Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
Page 27
“Case in point,” Enoch said to Sophia, apparently picking up last night’s conversation where it had left off. “You and I are sitting, what, about a meter apart, looking at this.” And he did not have to explain that this was the extraordinary scenic panorama of Glenwood Canyon. A human driver would have slowed down to enjoy it, but the car’s algorithms seemed to take it as a challenge and treated it as a slalom course. “We’re not just seeing it, we’re feeling it!” he half-joked as everyone was slammed leftward by an abrupt right curve. “Literally feeling it in our bones. The geometry of it, and of our trajectory through space-time, made manifest in our inner ears, in a way that could never by faked by virtual or augmented reality. And it’s all perfectly self-consistent, what you’re experiencing and what I’m experiencing, so that our understandings of the world tally. I keep trying to get Elmo to understand that the brain needs this—that if this kind of coherent world isn’t supplied, why, then not only can I not talk to you, my own brain can’t even talk to itself from one moment to the next.”
“Aaaand case in point,” said Phil, who was sitting in the middle back. He flipped his glasses up on his forehead, the better to see a thing looming above the road ahead.
They had emerged, abruptly and conclusively, from Glenwood Canyon and come out into a more open valley containing the crossroads town of Glenwood Springs. From here a highway doubled back east toward the elite paradise of Aspen. Travelers who, like them, chose to continue west toward Utah were confronted by an animated mushroom cloud rising from the interstate’s median.
Billboards in the traditional sense had gone the way of gas stations and ashtrays. Much cheaper and more efficient was to target the audience with personalized messages that would show up in their glasses, and those messages had better be interesting and germane or else they’d be filtered out by even the most bargain-basement edit stream. If you really wanted to put something up by the side of a road that everyone could see with the naked eye, then a stationary holographic projection system was a better bet, on every level, than erecting a physical object. Those could pose a fatal distraction to human drivers. But humans didn’t drive much anymore and so the only real objection that could be mounted against holographic billboards was that they were tasteless and annoying. Standards as to that varied. It could be inferred that, in the municipality of Glenwood Springs proper, good taste prevailed, lest one-percenters en route to Aspen be displeased by vulgar displays and decide to hurry down the road and buy their coffee in some place easier on the eyes. But west of town was some kind of invisible boundary on the other side of which anything was permissible. And someone had taken advantage of that by putting up this multimegawatt holograph of an animated mushroom cloud running on infinite loop and surmounted by yellow block letters proclaiming THE TRUTH ABOUT MOAB!
This turned out to be the first of several such advertisements spaced at intervals along the hundred and sixty miles to the Moab turnoff. It became clear that there were at least two different Moab-truther sites vying for their eyeballs and their mindshare: a “visitor center” and a “museum.” Both were founded upon the premise that Moab had been obliterated and its obliteration covered up by a vast global conspiracy. Both seemed to be very much for-profit tourist traps in the threadbare trappings of old-school nonprofit institutions. In addition a third attraction seemed to await them; this was much less heavily advertised, and such branding as it did have was understated in a way that Sophia associated with National Public Radio. It was called either the Moab Official Welcome and Information Center or the Nest of Lies, depending on your edit stream. It could be inferred that it had been put there by members of the reality-based community, perhaps bolstered by infusions of cash from a desolate Moab Chamber of Commerce.
The closer they got to the turnoff, the looser the local regs—assuming there were any—concerning signage, and the more desperate the competition grew. The last mile looked like an effects-laden movie or video game cut scene depicting an all-out, no-holds-barred global thermonuclear exchange. They turned off onto the two-laner that would take them the last thirty or so miles into Moab and almost immediately passed between the two competing truther establishments, which, compared to their advertising, looked despicable and forlorn, swallowed up in gravel parking lots lightly peppered with RVs and school buses.
Half a mile farther along was the Nest of Lies, a newish prefab building sporting a lot of bullet holes. Or to be precise, dents, since it seemed, on closer viewing, to be bolted together out of something with a lot of layers, a materials science tour de force that could stop most rounds in common use. A single car, a sensible sport-utility vehicle, was parked where it would be shaded by a photovoltaic panel during the hottest part of the day. At the moment, though, it was exposed to low late-afternoon sunlight. Out of some sense that the place was worthy of their patronage, Sophia overrode the car’s nav program and guided it into a spot near the sport-ute. That vehicle’s license plates were not issued by Utah but by the Municipal Authority of Moab. And Sophia—who had been reading about this—already knew why. The Utah state legislature had been taken over by Moab truthers who insisted that Moab had been obliterated by nuclear terrorism twelve years ago. From which it followed that anyone claiming to actually live there was a troll, a crisis actor in the pay of, or a sad dupe in thrall to, global conspirators trying to foist a monstrous denial of the truth on decent folk. In recognition of, and indignation over, which they had passed a law ordering the state licensing bureau to stop accepting motor vehicle paperwork from Moab. Unable to register vehicles in Utah, the people of Moab had begun printing their own plates, which had actually become a status symbol and desirable swag item in faraway places and produced revenue for the town until being buried under knockoffs. Anyway, the owner of this sport-ute lived in Moab.
They got out of the car, stretched, toddled around on stiff legs, made use of a portable toilet. Sophia approached the front door of the main building and heard it being buzzed open.
“Welcome to the Nest of Lies!” said the sole occupant, a woman in her—forties? No, probably mid-to-late thirties and simply not interested in any of the available technologies around hair, attire, skin, and makeup that might cause her to look younger. She had a short haircut that she might have done herself. She wore glasses of the old school, which is to say that they were nothing more than corrective lenses. Through them, she was reading a novel printed on paper.
“Thanks,” Sophia said.
“Is it your intention to keep driving south into town?”
“You mean Moab? Yes.”
“Then you know it exists.”
“Yeah, I’ve actually been there a few times.”
“Did you drive in or fly in, those times?”
“Flew.”
“Okay. Well, as you drive in, you’re going to see roadblocks. One or two, depending on time of day. They’re not real. You don’t have to stop. Just turn off your autopilot and drive slowly through them and ignore the bros with guns waving their arms.” The woman recited all of this in the intelligent, matter-of-fact tones of a park ranger explaining what to do if you saw a bear. “They’ll get out of your way and they won’t actually fire on you or anything like that. If there’s any trouble, here’s how to communicate.” And the woman licked her finger and pulled a sheet of paper from the top of a stack of printouts, then used a pair of scissors to cut off a strip about two inches high. She slid it across the counter to Sophia. It listed strings of codes and characters. Other than that and the book in the woman’s hands—a recent translation of Beowulf—there was no other paper in the place. The walls were equipped with literature racks, and a couple of spinning racks stood like broken columns in the middle of the floor, but all were empty.
Seeming to read Sophia’s mind, the woman said, “If you put your glasses back down over your eyes you’ll see the equivalent of brochures for tourists.”
“Got it,” Sophia said. “We’re just going to drop off a passenger though.”
“Is there any reason we wouldn’t?”
“No, it’s just a polite expression.”
It came to pass just as the woman said: five miles farther along, at the end of a long straightaway, a few dusty pickups and old-school SUVs were parked almost-but-not-quite blocking the road. To either side, roughly parallel courses of yellow plastic tape connected makeshift fence posts, extending for some little distance into the desert until the fence makers had lost their savor for the job. Someone had erected a rude arch of lumber over the road and, at its apex, nailed up a sheet of plywood painted highway-sign green and blazoned in hand-painted white letters:
DANGER
RADIATON
NO ADMITANCE
About the time they got close enough to read those words and to begin remarking upon the misspellings, the car’s autopilot became concerned about the clutter on the roadway ahead, emitted a warning tone, and slowed down. Sophia shut it off and assumed manual control, then, for good measure, stifled any additional warning beeps that might be forthcoming.
On an RV parked by the side of the road, a door flew open and a man, still in the act of shrugging an assault rifle over his shoulder by its strap, pounded down an external staircase and turned to face them. Watching on the other side with only mild curiosity was an older man standing before a smoking steel drum and using tongs to flip hot dogs. The one with the rifle strutted into the road and began waving both arms above his head. Following the instructions from the woman in the information center, Sophia kept the car moving at maybe five miles per hour and simply drove around the guy, slaloming around a series of barriers that did not quite block the road and passing into the uninhabitable radioactive wasteland beyond. The road negotiated a few curves and dips that limited visibility for a while, and then came out in full view of a Starbucks.
“What was it like before?” Sophia asked Enoch a few minutes later, after they had all got drinks at the drive-thru. The autopilot was back in effect and they were heading toward the relatively bright lights of Moab, still a couple of miles distant. She was thinking about the woman reading the book in the information center. About the whole idea of information centers. About information.
“Depends on how far back you want to go,” Enoch pointed out.
“Just saying that for everyone else in this car the post-Moab world is basically all we’ve ever known. Where people can’t even agree that this town exists.”
“What was it like when people agreed on facts, you mean?” Enoch asked. He seemed a little amused by the question. Not in a condescending way. More charmed.
“Yeah. Because they did, right? Walter Cronkite and all that?”
Enoch pondered it for a bit. “I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I think that the main thing it conferred on people was social mobility, so that if you were a smart kid growing up on a farm in Kansas or a slum in India you had a chance to do something interesting with your life. Before it—before that three-hundred-year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts—we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A lot better. Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.”
“But in order for the rich to get what they want, they also have to have a functioning tech economy, right? Because their wealth isn’t based on controlling land, like in the old days. It’s based on stock.”
Enoch nodded. “The system is selective enough now to identify those with the ability to contribute to the tech economy and bring them to places like this.” He waved out the windshield at Moab, which in a low-slung and easygoing way bore earmarks, for those who knew what to look for, of being the kind of place where smart people lived. They had traveled two thousand miles to end up back in Princeton. And once they left it in their rearview camera they would travel another thousand miles to end up in the same place again.
“So is it ever coming back?”
“The state of affairs that existed during those three hundred years?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. It’s the kind of big woo-woo topic your uncle Jake thinks about. You are free to think about it too, of course. Or to focus on the task at hand. Maybe one applies to the other.”
It took her a second to process that. “You’re talking about what you mentioned before,” she said, “that a brain, or a digital simulation of one, needs to be embedded in a world that agrees with itself as to what is what.”
“Yes. And it has to agree with any other brains that happen to be hanging around in the same world.”
“Not an issue for me,” Sophia said. “There’s just the one. Dodge’s.”
“Not for long,” Enoch said.
Coincidentally or not, they had reached the center of town and pulled up in front of one of the larger buildings, a former bank that was now the local offices of ONE: the Organization for New Eschatology. Sophia had been sharing her location with family members and apparently Jake had passed the word to the local staff, and so a few people, whom Sophia could only assume were professional eschatologists, or perhaps eschatological support staff, were emerging from the building’s grand old doors to greet their colleague. “Here is where I leave you,” said Enoch. “Thank you for helping take me down from that cross and for bringing me this far.”
Part 4
17
With her husband, Csongor, Zula still lived in the same condo where they had dwelled at the time of Richard’s death. They had raised Sophia there. Upon sending her off to Princeton, they had shopped around for a new place but decided that the condo—two thousand square feet on the eighteenth floor of a twenty-story building in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood—still suited them just fine.
Richard had bought it for them a long time ago, in the aftermath of events that had made them briefly famous and placed them at some hazard of violent reprisals. They could not safely go back to their homes, which were easily findable, and they had no money to speak of. Richard had eliminated the problem by setting up an untraceable shell company and using it to purchase the condo. By the time the Miasma had caught up with the ruse and figured out where they lived, they were no longer all that famous, and the existing security in the building had proved adequate to their needs.
Security was, though, an ongoing rock-paper-scissors match between technologies that all seemed to want different things. The lobby of the building, its elevators and stairwells, and its exterior belts of walkways and gardens had all been covered by security cameras from the very beginning of Zula and Csongor’s tenancy. In those days a security guard would sit all day behind a reception desk in the lobby, keeping an eye on the main entrance, glancing down from time to time at an array of flat-panel monitors that showed him the feeds from those cameras. But the desk had been torn out some years ago and replaced with a big saltwater aquarium. The building still employed a security firm. But those guards who were human, and who were actually on site, spent most of the day up on their feet, strolling about the property while keeping track of events in wearable devices. Some of the “guards” were just algorithms, analyzing video and audio feeds for suspicious behavior, recognizing faces and cross-checking them against a whitelist of residents, friends, and neighbors, and a blacklist of predators, stalkers, and ex-husbands. Anything ambiguous was forwarded to a Southeast Asian eyeball farm.
On a certain morning in June, Zula emerged from the building’s elevator into its lobby and don
ned her sunglasses. A yellow ball—the mildest of warnings—flickered in the corner of her vision. She glanced at it. It noticed the movement of her eyes and responded by letting her know that three VEILed pedestrians happened to be passing by outside.
Zula ignored it, pushed the door open, and saw them immediately: three high-school-aged girls, coffee cups in hand, gaily laughing and talking.
They all had wearables with large, reflective lenses, and so their eyes could not be seen. From the cheekbones down, their faces were exposed. But points and patches of light, projected by lasers in the lower rims of the glasses, were flashing and sliding all over their faces in a programmed manner that had been designed to foil facial-recognition algorithms.
Zula wasn’t using a VEIL. By exposing her face in a public area, she had, therefore, announced her location to any camera capable of seeing her and of checking her features against a database. Most people had become accustomed to this a long time ago and did not particularly care. But many preferred to opt out. You could avoid being recognized by wearing a physical veil and a pair of sunglasses, but most people in the industrialized world opted for its information-age equivalent.
To say that Verna and Maeve Braden had invented the Virtual Epiphanic Identity Lustre wasn’t quite right, since it incorporated a number of separate technologies. It had been more of a systems integration and branding play than an invention. But they had conceived it, named it, and made it a thing.