Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  In the meantime, he needed to settle one small point of mythological confusion, lest Sophia find out that he was not perfectly clear on the matter, and take him to task. It had to do with Fates and Norns.

  One of Richard’s first acts upon picking up Greek in the bookstore had been to thumb to its index and look up “Furies.” He had done so in a furtive, somewhat guilty frame of mind. A peculiarity of Richard’s was that he lacked a conscience or superego in the normal senses of those terms. His was a soul lacking any built-in adult supervision. In the course of his life, however, he’d had ten or so girlfriends of consequence. All of those relationships had gradually gone sour as those girlfriends had got to know him more thoroughly and drawn up manifests of all that was wanting in Richard. Some of them had kept their opinions to themselves until a relationship-ending moment of cathartic outpouring. Others had registered frank objections in real time. But Richard remembered every word of it, decades after they had presumably forgotten about him. And more than that, his brain had somehow contrived fully autonomous simulacra of these ex-girlfriends, which lived on between his ears immortally, speaking to him at the strangest times, actually changing the way he thought and behaved; before firing an employee or overlooking someone’s birthday he would pause to consider the consequences that would follow as one or more of the Furious Muses—as he called them—would coalesce from his brain vapors long enough to deliver a few choice remarks that would make him feel bad. This conflation of Furies and Muses was, of course, an invention of his own, and the sort of deviation from mythological purity for which Sophia (already turning into a sort of junior-league Furious Muse) would call him to account. He’d been carrying the idea around in his head for so long that the line between those two categories of subgoddesses had become blurry, and so he thought it would be illuminating, now that he had the ur-book in hand, to look them up.

  The F section of the index was very short, having only two entries: “Fates” and “Furies.” The latter being a mere cross-ref to the more correct “Erinyes.” The former were glossed as “three old goddesses who determined the life span of man.” Richard had merely scanned those words, since he was really interested in the Furies. Cross-reffing to “Erinyes” (“avenging spirits”), he turned to page 60, their first appearance in the book, and read of souls crossing the Styx (in a ferry no less) and drinking from the spring of Lethe under “dark poplars,” causing them to forget who they were and what they had done during their mortal lives. Fine. But then it said “great sinners” were sentenced to suffer forever under the whips of the Furies. So, that part of it matched up pretty well with Richard’s Furious Muses concept. It was troubling, however, to think that you could be whipped forever in punishment for sins that you had forgotten under the dark poplars. The sinners in the Christian version of hell could at least remember why they were burning in eternal fire, but these poor dumb Greeks could only suffer without knowing why; without, for that matter, even remembering what it was like to be alive and to not suffer. It wasn’t even really clear to Richard that a post-Lethe soul could even be considered the same being, for weren’t your memories a part of you?

  And yet it all rang true on some level. He did feel sometimes that he was continuing to suffer guilt pangs for acts he had long ago forgotten—deeds done when he wasn’t the same person. And who hasn’t known a sad sack, a hard-luck case who seems to be undergoing eternal punishment for no particular reason?

  The next Erinyes reference happened to occur just before a two-page spread featuring the more cheerful topic of the Muses, which was good stuff, way more Sophia-appropriate, as well as reminding Richard that his own Furious Muses were at least as creative as retributive, for some of his best work had emerged from imaginary dialogues with those estimable ladies. So “Furies” had been the text he was after, and “Fates” an accidental subtext—but this morning something about it was nagging at him.

  It had to do with the threads. Lying in bed a minute ago he’d been thinking about the thread of consciousness, and how severing it—breaking the brain–body link—was the key to a proper nap. And he knew that somewhere in d’Aulaire was a picture of the Fates spinning, measuring, and cutting thread. He looked all through Greek as he drank his coffee, and found it not.

  The coffee was unutterably fantastic. The machine cost more than Richard’s first car and there was nothing known to coffee technology that was not embodied in its hardware and its algorithms. The beans had come from an artisanal roaster a hundred yards away—a nimble coffee startup founded by java wizards who had been brought here to work for Starbucks and spun out the moment their stock options had vested. The taste of the coffee was not wonderful, however, merely because the machine and the roasters had done such good jobs, but in the categorical sense that Dodge was awake, he was alive, he was actually physically tasting this stuff with his body in a way that sleeping-Dodge-in-a-dream could never have done. In that sense awake Dodge was as superior to sleeping Dodge as a living person was to a ghost. Dreaming-of-coffee Dodge was to drinking-coffee Dodge as one of the shades in Hades—likened, in d’Aulaire, to dry leaves whirling about in a cold autumn wind—was to a living, flesh-and-blood person.

  He exhausted the first cup while looking for the thread-cutting picture. He did find a textual description of the spinning, measuring, and cutting operations being carried out by Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, respectively, but not the illustration that he clearly remembered showing to Sophia just a couple of days ago.

  On his second cup of coffee he had the idea of checking Norse. And there it was: a full-color half-pager of three blondes—here, they were called Norns—spinning the threads of life at the base of the world tree. Urd, Verdande, and Skuld. Names and hair color aside, they seemed to be a direct drop-in replacement for their Greek equivalents.

  Now, Richard had run off to Canada before obtaining a higher education and had not set foot in a classroom since, but he had done enough reading to understand that mythology piled up in sedimentary layers. This had to be one of those cases where there had been some early culture predating the Greeks and the Norse alike that had featured the Norns/Fates and laid it down in a base layer on which their various descendants had then added more stuff. Consequently, they always read like an add-on to the more fleshed-out mythology. Or perhaps vice versa. They were too simple to mess with. Richard, who had grown wealthy in the tech industry, saw in the Norns or Fates or whatever you called them a basic feature of the operating system. Zeus had no power over them. They knew the past and the future. They only got invoked in these stories when something had gone drastically wrong on a metaphysical/cosmological level, or else to cover plot holes. In the Greek version, Clotho was the spinner—the creator of these threads. Lachesis was the measurer. So that would be your snooze button right there—she had her nine-minute tape measure out the whole time Dodge was lying in bed. And Atropos was the cutter. The Greek version of the Grim Reaper. Though, according to the theory that Dodge was developing, the loss of consciousness when you fell asleep was basically the same as dying except that you could wake up from it.

  He did not eat breakfast because the medical assistant who had scheduled him for the procedure had said something about the desirability of showing up with an empty stomach. Instead he went and took a shower. When he emerged from the shower, he was fascinated to find the bathroom illuminated by a strange light, chilly and mottled, not artificial but not the light of the sun either. The effect was surreal, like entering a dream sequence in a movie made by a director who hasn’t the wherewithal to produce anything truly dreamlike and so is faking it with simple lighting effects. The weird light was flooding in through a window that was aimed north. Was someone welding outside? Finally he worked out that the sun, rising over the Cascades in the east, was hitting him with a bank shot off the half-silvered windows of an office tower a few blocks away. Dodge had been living here for five years but was still occasionally surprised by the way sunlight would carom in from surrounding architect
ure. He supposed that an astronomer could have a field day calculating the angles: how they varied from hour to hour and season to season.

  Because of the weird light, his reflection in the mirror took on a strange new aspect. He turned his head this way and that, checking for new moles. Richard, who was ruddy and freckle prone, had for decades been psyching himself up for a climactic battle with melanoma, which, according to dark prophecies uttered by multiple dermatologists, loomed as a near certainty in his future. Early on he had performed his monthly skin checks with anxiety bordering on clinical paranoia. But then years had flown by with no action. He was now actually beginning to feel somewhat crestfallen that this terrible foe, against whom he had so girded himself, looked to be passing him over.

  Presently he fell to shaving, for he had noticed a few days’ reddish growth. Medical personnel would soon be handling his body while he was unconscious. They would be able to stare at him all they wanted, to notice all the ways he wasn’t looking after himself. He was semifamous and ought to be mindful of such things. Maybe it would affect his company’s stock price or something.

  He had assumed that the strange light would be a short-lived phenomenon, so was pleasantly surprised that it was getting stronger by the minute. The weird pallor was ripening into something warmer, like fire. A shaft of it was coming in through the window and illuminating the little sink and its backsplash. Richard had shaved, as was his habit, using a bar of soap—a specific type that he bought from a company in southern France. It had a pleasant fragrance, not perfumey and not too persistent. He had just put the soap back in its dish a moment ago and so it had bubbles on it. In a few minutes these would dry out and pop, but just now they were capturing the light being bounced off the windows of the office tower after its passage through ninety-three million miles of space from the vast thermonuclear inferno at the center of the solar system. Each bubble was producing an intensely brilliant spark of light, not white, but iridescent, as some kind of prismlike phenomenon inside the soap film (he was a little weak on the details) fractured the light into pure brilliant colors. A beautiful but perfectly commonplace phenomenon that would not have given him much food for thought were it not for the fact that his video game company had put a lot of money and engineer-years into the problem of trying to more perfectly depict an imaginary world using computer code, and this was exactly one of those things that was most difficult to capture. Oh, there were various ways of faking it; e.g., by applying special computational shaders to bars of soap during the sixty seconds after they had been used and were therefore covered with lather. But they were all just hacks. Actually simulating the physics of soap, bubbles, air, water, etc., was ludicrously expensive and would never be achieved in his lifetime.

  It was hard even if you simplified matters by treating each bubble not as a small miracle of fluid dynamics, but as a simple reflecting sphere. At one point, some years previously, one of the engineers at Corporation 9592—a classic liberal-arts-major-turned-coder-so-he-could-make-a-decent-living—had identified this as the Hand met Spiegelende Bol Problem, and had discomfited many of the more hard-core engineers, during a meeting, by flashing up a graphic of the Escher lithograph of the same name. It was a self-portrait depicting the artist reflected in a mirrored sphere supported in his left hand. Escher’s face was in the middle, but a geometrically distorted rendering of his office could be seen around it. In the background of that was a window. This, of course, was gathering in light from at least ninety-three million miles away. The point being that in order to make a faithful 3-D computer graphics rendering of an object as simple as a shiny ball, you would, in theory, have to take into account every object in the universe. The engineer—a new hire named Corvallis Kawasaki—had footnoted his own remarks by mentioning that the mirrored-ball problem reached at least as far back as the German genius and polymath G. W. Leibniz, who had written of it as a way of thinking about monads. At this point in the meeting, the more well-established engineers had shouted him down and Dodge had made a mental note to yank the boy out of whatever branch of the org chart he’d landed in and employ him in Weird Stuff, which was Dodge’s personal department. In any case, the point, in this instance, was that every single bubble on the surface of the bar of soap was at least as complicated as Escher’s ball. Rendering such a scene realistically was completely out of the question. Far from being a source of frustration, this comforted him, and made him happy—perhaps even a little smug—that he lived in a universe whose complexity defied algorithmic simulation.

  He closed his eyes while splashing water on his face and then looked back up at the mirror. Now there was a little spot in the middle where he had been dazzled by the brilliant sparks of light from the bubbles. Soon enough the dazzled patch would shrink and be replaced by a correct view of what was really there.

  Except that it did not in this case. When Richard closed his eyes again to towel his face, he could still see a little patch of nothing in his visual field. This was a different sort of nothing from the field of red-tinged black that his eyes were seeing simply by virtue of the fact that his lids had closed over them. He knew what this was. The flash of reflected sun, a minute ago, had triggered a thing in his brain called an optical migraine. It was painless and harmless. He got them a few times a year. It was a visual display—“Aura”—caused by a temporary disruption of blood flow to the visual cortex. It always started thus, with a tiny dazzled region that refused to go away. Over the next half hour it would get bigger, making it impossible for him to read. Then it would gradually migrate rightward and mess with his peripheral vision on that side for a little while before disappearing without a trace.

  The affected region—the spot where he was absolutely blind—was not black, as you might imagine. This could be proved simply by closing his eyes so that he actually was seeing just black. The blind spot then showed up as a region of vaguely defined yellow and black stripes, like the patterns painted on factory floors to limn danger zones, except that these flashed and fluctuated like an old-time television with its vertical hold out of whack.

  Even as he drew these connections he was erecting defenses against a likely flanking attack from Polycultia, one of the Furious Muses, who was always pointing out that everything Richard could possibly think of was culturally relative. In this instance she might expect tactical support from Cerebra, an unintentionally offensive FM who had a knack for pointing out that any idea Richard came up with that he thought was clever was, in fact, but an imperfect rendering of a smarter idea that had occurred to her a long time ago. The projected line of attack from the Polycultia–Cerebra axis went something like this: Okay, because part of Richard’s visual cortex was on the blink, he was seeing “nothing” in that region. His brain was in the business of constructing, from moment to moment, the sort of three-dimensional model of the universe that, for example, enabled him to grab his phone from his bedside table without opening his eyes. As such, it couldn’t tolerate seeing a patch of “nothing” in the middle of an otherwise coherent reality. So it tried to fill in the nothing with something. It was simply the visual equivalent of tinnitus.

  But why this particular something? He construed it as black and yellow danger stripes, on-the-fritz TV sets, etc., but that was only because he was a white guy of a certain age from Iowa. A Maori midwife or a gay Roman centurion or an eleventh-century Shinto Buddhist, in the grip of the same underlying neurological phenomenon, would fill in the “nothing” with some other kind of hobgoblin derived from their own set of cultural referents—e.g., the wall of cold magical flames surrounding Gymir’s realm in Jotunheim (according to Norse).

  Being temporarily blind gave him an excuse to not expose himself to the Din. In an earlier decade he’d have said “not check his email,” but of course email was actually the least intrusive of all the ways the Miasma—as Richard referred to the Internet—had devised to bay for your attention. Richard lumped all of them together under the general heading of the Din. He deemed it unlikely tha
t there would be much that was important in this morning’s Din, since he had caused his administrative assistant to weave a system of spells and wards: robotic “out of office” messages and whatnot.

  He had, in consequence, time to kill before his appointment. He put the d’Aulaires back into their sack. As best as he could while half-blind, he made a sweep through the joint looking for any more of Sophia’s stuff. Then he took the elevator down to the lobby of the building. There was a café and bakery between it and the sidewalk. He had it in mind to buy a copy of the New York Times and, once his vision had cleared, to do the crossword puzzle. Not that he was even really all that fond of crossword puzzles as such, but the mere fact of having time to spend on it was an indicator of being a free man, in a certain sense.