Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  Freewander was the first to understand Dodge’s riddle, for her curiosity and her cleverness in flight had made her a frequent visitor to the place of which Dodge was speaking. “It is very like the crack in the world that lies deep below—”

  “The Knot!” exclaimed Thingor, who likewise had spent much time there. He nodded his head. “I could almost believe that I was looking down from a window of the Fastness.”

  Dodge nodded. “Chaos is no form or place, but all chaos is like other chaos. This then will be the manner of my return to the Land. Behold!”

  Directing his attention into the pit and the static that swirled and stormed below it, Dodge deepened and broadened the hole. It seemed to lead nowhere besides an infinity of nothingness. Thus it remained for hours and days as Dodge brooded upon it and marshaled every scrap of the power that he had built up during his long years in the Land. From time to time some figment would become visible below, and those of the Pantheon who had the patience to watch would exclaim, and gaze into one another’s eyes as if to ask, Did you see what I saw? But by the time they looked back it had flickered away. The change that Dodge wrought was so slow that it could not be perceived by those who sat and watched. Others who went away for a time and then returned would insist that they saw changes: light was shining from out of the pit now, and it was not the red light of fire but the white light of the Land. In that light shapes were beginning to manifest themselves, fleeting and fluid at first but later taking on permanence. At first these were difficult to make sense of.

  But then one day Pluto came to visit the place of Dodge’s labors. He had been absent for a long time, building up the dark tower that the Pantheon were making into their new abode. When he arrived at the edge of the pit and gazed down into it, he knew directly what he saw. For Pluto had seen it before. “When I first emerged from the chaos-filled hole beneath the Knot, it was exactly thus,” he said. “As we stand here, we seem to gaze downward. But the view is the same as one sees while looking upward from the depths underlying the Knot. What we are gazing upon here is the Fastness, though it seems to be upside down. Closest to us lie its massive foundations, shaped from the rock by the hand of him who in those days was called Egdod, and stretching away from us are its walls. Farther away yet are its high towers, and deep below, as we see things, are the convoluted forms of the Knot.”

  The others gathered to view it, and readily agreed that it was so. They saw it all through a swirling veil of static that sometimes coalesced into obscuring clouds and other times paled so thin that it was like looking up through clear water. But the view beyond it was always the same, and answered clearly to their recollections of the Fastness. “If this is a faithful portrait of the place as it is now, and not merely a memory of how it once was, then it is unmolested and undiscovered by El,” said Freewander.

  “I believe that to be the case,” said Longregard. For Thingor in the ruins of various craters had found shards of clear crystal that he had polished to make lenses, and in the tops of the towers of the dark castle he had assembled these to make instruments pointed upward, and Longregard now devoted long hours to peering up through those devices and observing the doings of El and his minions and of the thousands of souls scattered across the Land. “El has not torn down the Fastness. But neither has he ignored it; for his minions have constructed mighty works upon what used to be the Front Yard, and walled that place up so that nothing can come out of it.”

  Thingor rose up on his legs, the good one and the damaged one, and teetered on the brink of the pit. “I am of a mind to dive right in,” he said, “and return to my workshops that are now so close. Knowing what I know now, I could build them better.”

  Pan—the soul formerly known as Paneuphonium—began to pound on a set of war drums fashioned from skulls, sticks of wood, and scraps of skin collected during lost battles. He had a very large penis today, but tomorrow she might decide to have breasts. Something in the sound of the drums roused the Pantheon to action. They all crowded toward the brink.

  But Dodge spread one wing out to block Thingor’s view and to nudge him away. The drums of Pan fell silent. “I must ponder carefully how it is to be done,” Dodge announced. “For El and his minions see me coming whenever I draw near. I do not know how, for my disguises have been well crafted and my approaches stealthy.”

  Thingor said, “From the land of the living El brought with him powers of knowing and doing that exceed ours. Or perhaps it is more fitting to say that they belong to a different order not well known to us.”

  “How can you know this?” Love asked, stepping up to the very edge of the crater so that the white light shining up from the Land illuminated her face. This she had restored to its former beauty, though it was now of a different cast, reflecting all that she had suffered and learned.

  Longregard urged her to silence with a look and a gesture. “I too have seen evidence of what Thingor describes.”

  “Your question is not unreasonable, Love,” said Thingor, “since the events at the Feast were so brief, and passed for most of us in shock and confusion. But when I went to the storehouse of the thunderbolts I could easily discern that the undoing of the locks had been achieved by means not known to our kind.”

  “Likewise,” said Longregard, “my observations tell me that the approaches to the Land are watched, but not by eyes and minds akin to ours. The seeing is done by instruments that are in no way embodied—or if they are, they make no impression on our organs of vision and might as well be incorporeal. The minds behind those eyes are not minds such as ours, but more akin to those of bees, deriving their intelligence from the manifold interactions of a hive.”

  “To bewitch such sentinels is no small undertaking,” said Dodge, “but lodged in my memories of the world of the living are some notions that may be of interest here. Chief among these is the back door. I put it to you that the Knot is a back door to the Land, and that El is unlikely to consider it as anything other than a flaw left in its convolutions by an unskilled maker. Perhaps it will even gratify his pride to leave it unchanged as a testament to the insufficiencies of Egdod. It remains only for me to devise a manner of passing through this gate and abiding in the Fastness without being perceived by the invisible eyes or recognized by the teeming mind that El has set running in the Land to warn him of my approach. Leave me therefore in solitude here that I may consider the problem.”

  The others of the Pantheon then withdrew, leaving him alone on the rim of the pit. Or so he supposed for a time, until he became aware that another was lingering nearby. Raising his head he saw Daisy, or Sophia, hovering above and before him. Of all those who had been hurled down against the hard Firmament she had been altered least, as something in her lightness of form and agility of mind had enabled her to collect herself during the long fall and to light adroitly on the black shell of stone. She seemed therefore a kind of angel in this place. Not a brilliant angel but, like the others, a dark one. Whether by accident or design, she was treading air in such a place that the bright and distant Land appeared above her head.

  Dodge rebuked Sophia for not leaving him in peace, but there was no heat or conviction in his words and Sophia let them fly by her like so many dead brown leaves carried away on a gust.

  “From the land of the living I bring knowledge that you would do well to fold into your plan,” she announced. “Too I bring a dreadful power that not even El can be said to possess.”

  “Speak then of your knowledge and your power,” Dodge invited her. “For my defeat at the hand of El has stripped me of pride and opened my ears to counsel.”

  “Your plan of going into the Land through the back door is well conceived,” Sophia said, “but it will fail in the same way as your attempts to approach from other quarters. The eyes that watch the sky and the buzzing mind that searches for any trace of your return do not work as ours do. Blind and stupid in some respects, they possess an uncanny power of perception and recognition that I fear will find you out the moment y
ou appear anywhere in the Land, even if that be in the depths below the Fastness where you suppose El did not think to post watchers.”

  “It is for this reason that I mean to disguise my form,” Dodge said.

  Sophia shook her head. “The sentinels of El do not look for form; they cannot even perceive it. They can see your identity very well, however, and know you by the thread of consciousness that was spun beginning from the first moment many years ago when you began to collect yourself out of chaos.”

  Dodge considered it. “Your knowledge is hard news if truth be in it. I shall consider what you have said. But at first blush it suggests that my stay here in the Firmament will be a long one, possibly eternal. If that is so, we should give up all hope of returning to the Land and instead devote ourselves to the building of a new Land here, one forged of black minerals and lit by fire. Perhaps one day it will grow to rival or even surpass the beauty of the Land we first built and were thrown out of.”

  “Before you commit yourself to exile, Dodge, there is another thing I would tell you of,” said Sophia. But her face was downcast and her tone did not bode well.

  “You spoke before of possessing some power exceeding even that of El,” Dodge said.

  “I have the power,” Sophia said, “to snip that thread of consciousness that makes you you.”

  Long was the silence of Dodge. “You have the power of life and death,” he said at last. “No wonder El feared you.”

  “All of the souls who dwell in the Land can have their threads snipped at any time, and to me has been given the power of doing it.”

  “Why do you not kill El then?”

  “Perhaps I should have, when the opportunity was there, in the Palace. But in those early days I did not yet understand that this power was mine. And now that I do know it, I am too far away. I must be close, close enough to look the other soul in the eye, in order to use this power.”

  “Is Spring subject to that power?”

  “Yes. And all of the bees and the wasps and other lives that she gestates.”

  “Once I would have called that death, and would have dreaded it, and feared you,” Dodge said. “But even when I walked among the living, I used to muse about this thread, and how it made us who we are, and how it was snipped whenever we slept and yet began to spin once more upon awakening. To sleep was not to die, only to suffer an interruption that might last for a moment or the better part of a day. To awaken was to go on as if no interruption had ever occurred. Likewise death, which snipped my thread once but which I now perceive as not different from sleeping. For what matters is not the continuity but the coherence of that thread and the story that is told by it. El may have sentinels and wards to bar Dodge. But having made himself up out of chaos once, Dodge can do it again. As I have slept only to wake up, and as I have died only to resume living, I now submit without dread to the fate you alone have the power to wield. I regret only that our reacquaintance was so brief.”

  Water sprang forth from the face of Sophia. Dodge had never seen such a manifestation in the Land but remembered it now from the land of the living. He rose up and folded Sophia in his wings.

  Sophia said, “We were separated once and I found you and made you remember me.”

  “And love you,” Dodge added. He released her from the folds of his wings and drew back so that he could gaze upon her face and adore her.

  “So it will be again, I promise,” she said. Swooping in, she kissed his cheek. Then she drew back and swept her wing like the blade of a scythe. It struck Dodge in the neck and severed his head cleanly. First the head of Dodge, then his body, toppled slowly into the pit. For a moment it appeared that they would fall all the way through into the Fastness; but before passing through the back door, they were infected by chaos that dissolved the remains and left no trace of their existence in Firmament or Land.

  Part 7

  42

  Sophia died, or was murdered.

  El died, or committed suicide.

  Both of them showed up in Bitworld.

  At the same moment, someone in El’s Meatspace headquarters metaphorically threw a huge Frankenstein blade switch to the On position and activated a lot of computers that they had apparently stockpiled in advance. Which they more or less had to, since El’s process consumed power comparable to Dodge’s, and he brought with him an entourage of scanned and cached souls who were all booted up at the same time. Each of them was a Pantheon-class soul in his or her own right. So El didn’t show up alone, weak and tentative like most new processes; he was a big deal from day one, and he had help, and he had vast amounts of new processing power and memory to draw upon.

  When El moved from Meatspace to Bitworld, all of the weird drama seemed to move along with him. Zelrijk-Aalberg (Z-A) calmed down and began to work more constructively with South Lake Union (SLU).

  They had no choice but to get along, if they were going to keep the Afterlife up and running. Tens of thousands of processes had already been booted up. In the Land of the Living, millions of persons had paid deposits and signed paperwork obligating Z-A or SLU to scan and reboot them upon death. They had a business to run.

  A decade passed in Meatspace. Yet more computational resources came online. Half-facetiously, people in the know started referring to those as mana: a term that Dungeons and Dragons types had, decades earlier, culturally appropriated from Polynesian religion. In some role-playing games, mana was a kind of magical fuel that characters accumulated, stored, and then burned when they performed magical spells. In its new usage, it referred to all of the computational infrastructure needed to make Bitworld run: the CPUs, which nowadays were all quantum devices; the memory storage systems; the networking gear that sent messages back and forth between various subprocesses; and all of the electrical generating equipment and cooling gear needed to keep that stuff running. The more of that that came online, the faster and better Bitworld ran. Investments that they’d made years ago began to pay off. The amount of mana climbed at a rate that would have seemed impossible a few years ago. It easily outpaced the rate at which people were dying, and being scanned, in Meatspace.

  Accordingly, the Time Slip Ratio sped up. That was a way of saying that the simulation was running more rapidly than real time. Years, as perceived and counted by the dead, were passing faster in Bitworld than they were for the living in Meatspace.

  Sophia, the Pantheon, and the Dodge Process abandoned Town. For that matter, they abandoned the entire Landform. They began creating a new place altogether. They cloaked it with some kind of jamming algorithm that prevented the Landform Visualization Utility from working there. So it wasn’t clear what was happening, exactly. Sometimes they came back in smaller or larger groups to the Landform, and things happened that, when slowed down and viewed in the LVU, looked like altercations. Even full-on battles.

  Some while later—about four years in Meatspace, but hundreds of years in Bitworld—the Dodge Process was abruptly shut down by none other than Sophia. She had the power to do such things, apparently, since the same AIs that had recognized her when she was alive now recognized her in Bitworld.

  For better or worse, the Landform was a single contiguous thing. Some of its inhabitants “lived,” and some of its geographical features were simulated, on hardware maintained by the cluster of entities spawned and controlled by Forthrast and Waterhouse out of SLU. Others ran on equipment owned by El’s network of companies based in Z-A. But they could not be separated. So the two sides, like conjoined twins sharing a heart, had to coexist.

  They formed a consortium. This had an official name that was only used on legal documents. People called it SLUZA. Corvallis became the elder statesman of SLU. Sinjin Kerr was his counterpart in Z-A—though it was always difficult to make out just what was really going on over there. Enoch Root was the kindly professor they called upon to resolve squabbles and arcane techno-philosophical points. Zula, wizened by grief, dropped out of the picture entirely for a couple of years after Sophia’s death, a
nd then returned to the Forthrast Family Foundation in a vaguely defined CEO emeritus role.

  ACTANSS went on a year’s hiatus following the Incident, then resumed. It was never the same. It moved to bigger, more accessible venues. It flourished into what someone described as “the COMDEX of Death,” with overtones of revival meeting and academic conference. Even the biggest venues had small rooms hidden away in quiet corners, and in such rooms, C-plus and Sinjin and Enoch and Zula used ACTANSS as the annual summit meeting where they discussed, and agreed on practical solutions to, the Big Questions that were going to dominate their work in the decades to come.

  Or, in terms more useful to planners, Magnitudes 5 to 8.

  Because of the way the Time Slip Ratio varied, using years as a measuring scheme was tricky. A better yardstick was the number of independent souls or processes currently running on the system, and for that, instead of using absolute numbers, it was convenient to use a Richter scale–like system based on orders of magnitude.

  Ten raised to the power 0, 100, was equal to one. So, for the entire duration of the time the Dodge Process had been running on its own, the system had existed at Magnitude 0.

  Inevitably, they truncated “Magnitude” to “Mag.” Ten to the first power, 101, was simply equal to ten, and 102 was a hundred. The Mag 1/2 version of Bitworld—the epoch when it had hosted something like ten to a hundred distinct souls—had been the age of truly bizarre experimentation by newly booted processes who had spawned, mostly out in the middle of nowhere, in a world whose basic shape and environment had been sketched out by Dodge, but where rules were fluid and considerable resources available for the taking. In those days the scanning technology and the simulation software had been experimental, not as good as what came along later, and they’d only scanned brains—not bodies. Those souls, in many cases, had grown up in isolation from others. Several who had spawned near Dodge had ended up in his Pantheon, but many had developed on their own into creatures that in form, powers, and psychology were not really recognizable as human.