Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  As he gazed upon one tree or another, it would move closer to him, carrying all else along with it. When he grew accustomed to this, though, a change came over his thinking and he found it more fitting to conceive of the trees and the other things as remaining in one place while he moved through it. To fix them in their places, he created the ground.

  By its nature, the ground did not alter its shape once he had brought it into being. For its purpose was to keep the trees and other things in a fixed relationship to one another. To serve that purpose it had to be much larger than the trees and the other things that it contained. Therefore it required the conversion of a vast expanse of static into something of an altogether different nature. The static was not easily tamed, but in time he learned how to change it into a thing dark and rigid and hard, and this was adamant. Once made, it would not alter its shape or its position unless he broke it once again into the static from which he had formed it, and made such alterations as he desired. The forest, the street, and the park were thus situated on an island of adamant that held its shape and position in the sea of static.

  In the early going he’d had to build the leaf anew every time, but new things were now coming into being without his say-so, and he was stumbling upon them already made. He was rediscovering—becoming alive to—things that had been summoned and organized by him when he wasn’t paying attention. He knew, for example, that the leaf was red. Indeed they had emerged, in the beginning, from their redness; he’d seen motes that were different and assembled them into the leaf.

  In the first eon he had ever been in some kind of torment, finding the static unendurable when it engulfed him and fearing it would never abate, then, after it had gone away, sensing the possibility that it might never return, stranding him in darkness and silence. But it had now come and gone so many millions of times that he had altogether put aside those fears. The putting of names on things gave him power. He named the static chaos. Chaos was terrible but he had learned the knack of summoning things forth out of it and thereby mastered it. The waves still came and went but the rhythm of their coming and going had become a part of him now. He named them day and night and knew them as being good for different purposes. The day was when new things were drawn forth from chaos, perfected and beheld. The night was for resting, and for the naming of what had been drawn forth during the day.

  The street, the park, and the forest had at first wobbled in and out of existence and changed their shapes, but as he made it his way to inhabit them—walking up and down the street, strolling through the park, and looking into the forest—they became steady and ceased changing all the time. Leaves fell to the ground. He had no particular idea as to why this happened. To be a leaf was to fall. Early on, there had been no ground to stop them. For that matter there had been no up or down, just infinities of flickering chaos. But the trees seemed to want to be pointed in the same direction, with trunks down and leaves up, and the trunks had to stop somewhere and the leaves had to land somewhere. In that somewhere he began to see motes that were of a different nature, and yet not red. Beneath the trees’ spreading branches he made the ground all of a color, which was not red but green. Above, the trunks and branches took on another color, which was brown.

  Once the leaves had fallen and were lying still upon the ground, he would gaze at them and see that their redness was not all the same but that there was variation from one part to another—different shades of red, indeed different colors altogether: purple near the tips, yellow in the creases. Beneath them, the green ground took on definition. No longer was it a featureless slab of adamant, but instead was itself built of tiny green leaves. Some were long and skinny, others short and round. Packed together in uncountable numbers they made a variegated cushion upon which the leaves rested for his inspection. He would gaze upon one and note the variations in color and shape that made it different from other leaves, then turn his attention to another that had fallen next to it. When he turned back to the first leaf, he expected to see it lying in the same place. It was not correct for it to have moved, or disappeared, or to have altered its color or its shape while he was looking elsewhere. In time he bettered the workings of the leaves and the ground so that the leaves stayed where they had fallen and, having found a color and a shape, changed not.

  The fixing of the leaves transformed the street and the park in a way he had not forethought, in that leaves began to fall on top of other leaves and to cover them up. The green ground disappeared beneath them altogether, and their level began to climb up the trunks of the trees. He gazed up at the branches and understood the problem, which was that although leaves fell from them unceasingly, the appearance of the trees never changed, and the number of leaves on them forever stayed the same. This too was a kind of wrongness that he had the power to better. Bettering such things was what he did; it was his reason for existing now. He made it so that the falling of each leaf left a bare place on the branch where it had been attached.

  Then, for the first time in all the days he had dwelled in the park and walked in the street, the appearance of the trees began to change. Their redness diminished and their shape became patchy. After some number of days had gone by, only a few leaves remained clinging to the branches, which had gone bare and brown, and the ground below was a deep lake of red. He missed the beauty of the red trees and wished to see it again as it had been in the beginning, but he understood now that to place the leaves back on the branches and begin it anew would only lead to more leaves on the ground.

  He missed the green. The fallen leaves needed to be done away with if the street, the park, and the forest were ever to return to their original form. Yet the rules of the place—the rules he had, through his ceaseless building and bettering, set into being—stated that fallen leaves did not move. For a long stretch of days and nights he brooded over this problem, and it occurred to him that all of his efforts might have gone for naught and that he might ought to let it all come apart into chaos again, and begin anew, or else abandon his foolish efforts to bring forth fixed and pleasurable things out of the dead terror of the chaos.

  One day, though, he noted a leaf that appeared different from the others, being of a darker color, and no longer flat but curled up at the tips and wrinkled in the middle. It was not as beautiful as the red leaves around it, yet something in it struck him as new and important to the problem that had been troubling him. He watched that leaf over days as it grew darker and darker and curled in upon itself.

  Then, one day after it had become nearly unrecognizable, he noticed that it had moved. He gazed at it in fascination, for he had long ago laid down the law that leaves did not move once fallen. After a long while, it moved again, as of its own volition. It did not disappear in one place and reappear in another, but lifted itself up from the pond of red leaves, moved across space, and settled down again, sometimes lighting at a different angle. It moved again and again and finally took to the air and whirled away and was gone.

  So there was a way of getting rid of fallen leaves, but it required that they lose their beauty and be allowed to move about. Having labored for so many eons to create the beauty of the park and the street, he was fearful of letting all the leaves go. He had learned though to trust that sense of correctness that had guided him to this point. Ignoring it led, sometimes quickly and sometimes over slow eons, first to troubling emotions and then to the steady and relentless decoherence of all that he had so laboriously summoned into his regard. Obeying it—though it didn’t always lead to results quickly, or at all—more often than not made things better than they had been. And things that were better persisted and self-improved. Things that were shoddy frayed, sometimes while he wasn’t looking, other times even as he gazed on helplessly watching them dissolve into chaos.

  Seeing no other way to bring the leaves’ beauty back, he suffered it to happen. The red lake turned brown over the course of many days as the leaves all went the way of that first one. They began going into motion. At first they moved fit
fully, each choosing its own course, but he sensed the wrongness of that and put a stop to it and built it back up in a new manner that felt right. Thereafter they did not move singly and of their own accord but in groups, with all the leaves in a particular area suddenly taking flight and traveling in the same direction for some distance before settling down again. At first the movement was in straight lines but as the change deepened, and most leaves disappeared, never to return, the remaining ones began to whirl about in loose gyres that would scrape and tumble over the green grass for some distance before disassembling and falling to the ground for a time.

  Part 5

  25

  Kill it, put it on ice, or let it live? Those are the options when you’ve created a monster” was how the keynote speaker began.

  This created a stir in the hall, which Enoch enjoyed for a few moments before settling things down.

  “That word. The Oxford English Dictionary begins by telling us that a monster is something extraordinary or unnatural; a prodigy, a marvel. Then it sort of ruins everything by letting us know that this wonderful definition is obsolete. Go and look up ‘prodigy’ and you’ll see more of the same; the old meaning of the word is suffused with a sense of the marvelous.”

  The setting was a long hall with a steeply pitched roof of western red cedar, supported by columns of the same: whole tree trunks felled from the surrounding forest. They were in a resort in Desolation Sound, between Vancouver Island and the mainland of British Columbia. The architecture was meant to evoke the longhouses once built here by First Nations people, but everything was state-of-the-art, energy-efficient, buttoned up. The fireplace ran on natural gas, and a little plaque next to it explained that the Desolation Lodge, as this place was called, was atoning for its sins against the climate by growing trees elsewhere, pulling more carbon out of the atmosphere than this appliance was putting into it. An autumnal gale was flinging rain against the thermal-pane windows and making the post-and-beam structure creak, but the three dozen people in the hall were comfortable in their fleece vests, artisanal sweaters, and high-dollar hoodies. Most had woken up this morning in homes or hotel rooms in Seattle. A few had chosen to take early-morning flights from the Bay Area, or red-eyes from the East Coast. All had made their way down to the Lake Union waterfront, where float planes were loading and departing every half hour. A ninety-minute flight took them across the international border and up the Strait of Georgia to Desolation Sound. The planes pulled up to a rambling complex of piers founded on massive rocks that shouldered above the high-tide mark. From there a boardwalk strode across a pebbled beach littered with the age-silvered trunks and roots of ancient trees. Rambling switchbacks took them to the conference center—an old-time resort that had been fixed up with some unholy combination of tech money and cruise industry investment. They’d checked into their apartments and cabins, which were spattered across a few acres of rain forest, and had had a couple of hours to freshen up before the opening session had commenced at one o’clock in the afternoon.

  Zula had arranged more conferences than she could count. The seeming informality of this setting belied all of the premeditation that had gone into it, and the long experience of her staff. The trip from the city was just long enough to reset the mind and instill a sense of having gone somewhere special, but not enough to deter people from coming. The midday start time enabled people to ease into it. She’d federated the guest list, handing out some slots to the Waterhouse people, some to ONE. Some she’d handed off to Sinjin Kerr, trusting him to sort out the Gordian knot of Elmo Shepherd’s network. Others had gone to Solly Pesador, and of course she’d reserved a bloc for the Forthrast Family Foundation. She had only sent out her invitations after the others had made their picks, and she’d chosen with an eye toward balancing the slate if need be.

  But need hadn’t arisen. The other organizations had chosen wisely. By tech industry standards, the Waterhouses were, by this point, old money—the unglamorous ballast that would keep the conference from heeling over to one side or the other. The glittering-eyed libertarians from El Shepherd’s world were counterbalanced by the invitees from ONE, which had evolved, over the years, into a mostly harmless foundation that tried to bridge the gap between science and religion. Top-drawer brains had been nominated by Solly Pesador, who to his credit had reached outside of his own department and invited some who could be counted among his rivals. The roster had struck Zula as a little weak when it came to currently active members of the underlying industries. So, once she’d made certain that Corvallis and Maeve could attend, she’d spent her remaining invitations on CEOs and CTOs of companies working on things like quantum computers and distributed ledgers. The guest list now comprised twenty-seven humans, one robot, and one monster.

  As far as she knew the word “monster” had not been uttered until this moment, but she was relieved, in a way, that it had now broken the surface.

  The afternoon sessions had all been introductory in nature. They went over the ground rules: everything here was off the record, private, not to be photographed or posted. The usual conflicts and rivalries were to be left on the pier. Indeed, some of the session topics were specifically about the legal and political twists and turns that had been part of this story from the moment Richard Forthrast had signed his will.

  Sophia had told the story of her internship and her senior thesis, bringing them up to May of this year. It was now October. Solly had picked up the torch, starting with the moment during Sophia’s thesis presentation when the account had run out of money only to receive a large, unexpected infusion of funds, “presumably from someone in this hall,” and continuing through the summer and fall as the resources demanded by the Process (as they called the thing that Sophia had launched) had grown, sometimes in small increments, and—as had occurred last week—sometimes in huge quantum leaps.

  The late-afternoon session had been on the topic of mind reading. The thumbnail image in the program was a still from Star Trek, portraying Spock with his hands all over Captain Kirk’s face, using the Vulcan mind meld to read what was going on in Kirk’s brain. At the beginning, El’s people had conducted a virtual boycott, clustering in the nest of sofas around the fireplace where the robot had planted itself. They’d assumed, based on the title, that the subject matter was pure fluff. Indeed, the speaker—a brain scientist from USC, invited by Solly—had warmed up the room with a few such pop-culture references. But then she had asked, in all seriousness, how we could really know what was going on inside of another mind—be it a biological brain or a digital simulation. We took speech and other forms of communication for granted. Computer geeks tended to see those as add-on modules, separate from the brain per se—peripheral devices that could be plugged in, like a microphone or a printer, when some input or output was desirable. Brain scientists considered the input and the output as more fundamental, woven into the neural fabric of the brain. No one really knew what to make of the Process, which purported to simulate activity in a brain but was not actually hooked up to anything except a bank account.

  The presentation was inconclusive by design. She was asking questions, not reciting answers. And it was bracketed in the usual disclaimer that Sophia, foolish undergraduate that she was, had done it all wrong. She shouldn’t have launched a whole brain just to see what it would do. She ought to have built it up gradually and figured out a way to connect input/output systems to it at each step.

  Halfway through the talk, though, the robot stepped forward and walked up the length of the hall to a position where it could get a clearer view. El’s boys woke up and took notice. No one really knew for certain, but it was generally assumed that the robot—a telepresence device meant to serve as the sensorium of a person not physically in attendance—was being controlled from Europe by Elmo Shepherd.

  Early telepresence robots had just stood there stolidly when not moving, like statues; this one was more elegant. Even when it wasn’t going anywhere it never stopped making minute shifts in its at
titude, transferring its weight from foot to foot and turning its head toward sound and movement. Its head was a prolate spheroid, matte gray and featureless except for a few tiny holes for cameras and microphones. In theory, if you looked at it through a wearable device, you’d see the operator’s face projected onto it, and it’d be almost like sharing the room with them. But El, or whoever was controlling this thing, had turned off that feature and so the robot was anonymous. Which only tended to confirm that this was in fact El, or perhaps some assistant sitting in a room with El. He’d not been seen in public for a while and it was assumed that his disease—which was now common knowledge—was getting the better of him.

  The final session of the afternoon had been about wills, dispositions of remains, and other legalities. Because of the dry subject matter, it had been sparsely attended; by that point in the day, many attendees had been eager to break away for impromptu discussions in the hallways and the bar. Zula had sat through it. It was expected of her. The presenter—a recent Yale Law graduate—had chosen to focus on the “most favored nation” clauses that had begun showing up in such documents, beginning with Verna’s. Since Verna had died, three dozen others had signed similar deals with the Forthrast Family Foundation. Of those, eight—including Randall Waterhouse; his wife, Amy Shaftoe; and several of their business partners—had since died, and been subjected to the same preservation and scanning procedures as they’d invented for Dodge. So in addition to DB there were now nine other complete connectomes that could in principle be switched on in the same manner, creating nine more monsters, if you wanted to think of it that way. Attorneys representing the estates of those nine people had recently approached the Forthrast Family Foundation requesting information about the Process: how it worked, and what it was doing. Nothing had been stated openly yet, but it was clear where this was going. To the extent that simulating Dodge’s brain fulfilled the conditions in his will and his disposition of remains, it—simulating it, turning it on, letting it run—should fall under the most favored nation clause. Those nine connectomes—and, for that matter, the Ephrata Eleven as well—should become processes of their own.