Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  “This isn’t complicated. El Shepherd has never been happy with the state of affairs that began when Corvallis made Sophia a token holder in Dodge’s Brain and she used that authority to launch the Process. He’s made it obvious in many ways, over the years, that he wants that same level of authority.”

  Zula looked across the table at her daughter. Sophia and Maeve had joined Zula, Marcus, and C-plus for lunch. They were sitting around a corner table in an Ethiopian place on Cherry Street. The restaurant was about three blocks down the hill from the medical office building where Richard had been stricken. The time of year was early October. It was an unspoken family tradition that they would haunt this part of town when the maple leaves were red. And “family” had become a complicated word to them. C-plus had effectively been made into a Forthrast long ago. Sophia was now a beloved aunt to the teenage children of Corvallis and Maeve.

  And all of them together were haunted by departed spirits. They were responsible for having created the systems on which Dodge, Verna, and Pluto were now, in some sense, alive.

  “He keeps complaining that the Singularity isn’t working out the way he’d hoped,” Zula said. “I think part of what disappoints him is just how damned bureaucratic it is. So many lawyers. So many meetings.”

  “But it is,” Sophia said. “It is starting to turn his way now, I think.”

  “You mean, with the Wad?” Corvallis asked. He had told everyone at this table about his encounter with Elmo Shepherd’s avatar.

  “Yeah,” Sophia said.

  “He loves the Wad,” Corvallis admitted.

  “Fine,” Zula said, “but even if that’s everything he was hoping for, who’s going to keep it running after he goes and joins it? A bunch of foundations with interlocking boards of directors. Their endowments distributed across god knows how many different investment vehicles, spread across every financial institution in the world.”

  “A lot of that is self-managing by this point,” Marcus reminded her. “Most of our investments are now managed by bots we don’t even understand. In his case, the fraction’s probably much higher than that.”

  “But physical stuff still has to exist. The computers that run it all need electricity, and roofs to keep rain from falling on them. Humans can shut it down any time they want.”

  “That’s what bothers him,” Sophia said. “And it’s what bothers me about what he’s asking for.”

  “Could you say more on that?” Marcus asked. “Because it’s increasingly obvious that it’s the real reason Sinjin’s here.”

  “The Process that I launched at Princeton may be very complicated, and powerful, and expensive to run,” Sophia said, “but it’s still a computer program that responds to some very simple commands. And one of those commands is ‘exit.’ Or maybe it’s ‘quit’ or ‘shut down.’ I don’t actually know because I’ve obviously never invoked such a command against it. Or against Verna or Pluto or any of the others.”

  “You as the token holder have the power to terminate the Process—or any subprocess—at any time,” Marcus said.

  “That’s basically how it works,” Sophia answered, looking to Corvallis. He nodded in confirmation.

  “Do you also have that power, C?” Marcus asked. “Since you were the one who issued the token to Sophia?”

  Corvallis shook his head no. “You’re thinking I’m like the superuser or the sysadmin. This is different. The token I issued to Sophia gave her the access and the authority to establish a new system altogether. On that system she is root—she has total authority over all of the processes and I have none whatsoever. Nor,” he added, “do I want it.”

  Maeve had been tracking this intensely, suggesting that she’d been curious about it for a while but had never found the right moment to ask. “To be blunt, honey, what happens if you get hit by a bus?”

  “Nothing,” Sophia said.

  “In other words,” Marcus said, “you haven’t made arrangements for that token to be transferred to someone else in the event of your demise.”

  “I wouldn’t even know how,” Sophia said. “I’ve never thought about it. But I will now.”

  “To ask the same question in a less loaded way,” Zula said, “since we are talking about my daughter here, what if you forget the password?”

  “We don’t use passwords.”

  “I know. It’s connected to your PURDAH. I get it. Work with me here.”

  “There’s no ‘it.’ You can’t understand this in terms of passwords. We got rid of passwords exactly because they had these defects: if you forget yours, you’re screwed. And if someone steals yours, they become you, they suddenly have all of your power, all your privs. The point of the ‘H’ in PURDAH—‘Holography’—is that you have to prove your identity from one moment to the next—”

  “With your face, your voice, the way you type, the way you walk . . . ,” Zula said. She knew all this.

  “Back in the day, yeah. It was clearly traceable to face recognition or whatever. Now we don’t even know how it works. We’ve handed it over to AIs that just know when it’s you, based on—who the hell knows?”

  “So, getting back to the point of my question,” Zula said, a little heated, “suppose this mysterious AI, the gatekeeper, couldn’t recognize you anymore. Which is what I was trying to express with the archaic expression ‘forget the password.’”

  “If I lose the ability to verify my identity—my ownership of the PURDAH—if the mysterious AIs somehow stop recognizing me as me, then the authority vested in that toho is lost forever.”

  “And what does that cash out to, on a practical level?” Maeve asked.

  “Surprisingly little,” Sophia said. “I am Atropos.”

  “For those of us who haven’t boned up on our D’Aulaires’ lately, could you explain that?” Zula asked dryly.

  “Atropos was the Fate who had the power to cut the threads of life. I have the power to terminate processes by typing ‘quit’ or ‘kill’ or whatever into a terminal window—I’d have to look up the man page to know the exact command. If I became disconnected from the relevant PURDAH, no one else would have that ability.”

  “But creating new processes is a different story,” Maeve said, half statement and half question.

  “Because it’s an open protocol for exchange of messages,” Corvallis said, “anyone can launch a process that participates. Of course, only a few people have the know-how to launch a process that’s actually interesting. Basically that power is limited to us and to El Shepherd.”

  “This places Sinjin’s demands in a different light,” Marcus said. “To hear him tell it, all that El’s really asking for is the same root-level access that Sophia has had from the very beginning. Shared authority. But if the only special ability Sophia has is that of Atropos, then why does he want it?”

  “He wants to kill Dodge and Verna and the others,” Maeve said.

  Sophia shrugged. “I may have oversimplified it. I can perform some other administrative functions that El can’t. Basically having to do with limiting resource usage. In retrospect, if I’d thought all of this through at the beginning, I’d have imposed some limits on how much memory the Process could allocate for itself, how much processing power it could use, and so on.”

  “That’s what a system administrator would normally do as a matter of course,” Corvallis explained, for Zula’s benefit. “Like, back in the old days, if I were installing a piece of software on a system with a one-terabyte hard drive, I’d set a quota saying that the software wasn’t allowed to allocate more than, say, half a terabyte for its own use—otherwise it’d crowd out all of the other processes and crash.”

  “I never did that,” Sophia said, “because Jake and later El threw resources at the Process faster than it could consume them. Everyone was so fascinated by its growth that they just wanted to let it run unfettered, as an experiment.”

  “I see,” Zula said, “and later El came to regret that choice because of the dominance that the Pr
ocess had achieved.”

  “It came as a surprise that the other processes launched out of El’s network gravitated to the first one and glommed on to it rather than growing independently,” Corvallis said, nodding.

  “Okay,” Marcus said. The skepticism in his voice was clear. “So Sinjin’s going to claim that El merely wants the authority to rein in out-of-control processes. Build some fences around them. Impose the normal quotas and so on that Sophia never put into place.”

  “There’s other stuff he could do, like erect barriers around ‘our’ processes to limit their interaction with ‘his’ processes,” Sophia said, air-quoting.

  “Which sounds reasonable. But we can’t give him the ability to do those things without at the same time giving him the power of Atropos,” Marcus said, holding up two fingers and making a snip.

  “I would have to do some research on that,” Sophia said.

  “How does it look to you, based on this morning?” Zula asked Marcus.

  “Sinjin’s constructed a pretty airtight box around us,” Marcus admitted. “Until the Wad happened, nothing was resource-constrained. The world’s supply of quantum supercomputing clusters, bandwidth, and storage were able to keep abreast of the growth.”

  “Which is no accident,” Corvallis put in. “El built all of that specifically to support all of the processes he was launching.”

  “Of course,” Marcus said. “But he was making the assumption that each new process would add only a certain amount of load to the system. All of those assumptions went out the window when the Wad began to take shape. The amount of computation in that thing is an order of magnitude larger than what we saw in the old scheme where the processes weren’t so tightly linked. The system’s threatening to burn itself out.”

  “You know my opinion on this,” Corvallis said. “It’s degenerate activity. A lot of these things have just gotten caught up in infinite loops. Race conditions. There’s no meaningful computation happening in the Wad.”

  “But it’s just your opinion,” Marcus reminded him. “Imagine you’re in front of a jury in a civil case, trying to get them to believe that. You need to be able to say with a straight face that all of the computation associated with Dodge and the Pantheon processes is legit, but everything in the Wad is ‘degenerate.’”

  Sophia was nodding her head. “It’d be a different story if we actually knew what those processes were thinking. But all we have to go on is traffic analysis and burn rate.”

  “I disagree,” Corvallis said. “We have plenty of track record indicating that the result of the Pantheon’s computation is the Landform. What’s the result of all the computation in the Wad? Nothing that we can discern.”

  “Again. Jury,” Marcus said.

  “We can’t enter Critique of Pure Reason into evidence?” Maeve cracked.

  “The fact is,” Marcus said, “that the Wad plays directly into El’s hands by creating a shortage of computational power that never existed before. And he can use that shortage as leverage against us. What could be more reasonable sounding than to say it’s time to impose some limits?”

  “It didn’t take him all morning just to say that,” Zula pointed out.

  “Everything else is just Sinjin sending the message that if we don’t agree to El’s request he can make an amount of trouble for us that’s big enough that it’ll be easier to just change our minds.”

  Food was served, and conversation stopped for a while as all reached into the middle of the table to tear the injera bread and pinch up mouthfuls of spicy food. Once Maeve had taken the edge off of her hunger, though, she wiped her hands on a napkin and spoke: “I draw the line at giving El, or anyone, the power to terminate a process. I’ve already lost my sister once. If the process we’ve named Verna is in any sense Verna, then I want her protected. And the same goes for any little nieces and nephews.”

  The others took a minute or so to process that. Verna, who was Maeve’s only sibling, had died childless. Corvallis was an only child. It was an impossibility for Maeve to have any nieces or nephews. One by one, the others got puzzled looks on their faces until Corvallis turned to her and said, “You might want to unpack that for them, sweetheart.”

  “We’re seeing evidence that a new process is being assembled. Connected with Verna.”

  “That’s been going on for a while now, right?” Marcus asked. “That’s what makes the behavior of Verna different from all the others: she has figured out how to spawn processes that run on their own.”

  Maeve held her thumb and index finger barely apart. “Wee ones. Little ‘hello world’ contraptions that run on their own. They don’t do much. Don’t consume a lot of resources.”

  “They all get billed to our accounts,” Corvallis added, “so we can track them. They are too tiny to matter.”

  “Until now,” Maeve said. “Now Verna’s working on spawning two big ones.” She looked to Corvallis, who nodded in confirmation. “The new process looks to be on a similar scale to a scanned human connectome. It’s been a-building for a few months.”

  Marcus nodded, getting it. “So that’s what you meant when you were talking about nieces and nephews.”

  “Maybe that’s another reason El’s gotten so cranky,” Zula said. “If our processes figure out how to make new copies of themselves, it could go viral in a hurry, and crowd out his.”

  Marcus’s watch had hummed on his wrist a minute ago, and he’d been looking at some new information in his wearable—this was obvious from the fact that he’d been staring at a blank spot on the wall for no discernible reason. He wiped his hand on a napkin and pushed the device up onto his forehead. “He’s about to get a whole lot crankier,” Marcus announced.

  “What happened?” Zula asked. “What did you just learn?” She’d been getting notifications too but ignored them.

  Marcus shook his head. His expression was saying, Who the hell knows? He announced, “The Wad just fell over.”

  “Fell over?” Maeve asked sharply.

  “Crashed. The amount of computational activity going on in the Wad suddenly dropped by three orders of magnitude. And that green thing above the Town Square? It’s gone. Town Square’s back to normal: a little tower in a park.”

  Wearables came out of pockets all around the table, or people flipped them down from where they’d been parked atop their heads. Everyone went to the Landform display first and verified that Marcus was correct: the towering flare that during the last several weeks had risen above the Town Square like an oil well fire was now completely gone. But the building atop the nearby hill stood just as it had before, the only difference being that the hill kept growing taller and steeper.

  “We’re sure this isn’t just a fail in the LVU?” Maeve asked.

  Marcus shook his head. “It’s screamingly obvious in the burn rate. The financials. And if you switch over to the other viz you can see what’s up with the Wad.”

  They all checked out the more abstract visualization scheme—the one that for the last few weeks had been dominated by the amorphous cloud of dense white lines. The Dodge process and the Pantheon still hovered above everything else, as bright and as dominant as ever. But the Wad was no more. In its place was a thin white layer that looked like the aftermath of a hailstorm: thousands of hard-looking white pellets. Each of them represented a separate process. They had always been embedded in the Wad. Until a few minutes ago, though, they’d been concealed by the dense matting of white lines representing the messages being passed between them. Now, if you bent close and stared at one of those pellets, you could see white fibers zapping in and out of it as messages were passed. But Marcus was right: the level of activity had dropped to something approaching zero.

  They all received the same notification at once. It was a terse message from Sinjin Kerr, letting them know that he needed to cancel this afternoon’s meeting and apologizing for the short notice. Moments later he sent another one very much regretting that he would not be seeing them at ACTANSS 5 next we
ek.

  40

  In lieu of a purse, Sophia carried Daisy: a sort of disembodied pocket whose purpose was to atone for the sins of the women’s clothing industry. It was a flat wallet that she slung over her shoulder on a thin strap. It was big enough to carry ID, tampons, pens, a miniature multitool, a spare house key, and an improvised rosary of electronic fobs and dongles and mini-flashlights. Every so often it grew bulky enough that she could feel it thudding against her hip, and then she would go through and clean out all the little scraps of paper she’d stuffed into it. When prepping for a day at work or a night out, she could put it into a larger bag. At ACTANSS 5, it carried a key token to her room and one of the pocket notebooks that the organizers handed out as swag. On one side it had an outer sleeve consisting of a rectangle of tough clear plastic, closed by a zipper. Some while ago, while pawing through a drawer in search of her passport, she had come across the peel-and-stick op-art shower daisy that she had purloined from the Forthrast family farmhouse. On the spur of the moment, she had slipped it into the transparent sleeve so that she could see it more often. Since then, it had become a visual hook, like a distinctive piece of jewelry or a dyed streak in the hair, that friends associated with her and strangers used as a conversation starter. Her more stylish girlfriends had begun rolling their eyes at the increasingly frayed and dingy wallet, and begun addressing it as Daisy.

  After a long day of sitting still in conference sessions, it was her habit to wind down by going to the spa, where she would walk on a treadmill for half an hour or so, just to wake up the muscles and get the blood moving. The machine had a shelf intended to hold reading material. It was no longer all that useful since wearables tended to be easier to read from when you were bobbing along at full stride. She put Daisy on that and cranked the treadmill up to a brisk pace. Then she pulled her wearable down from the top of her head and settled it on the bridge of her nose and began wading through all of the message traffic that had piled up during the day. Her editor, assisted by various bots, had done her best to sort that into different buckets. One large bucket was devoted to quarantining all notifications relating to the complex of lawsuits recently generated by Sinjin Kerr and his minions at the behest of Elmo Shepherd. Those were a strange blend of very boring and very stressful. Sophia had an understanding with the Forthrast attorneys that she could ignore all of them and they would notify her when her attention was really needed.