Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  And so she had requested that Karen Borglund place her, and, by implication, Phil, in the room that Richard and John had once shared. Karen—acting as designated driver since Pete had indulged himself with two flagons of Miller Lite—had given her an amused, knowing look in the SUV’s rearview mirror. “That room still has the original bunk beds,” she warned, with the briefest flick of the eyes at Phil.

  “We’ll manage, thank you,” Sophia said. “Did Richard sleep on the top or the bottom?”

  “To judge from the graffiti carved into the underside of the top bunk, he slept on the bottom.”

  “As befits the younger brother,” Pete threw in, being as puckish as it was possible for a podgy Swedish-Iowan estate lawyer to get.

  “Is that graffiti still there?” Sophia asked.

  Karen paused before giving the answer, and the back of her neck flushed. “No,” she admitted, “it was on a sheet of what do you call it—”

  “Masonite, sweet,” Pete said.

  “—that was laid over the—”

  “Slats.”

  “—and supported the mattress. Which was just foam rubber. The whole thing had gone bulgy with age. I believe we took it to the dump. I can have Manuel hunt around for it.”

  “No worries,” Sophia said, “I was just curious.” Earlier her voice had betrayed a little too much eagerness, and now she was trying to walk it back.

  “The names of girls,” Pete informed her. “He would, I’m told, become very attached to certain young ladies, and then a breakup would occur for one reason or another, but they stayed on his mind for a long time after. He felt things deeply but didn’t always show it, your uncle Richard.”

  After lying awake for a time in the lower bunk, hearing the slats creak as Phil settled into slumber above her, she reached over the edge of the bed, groped for her shoulder bag, and found the little flashlight she kept in an outside pocket. Rolling over on her back, she turned it on and played it over the blank sheet of plywood that had replaced the bulgy Masonite. There was, of course, nothing there except a layer of varnish. The slats themselves bore traces of carved words, but these had been painted over. All traces of Richard, or for that matter of Patricia or John or anyone else, had been expunged from the house. All of the history had been erased in Karen’s earnest efforts to make the house historical.

  Later, she got up and padded out of the room. To the embarrassment of Karen, the master bath—originally the only bathroom in the house—was out of commission, as some plumbing was being replaced. So the visitors had been relegated to a sort of gimcrack mini-bath that the father of John, Richard, Patricia, and Jake had shoehorned into a wedge of space under the attic stairs so that he would have a decent statistical likelihood of being able to take a crap in peace. Stepping into it was like time-traveling to 1970. Its autumn-toned daisy Formica countertop, its op-art wallpaper, its light fixture, even its shower knobs were straight out of a Nixon administration Sears, Roebuck catalog. Sophia made herself comfortable on the padded seat of its harvest-gold toilet and reflected that this was probably where Uncle Richard had taken his last piss before walking out the door in 1972 to head for Canada to avoid the draft. Though of course he’d have been standing up. Sitting down, she was looking directly into the door of the shower stall. Its walls were covered in little inch-square tiles with a sort of randomized pattern. The floor had been adorned with peel-and-stick daisies made of some grippy high-friction plastic, to prevent slip-and-fall accidents. They’d been there, silently waiting to perform their assigned task, for sixty years. The color, she guessed, had faded—these were daisies as reinterpreted and geometrically abstracted by one of those acid-dropping hippie artists who made album covers for the Beatles or whatever. Through some fascinating process of aesthetic percolation, they had made their way here of all places in the world. The colors were now pastels, but she guessed they’d started out as primaries.

  She had brought her bag with her. Tucked into the end pocket was a folding multitool—a going-to-college gift from her uncle Jake. This detail empowered her, somehow, to do what she did after she was finished on the toilet, which was to crawl into the shower stall on hands and knees and get the blade of the knife under the edge of a nonslip daisy—the best preserved of all the specimens, only one of three that still had all of its petals, not directly visible from the toilet, bettering her odds of getting away clean. With care and patience born of insomnia she pried up each of the petals, one at a time, exposing fiberglass that had not seen light since the Vietnam War. Then she worried the circular middle loose. Finally it came free and she gazed at it delightedly on the palm of her hand; it was limned in grime rich with Forthrast biomass, smelling faintly of Comet. The rest of Uncle Richard’s DNA might have been reduced to water vapor and air by the ion-beam scanner, but perhaps traces of it were still embedded in the slip-proof porosities of this artifact. She doubted she would ever make any practical use of it as genetic material, but it did make for a nice souvenir.

  15

  Lovely people, but the weird was strong in that place,” Phil announced as the town receded in the Land Cruiser’s rearview mirror the next morning. He had swapped places with Anne-Solenne and was now riding shotgun, the better to see Tom and Kevin’s pickup truck. During the night, Tom and Kevin had opened up the locker in its back, taken out the machine gun, and mounted it on the tripod. They’d kept it under a blue tarp until the caravan had got out of town, then pulled over onto the shoulder long enough for Kevin to hop out, remove the tarp, and take a seat atop the locker. For the time being, the barrel was still canted sharply upward and Kevin was keeping his hands off the controls. Apparently the sole point of all this was to make everyone in their vicinity aware that they were a hard target.

  “Mmm,” Sophia answered.

  “Is this an okay time to talk about the finer points of estate law?” Anne-Solenne asked, swiveling around to cast a significant look behind them. Just a couple of car lengths to their rear, Pete’s SUV loomed. Pete was driving. Most of its seats were occupied by men—a mix of extended family and servants—who were open-carrying a range of long and short guns. “Just so I have a basic TLDR-level grasp of the weirdness? Because those people are super nice and everything but I can tell that you are dancing through a minefield.”

  “Per stirpes,” Sophia said, and then spelled it out. “Look it up. Read it and weep. Those of you who finish early may wish to refamiliarize yourselves with the storyline of Bleak House.”

  “Per stirpes” turned out to be a term of art, used in writing wills. It basically meant a scheme for dividing up an estate in which the money was split evenly among siblings (or, at any rate, people in the same generation of a family).

  “Got the idea?” Sophia said, after she’d given them some time—a stretch of Iowa five miles or so wide—to digest it. “Richard’s will basically said, ‘Create two things: a foundation and a trust. Put some of my money into the foundation and use it to do cool stuff. Put the rest of it into the trust, which is there to provide a safety net for my extended family—so I don’t have any grandnephews who can’t afford to go to college or get medical care or whatever. Set up the trust so that the money is divided per stirpes among my generation.’ He signed that will and then forgot about it. So far, so good. But then he proceeded to get much richer than he had ever imagined. The amount of money that was destined to be dumped into the trust became way bigger than was conceivably needed just for a safety net. It started to look like a ticket to easy street for everyone who could call Richard a brother, an uncle, or a great-uncle.”

  “The amount wasn’t capped?” Phil asked.

  “Should have been. But wasn’t. One of many defects in the language.”

  “And I’m guessing he never got around to updating it?” Anne-Solenne asked.

  “Wasn’t in his nature.”

  “So, were people, like, just licking their chops and waiting for him to kick the bucket?”

  “No, actually. Because he should have
lived decades longer than he did. And anyway no one knew what was in the will until Corvus read it in the hospital.”

  “Corvallis Kawasaki,” Phil explained. He’d learned that much, at least, from being Sophia’s boyfriend.

  “Seriously?” Julian asked. “Corvallis Kawasaki is, like, your family retainer!?”

  Sophia met his eyes and thought he was looking at her in a new light. He raised both hands, palms up, and made a salaam gesture, or as best he could while belted in. Sophia took a moment wryly to imagine how C-plus would react to hearing himself described as a retainer.

  “Okay,” Phil said, impatient for drama. “So C-plus reads the will and does the math. Word gets out that this trust is going to be set up.”

  “Set up by him personally, because he turned out to be the ‘personal representative,’ or what they used to call the executor,” Sophia said. “And C-plus was duty-bound to follow the language in the will. The per stirpes language meant dividing the trust money equally among Richard’s siblings—or, in a case where a sibling had already died, the heirs of that sibling. So. One-third would be allocated to John and Alice, one-third to Patricia, and one-third to Jake. Or that was his intent when he signed the will.”

  “But Patricia was already dead?” Anne-Solenne asked.

  Sophia nodded. “Patricia—my mom’s adopted mother—was already dead.”

  “So her third of it should have gone to Zula—your mom—Patricia’s heir?”

  “Should have. Didn’t. Because John and Alice had legally adopted my mom. And the law says that once you have been legally adopted by a new set of parents, you can’t inherit from the previous set. So the trust was split two ways instead of three. Jake got half of it. Alice—because John was dead by this point—got the other half. Then she made a decision to split the trust up, not among her four kids—or five, if you count Zula—but among their kids, of which there are now a total of thirteen. So, I ended up with one-thirteenth of one-half of the trust.”

  “Instead of one-third,” Julian said.

  “The one-third that Richard probably intended you to get,” Anne-Solenne added.

  “Probably he was expecting my mom to get one-third,” Sophia said. “I wasn’t born yet. But yeah. That is basically the story.”

  A new thought had crossed Julian’s mind. “Was this how C-plus and Maeve became interested in PURDAH and VEILs? Because of all these hassles over this one paper document?”

  Sophia shook her head. “I would say not. I mean, this was all after the blockchain craze, and all of the issues related to anonymity and privacy on the Old Internet.”

  “Mmm,” Julian said, going a little passive-aggressive on her.

  “No, seriously,” she insisted. “Again, it goes back to the language in the will. One of the stated missions of the foundation was to work on applications of gaming technology outside of what was conventionally thought of as the game industry. And to tackle social issues related to games. And a hot topic in those days, before the Fall, was that women in the games industry were subjected to a lot of overt harassment. And even when they weren’t being harassed as such, their contributions just weren’t taken seriously by gamer bros.”

  “Got it,” Anne-Solenne said. “PURDAH was a way around that—any coder or team could use it to sign code.”

  “Code that would have to be evaluated strictly on its own merits—just like with any test essay or job app that we’ve ever turned in,” Sophia said.

  Phil had been silent for a little while, doing arithmetic in his head. “The difference between one-third and one-twenty-sixth is a number with a lot of zeroes,” Phil said.

  “Yeah,” Sophia said. She was staring out the window. A smile came over her face. “And look. Here’s the thing. At Princeton we talk a lot about privilege, right? Well, the reality is that Richard was so wealthy, and the amount of money that mistakenly went into the trust was so huge, that even one-twenty-sixth of it—my share—is huge. I’ll never have to work. I am fantastically privileged because of him. Those zeroes that Phil mentioned are pretty much meaningless. But it’s still a huge number.”

  “What about the foundation?” Phil asked.

  “Completely separate from the trust,” Sophia said.

  “Your mom runs it,” Julian reminded her.

  “The saving grace of the will,” Sophia said, “was that it named John as the director of the foundation. If he was deceased, and if my mom was old enough, then she was to become the director. He was. So she did. She’s been running the Forthrast Family Foundation for the last fifteen years. She’s been drawing a salary. Nothing crazy. There are all kinds of rules around conflict of interest and so on.”

  “How’s that going to affect your little plan?” Anne-Solenne asked.

  “You mean, my little plan to spend my summer working for the Forthrast Family Foundation?”

  “Yeah. Isn’t that a conflict of interest or something?”

  “Not the way I’m doing it.”

  16

  Tom turned on his four-ways and let the Tactical (as they now referred to the pickup truck with the machine gun) coast to a stop on the shoulder of the road, just at the crest of a gentle rise in the land. Topography around here was subtle, but a long picket line of wind turbines, running approximately north-south, hinted at some kind of ridgeline. The maps in their glasses gave them a hint as to what was going on, and they confirmed it by climbing out of the Land Cruiser and walking up to the place where Tom and Kevin had parked. From there it was possible to look west across the valley of the Missouri River, separating this part of the state from Nebraska to the west.

  The SUV had stopped behind them. Formerly gleaming and sleek in a chunky, huge SUV-ish way, it was now a cluttered beast of burden with two ladders strapped to its roof rack and a flatbed utility trailer, laden with tarp-wrapped consumer goods, trailing behind. Most of its occupants remained in their air-conditioned seats but Pete came out for a chat. He was strapped with a holster that was mostly inside of his khaki trousers but allowed the handle of a semiautomatic pistol to show above the waistline. He caught Sophia looking at it as he approached. “It’s like a cheese head,” he explained.

  “Huh?”

  “Packers fans wear big silly hats shaped like wedges of cheese. Why? To show affiliation. All of this”—he waved vaguely toward the machine gun in the back of the Tactical, then patted the grip of his pistol—“is to announce, to anyone looking at us from a drone, that we speak their language.”

  “You’re members of their tribe.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s a way of saying that, A, we can be talked to, and B, we are not to be messed with.”

  “It’s . . . disarming to be armed?”

  “Exactly.”

  Kevin had been staring at output from their drone while Tom scanned the sky around them for drones operated by other people. He was gazing fixedly at one such. It was too small and far away to be seen with the naked eye. Apparently, though, his goggles were running some kind of augmented ware that enabled him to know of its existence and, in some sense, “see” it.

  He slid them up on his backward baseball cap and turned toward Pete. “What’s the word, boss?”

  Microaggression. Sophia had hired Tom and Kevin to escort them to Sioux City, but now that a middle-aged white guy had entered the picture, suddenly he was “boss.” Sophia was getting ready to say something when she noticed Pete watching her face wryly. Pete held up a placating hand. “I have taken the liberty of hiring these fellas for the extra job that needs doing,” he explained.

  “Okay,” Sophia said. “I was kind of wondering why you were following us in the war wagon. Assumed you were just being courteous above and beyond the call of family duty.”

  “We do try to extend courtesy,” Pete said.

  “Noted. Appreciated.”

  “But there is this other thing that has come up. Across the river. Just across the river.”

  “Do I get to know what it is? Now I’m all c
urious.”

  Pete looked ready to say no but then thought better of it. “You might hear about it from Jake. I know you are headed out to Seattle and that you might cross paths there. I don’t want you to feel left out. So, yes. You get to know what it is.” Pete exchanged nods with Tom, then continued: “You know that Jake has this ONE thing.”

  “The Organization for New Eschatology.”

  “Yes. His nonprofit.” Unsaid by Pete, because Sophia was the last person on earth to whom it needed to be explained, was that the entire financial empire over which Pete presided on behalf of Alice’s estate, vast as it was, was actually somewhat smaller than that controlled by Jake. Dodge’s estate had been split down the middle between them. But whereas Pete invested his half in utilities and real estate, Jake put his money into weird bot-controlled investment vehicles that reputedly brought a higher rate of return. He appeared to spend a lot of the proceeds on the nonprofit known as ONE, which was his way of wrestling with matters religious and spiritual. Before suddenly becoming a billionaire he had lived in a compound in northern Idaho and practiced a fringy kind of Christianity; since then, he had been reaching out and talking to all kinds of people who held beliefs of varying levels of weirdness. On the whole, it felt like he was becoming more sane over time, which was good as far as it went. But the way Pete had said You know that Jake has this ONE thing caused Sophia to brace herself for some manner of appallingly strange wacky Jake news.

  “Yeah. They have, I guess you could call it an outreach program aimed at the Levitican types. He tries real hard not to use the M-word.”

  “M-word?”

  “‘Missionaries.’ He feels like he can sort of speak their language a little bit, because of Idaho.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, now that Jake has sort of come in from the wilderness and started living a more, I don’t know, settled and responsible life, he feels like a legitimate thing for ONE to be doing is to be maintaining some level of contact with some of the weirder sects out there. The people around where we live, even the hard-core Leviticans, you know they come into town to get teeth pulled or what have you, so we have some amount of day-to-day contact with those people. But over there”—he waved his hand vaguely at Nebraska—“some of them have really gone off the deep end.”