Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  “It’s a phase transition, I think.”

  Corvallis smiled. “You know what Richard used to say about those?”

  “No.”

  “We had mathematicians working on weird stuff. Richard had no idea what they were talking about most of the time. But he learned that when they trotted out certain phrases, it meant they were really excited. ‘Phase transition’ was at the top of the list.”

  “There’s this very complicated system with a lot of parts. Way too many to keep track of. You can only make sense of it statistically. Most of the time it just kind of does what it does—falls into certain habits. But then all of a sudden something happens. There’s a complete top-to-bottom change that anyone can see. That’s what this is,” El said.

  “What do you see in it? A minute ago you said, ‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’ What did you mean by that?”

  “I had qualms about how it was shaping up before. You know that,” El said. “The early processes had gained a head start that seemed prohibitive. Constructed a crude spatial matrix echoing their fractured and hazy memories of landforms and built environments. The new processes flocked to it for some reason, instead of starting from scratch. It became a straitjacket—a prison. Not sufficiently different from the world they’d left behind—the world that you and I live in. What’s the point of dying and being transmogrified into a digital entity if you’re going to use all of that computational power to re-create the analog world you just managed to escape from? Worse, to exist in a hierarchical social structure where resources are dominated by a few at the top with godlike power? I was deeply worried that Dodge and his Pantheon had created a stable system.”

  “Stable is good, right?”

  “Except when it’s bad. Totalitarian regimes, corrupt systems are stable. I was afraid this was one of those. And maybe it was—but now, among the late-arriving processes that constitute the vast majority of working souls, we are seeing an accumulation of power and resources that rivals that of the old guard. Getting ready for a Titanomachia, I believe.”

  “The word rings a bell but you’re going to have to help me out,” Corvallis said.

  “When the gods of Olympus overthrew the Titans. Replaced them with something new, more brilliant, more perfect.”

  “Chained the Titans to rocks, threw them into the pit of Hades, or whatever,” Corvallis said.

  “I’m not a mythology geek the way Sophia is,” El admitted. “The point is just that there is a change coming. For the first time, I see a way out. I am optimistic that when I upload—which won’t be long now, C—when I upload I’ll be going to a place where I can actually look forward to operating. A better place.”

  “What do you mean, it won’t be long now?” Corvallis asked. He’d been staring, not at the Wad, but at the big colored blobs hovering above it, wondering what this display would look like if El’s prophecy came true and they were all hauled down in some kind of Titanomachia. Were they beautiful, those souls? Were they brilliant and good? Or were they hideous ogres that needed to be thrown down and chained to rocks in the lowest circles of hell?

  He turned to look at Elmo Shepherd’s avatar, but it had winked out. As if he, or someone who was responsible for looking after him in Zelrijk-Aalberg, had pulled the plug.

  38

  Sinjin Kerr was a really good lawyer. Today he was launching an offensive against the Forthrast Family Foundation. He was a really good lawyer. He and his staff had clearly been planning this attack for years. He was a really good lawyer. Zula, as the person responsible for everything that the foundation did, was the primary target of the attack. Sinjin Kerr was a really good lawyer. She was going to have to put everything else in her life on hold and do nothing else besides fight back, probably for the next several years, or else resign and hand the foundation over to a professional war-fighter.

  Sinjin Kerr was a really good lawyer.

  Thus Zula’s internal monologue during the three hours that Sinjin spent patiently laying out his case. They were meeting on neutral ground, in a hotel conference room in downtown Seattle. Once the scope and scale of the assault became clear, Zula’s reptile brain began calling for a fight-or-flight reaction. But her foundation had lawyers of its own, almost as good as Sinjin, who had seen this coming for a long time and erected many-layered interlocking defenses. Years would pass before Zula’s reptile brain was of any use whatsoever. Ditches would have to be taken one by one, moats drained, walls undermined, gates rammed down, ramparts scaled, watchtowers burned, and defenders picked off before Zula found herself locked in the highest room of the tallest tower, Sinjin’s soldiers banging on the locked door with a sledgehammer as she gripped a dagger in her sweaty hand. So once again, as in so many other cases during her tenure as the head of the foundation, her presence in the room was largely symbolic and her mind couldn’t help but drift. She was fascinated by Sinjin because he had an essential humanity about him that could not be teased apart from his excellence as a lawyer. He opened his carefully planned legal offensive with a single, uninterrupted, hour-long monologue, delivered without notes, on the topic of graphs. Not even three-dimensional augmented-reality plots with glowing lines and such. No animations. Just straight two-dimensional plots that could just as well have been delivered on a flipchart. As a convenience to the people he was attacking, he had printed these out on paper and handed them around, as if this were a business meeting in 1995 or something. And yet these hokey, outmoded physical artifacts made it all seem more serious and more real. Sinjin was kicking it old-school! During the second hour Zula’s mind wandered even further afield and she found herself thinking about the weird talismanic power of hard copies. She was thinking of medieval documents she’d seen in museums in Europe, handwritten on sheepskin, with huge wax seals dangling from them. The physical reality of the object was proof that humans had put intention into their contents, that this was real, not just a game played with pixels.

  The fabulous complexities of Sinjin’s case had all been researched and footnoted to the nth degree by his staff, which must by this point have occupied several new office buildings adjacent to Zelrijk-Aalberg’s convoluted border. The burden of detail had been lifted from his shoulders, freeing him to do what his subordinates were not capable of: to tell the story of it in a way that was engaging, coherent, and disturbingly close to being absolutely convincing. It was, as everyone understood, a sort of dress rehearsal for future pleadings before judges or juries. Elmo Shepherd was demonstrating the power of his new superweapon before a handpicked delegation of his enemies. The message was obvious: Surrender now or I shall be forced to use this weapon in anger against you. Imagine how bad that would be. Sinjin had only brought two associates with him but it was to be understood that they were only the head of a queue of legal myrmidons that would stretch behind him over the horizon were they all physically here. With their carrying the supporting documents in their satchels, he was free to just be Sinjin. He pointed to squiggles on graphs and held forth about their meaning enough to convey the point that he had mastered all of the details, but just when he was getting into the weeds he would retract that accusatory finger and with a gentle wave of the hand dismiss the specifics and look someone in the eye and make an interesting point of a more general nature, not in an aggressive manner that might elicit a sharp defensive response but more with an air of Since we are all intelligent grown-ups here, and since we have subordinates who can plow through the specifics later, I thought you might find a few moments’ diversion in the following trenchant observations. And then he could be philosophical, he could be wry, he could even get everyone in the room to laugh. Not the fake forced laughter that people made when they understood someone was pooping out an attempt at humor but sharp surprising laughter followed by an afterglow of appreciating Sinjin. Even loving Sinjin. Being glad to be in his company. All, of course, with the unstated message of Imagine what this man could do in front of a jury.

  He was saying that Elmo Shepherd had been a mor
e than equal partner in all of these efforts from the very beginning—years before Richard Forthrast or Corvallis Kawasaki or any of the others had even heard of cryonics or the Singularity. Mr. Shepherd had researched and cowritten the boilerplate instructions that had gone into Dodge’s disposition of remains. He had been on the scene, talking face-to-face with C-plus, within hours of the tragic events. The immense edifice of research labs and intellectual property and human capital that had grown up around this industry in the decades since then could not have come into existence without the unstinting generosity of Mr. Shepherd. But it wasn’t just about his being a moneybags; more than any other one person, Mr. Shepherd encompassed within his colossal intellect all that was known on the connectome, how to scan it, how to store it, how to simulate it. Knowing that existing computer systems were inadequate to the task, he had almost single-handedly created the quantum computing industry from scratch. He could have made himself even more fabulously wealthy just from that, but chose instead to plow the money back into his life’s work.

  The premature launching of the Process by Sophia had led to consequences that Mr. Shepherd in all frankness had not predicted, but he had adapted gracefully and supported subsequent developments with his usual generosity. This was not a commercial proposition. Anything that advanced the science had Mr. Shepherd’s wholehearted backing. He did not seek credit or applause. He did not even seek understanding. All of that would sort itself out in due course. His wealth had afforded him the privilege, given to very few, of taking the longest and most visionary possible view. The goals of the world’s great religions were indistinguishable from Mr. Shepherd’s, but he was approaching them along a different path, a hidden path up the back of the mountain that Christianity and Islam and the others had been frontally assaulting for thousands of years. It was a long path through dark woods, difficult if not impossible for most to follow, but it was in the end a more certain way to the summit. One day all of this would be seen and acknowledged. In the long meantime Mr. Shepherd was willing to shoulder the burden of being misunderstood.

  Mr. Shepherd did not ask for very much in return for his steadfast generosity but he was serious in his goals, not a dupe, not an absentminded philanthropist blindly writing checks so that he could claim tax deductions or get buildings named after him. He was meticulous about his business dealings. Fairness was a two-way street. The other great institutions to which he had yoked himself—Waterhouse and Forthrast—could expect openhandedness and honesty from Mr. Shepherd. In return he expected—nay, demanded—symmetrical treatment from them. Nothing could be more reasonable.

  All fine and simple in principle. The details very complicated, of course. No one really at fault; these things happened when brilliant energetic people hurled themselves into the fray. No progress could be made by such marvelous minds if they were second-guessing themselves at every turn, minding the legal p’s and q’s, torturing themselves thinking about possible future entanglements, contradictions, conflicts. You had to let these people do what they did. Lesser minds like Sinjin could follow along in their wake tidying up.

  It was, however, time to tidy up. Not a big deal really. Some things had grown out of proportion, got out of whack, the current state of affairs not exactly in alignment with contracts that all of the principals had willingly entered into years ago. Unforeseen developments now called for some pruning, some rerouting of the financial plumbing, some add-ons and codicils to the agreements that were already in place. No need to hand it over to the terribly inefficient legal system.

  No one wanted that.

  39

  Egdod saw that the Tower was an abomination, not merely because of its tallness and its situation but because of the joining together of the souls’ auras.

  He summoned Thingor forth out of the Fastness and with him forged a thunderbolt much greater than any of the others. When it was ready Egdod flew up above the Palace holding it in his right hand. The heat of it burned him and the brightness of it blinded him. He hurled it at the Tower and struck it in its midsection, which was destroyed in an instant, and the top part of it fell down upon the bottom and smote it to dust all the way down to its stone foundations, which after that were no longer visible, being buried under a heap of pulverized mud.

  Flying over this Egdod could see the dust moving as souls within it struggled to emerge. They had been greatly diminished by the annihilation of the Tower into which they had woven much of their own beings, but still they lived, and as they called out, they did so not in the hum they had stolen from the bees but in the various kinds of speech that they had used before they had taken up that habit. “Build no more Towers,” Egdod said to them, “and dwell not in hives, but in houses, as you did at the beginning. You shall have to build them yourselves, since you have so foolishly destroyed the ones that I made for you. And do not join your auras together in place of speaking, but shape your thoughts into words, as is proper for souls.”

  “They do not all speak in the same tongue, of course,” Speaksall pointed out to him later. “They will clump according to their manner of talking; and the new houses that they build for themselves may be sown far and wide across the Land rather than being together in a single Town that lies within your view and beneath the threat of your terrible weapons.”

  “So be it,” Egdod said. And so it was, for souls had already begun grouping themselves in the manner that Speaksall had foretold, and were struggling out of Town in various directions. It could be guessed that each was of a mind to build its own town far away from others who spoke in different tongues, and far away from the abode of Egdod. Egdod took no measures to prevent it.

  But after the Town was empty, and contained no souls to gaze on his work, he persisted in his practice of building the hill higher, until the Palace had become a soaring tower unto itself, perched on the summit of a pillar that projected above the clouds. No longer did the hum of the Hive trouble his ears. Instead his work was accompanied by sweet sounds made by a new soul who had lately come into the Land. Longregard had discovered her perched on a rubble heap below, amid the ruins of the Hive, playing a tune by blowing over the top of a hollow bone. She—or perhaps he, for this soul never seemed to make up his or her mind as to sex—had been adopted by those who dwelled in the Palace, and become a favorite of Thingor and Knotweave, who had assisted her, or him, in fashioning many kinds of new devices for making all sorts of sounds. Egdod had named this soul Paneuphonium and given them leave to perch wherever they pleased. Paneuphonium had rewarded Egdod by learning to make just the kind of music that suited him when he was in a mood to build and alter those parts of the Land that were still in need of bettering.

  So high did Egdod build the pinnacle that, when he looked down from his solitary chamber at its top, he could see all parts of the Land, provided that the weather afforded him clear views. And when he looked up he could of course see the stars. But if he redoubled the intensity and the penetration of his gaze he could see through the veil of night into the infinite sea of chaos that lay beyond it. Nor did seeing chaos above trouble his thoughts, any more than seeing it below did in the bottomless chasm under the Fastness. For he had mastered chaos and made it his servant now.

  Weather at such a height was cold, but he caused the air about the Palace and in the Garden to be warm, as before. The Forest just outside the Garden gate he too made warm and pleasant in all seasons, so that its creeks did not freeze, but flowed together into a river that plunged off the precipice in a long waterfall. Spring’s abode remained as it had been before, and there she remained, rarely venturing outside of her grove, as she gestated the new souls that she and Egdod had conceived.

  Then a semblance of calm returned to the Palace and the Land as summer ended and fall began, and the leaves and the apples alike began to turn red, and all of the souls whom Egdod had invited began winging toward the Palace to enjoy the feast.

  There was a reason Zula wasn’t a lawyer. At some point around the two-hour mark she zoned out.
This was because she had been seduced by Sinjin Kerr. Not in a sexual way, of course. More in an emotional way. Everything he was saying was so reasonable. He was such an intelligent guy. So witty. But not in a self-congratulatory way. More like he was forever surprising himself with his own ability to stumble on the occasional nugget of wry humor inherent in all proceedings that involved humans. How could any intelligent person argue against his basic point that a lot of stuff had changed and it was time to do some housekeeping? The third hour was a lot of detail about where the money had been going. Huge flows of virtual cash, all denominated in modern digital currencies, chundering back and forth between Forthrast and Waterhouse and Mr. Shepherd’s enterprises, both for- and nonprofit. The transfers observable by humans who held the requisite tokens and who actually bothered to kick through the numbers but frequently occurring in the dark since the details were too complex for any one person to wrap their mind around them. Even in her zoned-out state Zula had a sense of where Sinjin was going with this: he was going to assert some claim that money had ended up in the wrong place. Probably just an oversight. Understandable. But important to get it fixed. Maybe a lot of money.

  She did not snap out of it until ten minutes before noon, when she heard her daughter’s name being mentioned. An observer sitting across the table from her would have seen little change in her expression, but she felt her heart beating faster and her face get warm. The latter was simple embarrassment. She hadn’t been following. She’d lost the thread of the argument just at the critical moment. She knew that Sinjin had mentioned Sophia but she was lagging behind him, playing catch-up, not really sure what he’d said.

  But it wasn’t difficult to guess.

  Half an hour later, during the lunch break, she confirmed as much with Marcus Hobbs, the chief counsel of the Forthrast Family Foundation, who had actually managed to follow Sinjin’s argument all the way through.