The Big U

by Neal Stephenson

  Next morning he visited the Science Shop, where Virgil Gabrielsen was fixing up a chromatograph that would enable Casimir to find out what chemicals were contained in the rat liver extract. “We’re ready for your mysterious test,” said Virgil.

  “Hope you don’t mind.”

  “I love working with mad scientists—never dull. What’s that?”

  “Mostly grain alcohol. This machine will answer your question, though, if it’s fixed.”

  A few hours later they had the results: a strip of paper with a line squiggled across it by the machine. Virgil compared this graph with similar ones from a long skinny book.

  “Shit,” said Virgil, showing rare surprise. “I didn’t think anything could live with this much Thalphene in its guts. Thalphene! These things have incredible immunities.”

  “What is it? I don’t know anything about chemistry.”

  “Trade name for thallium phenoxide.” Virgil crossed his arms and looked at the ceiling. “Dangerous Properties of Industrial Materials, my favorite bedtime reading, says this about thallium compounds. I abbreviate. ‘Used in rat poison and depilatories…results in swelling of feet and legs, arthralgia, vomiting, insomnia, hyperaesthesia and paresthesia of hands and feet, mental confusion, polyneuritis with severe pains in legs and loins, partial paralysis and degeneration of legs, angina, nephritis, wasting, weakness…complete loss of hair…ha! Fatal poisoning has been known to occur.’”

  “No kidding!”

  “Under phenols we have…‘where death is delayed, damage to kidneys, liver, pancreas, spleen, edema of the lungs, headache, dizziness, weakness, dimness of vision, loss of consciousness, vomiting, severe abdominal pain, corrosion of lips, mouth, throat, esophagus and stomach…’”

  “Okay, I get the idea.

  “And that doesn’t account for synergistic effects. These rats eat the stuff all the time.”

  “So they go through a lot of rat poison, these rats do.”

  “It looks to me,” said Virgil, “as though they live on it. But if you don’t mind my prying, why do you care?”

  Casimir was slightly embarrassed, but he knew Virgil’s secret, so it was only fair to bare his own. “In order for Project Spike to work, they have to be heavy rat-poison eaters. I’m going to collect rat poison off the floors and expose it to the slow neutron source in Sharon’s lab. It’s a little chunk of a beryllium isotope on a piece of plutonium, heavily shielded in paraffin—looks like a garbage can on wheels. Paraffin stops slow neutrons, see. Anyway, when I expose the rat poison to the neutrons, some of the carbon in the poison will turn to Carbon-14. Carbon-14 is used in dating, of course, so there are plenty of machines around to detect small amounts of it. Anyway, I set this tagged poison out near the Cafeteria. Then I analyze samples of Cafeteria food for unusually high levels of Carbon-14. If I get a high reading…”

  “It means rats in the food.”

  “Either rats, or their hair or feces.”

  “That’s awesome blackmail material, Casimir. I wouldn’t have thought it of you.”

  Casimir looked up at Virgil, shocked and confused. After a few seconds he seemed to understand what Virgil had meant. “Oh, well, I guess that’s true. The thing is, I’m not that interested in blackmail. It wouldn’t get me anything. I just want to do this, and publicize the results. The main thing is the challenge.”

  A rare full grin was on Virgil’s face. “Damn good, Casimir. That’s marvelous. Nice work.” He thought it over, taken with the idea. “You’ll have the biggest gun in the Plex, you know.”

  “That’s not what I’m after with this project.”

  “Let me know if I can help. Hey, you want to go downstairs to the Denny’s for lunch? I don’t want to eat in the Cafeteria while I’m thinking about the nature of your experiment.”

  “I don’t want to eat at all, after what I’ve just been doing,” said Casimir. “But maybe later on we can dissolve our own livers in ethanol.” He put the beaker of rat potion in a hazardous-waste bin, logged down its contents, and they departed.

  And lest anyone get the wrong idea, a disclaimer: I did not know about this while it was going on. They told me about it later. The people who have claimed I bear some responsibility for what happened later do not know the facts.

  “What makes you think you can just play a record?” said Ephraim Klein in a keen, irritated voice. “I’m listening to harpsichord music.”

  “Oh,” John Wesley Fenrick said innocently. “I didn’t hear it. I guess my ears must have gone bad from all my terrible music, huh?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “But it’s okay. I’m not going to play a record.”

  “I should hope not.”

  “I’m going to play a tape.” Fenrick brushed his finger against an invisible region on the surface of the System, and lights lit and meters wafted up and down. The mere sound of silence, reproduced by this machine, nearly drowned out the harpsichord, a restored 1783 Prussian model with the most exquisite lute stop Klein had ever heard. Fenrick turned on the Go Big Red Fan, which began to chunk away as usual.

  “Look,” said Ephraim Klein, “I said I was playing something. You can’t just bust in.”

  “Well,” said John Wesley Fenrick, “I said I can’t hear it. If I don’t hear any evidence that you are playing something, there’s no reason I should take your word for it. You obviously have a distorted idea of reality.”

  “Prick! Asshole!” But Klein had already pulled out one of his war tapes, the “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” as performed by Virgil Fox (what Fenrick called “horror movie music”) and snapped it into his own tape deck. He set the tape rolling and prepared to switch from PHONO to TAPE at the first hint of offensive action from Fenrick.

  It was not long in coming. Fenrick had been sinking into a Heavy Metal retrospective recently, and entered the competition with Back in Black by AC/DC. Klein watched Fenrick’s hands carefully and was barely able to squeeze out a lead, the organist hitting the high mordant at the opening of the piece before the ensuing fancy notes were stomped into the sonic dust by Back in Black.

  From there the battle raged typically. A hundred feet down the hall, I stuck my head out the door to have a look. Angel, the enormous Cuban who lived on our floor, had been standing out in the hallway for about half an hour furiously pounding on the wall with his boxing gloves, laboriously lengthening a crack he had started in the first week of the semester. When I looked, he was just in the act of hurling open the door to Klein and Fenrick’s room; dense, choking clouds of music whirled down the corridor at Mach 1 and struck me full in the face.

  I started running. By the time I had arrived, Angel had wrapped Fenrick’s long extension cord around the doorknob, held it with his boxing gloves, put his foot against the door, and pulled it apart with a thick blue spark and a shower of fire. The extension cord shorted out and smoked briefly until circuit breakers shut down all public-area power to the wing. AC/DC went dead, clearing the air for the climax of the fugue. Angel walked past the petrified Ephraim Klein and pawed at the tape deck, trying to get at the tape. Frustrated by the boxing gloves, he turned and readied a mighty kick into the cone of a sub-woofer, when finally I arrived and tackled him onto a bed. Angel relaxed and sat up, occasionally pounding his bright-red cinderblock-scarred gloves together with meaty thwats, sweating like the boxer he was, glowering at the Go Big Red Fan.

  The fugue ended and Ephraim shut off the tape. I went over and closed the door. “Okay, guys, time for a little talk. Everyone want to have a little talk?”

  John Wesley Fenrick looked out the window, already bored, and nodded almost imperceptibly. Ephraim Klein jumped to his feet and yelled, “Sure, sure, anytime! I’m happy to be reasonable!” Angel, who was unlacing his right boxing glove with his teeth, mumbled, “I been talking to them for two months and they don’t do shit about it.”

  “Hmm,” I said, “I guess that tells the story, doesn’t it? If you two refuse to be reasonable, Angel doesn’t have to
be reasonable either. Now it seems to me you need a set of rules that you can refer to when you’re arguing about stereo rights. For instance, if one guy goes to pee, the other can’t seize air rights. You can’t touch each other’s property, and so on. Ephraim, give me your typewriter and we’ll get this down.”

  So we made the Rules and I taped them to the wall, straddling the boundary line of the room. “Does that mean I only have to follow the Rules on my half of the page,” asked Fenrick, so I took it down and made a new Rule saying that these were merely typed representations of abstract Rules that were applicable no matter where the typed representations were displayed. Then I had the two sign the Rules, and hinted again that I just didn’t know what Angel might do if they made any more noise. Then Angel and I went down to my place and had some beers. Law, and the hope of silence and order, had been established on our wing.

  NOVEMBER

  Fred Fine was trying to decide whether to lob his last tactical nuke into Novosibirsk or Tomsk when a frantic plebe bounced up and interrupted the simulation with a Priority Five message. Of course it was Priority Five; how else could a plebe have dared interrupt Fred Fine’s march to the Ob’?

  “Fred, sir,” he gasped. “Come quick, you won’t believe it.”

  “What’s the situation?”

  “That new guy. He’s about to win World War II!”

  “He is? But I thought he was playing the Axis!”

  Fred Fine brushed past the plebe and strode into the next room. In its center, two Ping-Pong tables had been pushed together to make room for the eight-piece World War II map. On one side stood the tall, aquiline Virgil Gabrielsen—the “new guy”—and on the other, Chip Dixon shifted from foot to foot and snapped his fingers incessantly. Because this was the first wargame Virgil had ever played, he was still only a Private, and held Plebe status. Chip Dixon, a Colonel, had been gaming for six years and was playing the Allies, for God’s sake! Usually the only thing at question in this game was how many Allied divisions the Axis could consume before Berlin inevitably fell.

  At the end of the map, where the lines of longitude theoretically converged to make the North Pole, Consuela Gorm, Referee, sat on a loveseat atop a sturdy table. On the small stand before her she riffled occasionally through the inch-thick rule book, punched away at her personal computer, made notes on scratch paper and peered down at Europe with a tiny pair of opera glasses. Surrounding the tables were twenty other gamers who had come to observe the carnage shortly after Virgil had V-2’d Birmingham into gravel. Many stood on chairs, using field glasses of their own, and one geek was tottering around the area on a pair of stilts, loudly and repeatedly joking that he was a Nazi spy satellite. The attention of all was focused on tens of thousands of little cardboard squares meticulously stacked on the hexagonally patterned playing field. The game had been on for nine and a half hours and Chip Dixon was obviously losing it fast, popping Cheetos into his mouth faster than he could grind them into paste with his hyperactive yellow molars, often gulping Diet Pepsi and hiccuping. Virgil was calm, surveying the board through half-closed eyes, hands behind back, lips slightly parted, wandering around in a world inside his head, oblivious to the surrounding nerds. A hell of a warrior, thought Fred Fine, and this only his first game!

  “Here comes the Commander,” shouted the guy on stilts as he rounded the Japanese-occupied Aleutians, and the observers’ circle parted so Fred Fine could enter. Chip Dixon blushed vividly and looked away, moving his lips as he cursed to himself. “Very interesting,” said Fred Fine.

  Great stacks of red cardboard squares surrounded Stalingrad and Moscow, which were protected only by pitiable little heaps of green squares. In Normandy an enormous Nazi tank force was hurling the D-Day invasion back into the Channel so forcefully that Fred Fine could almost hear the howl of the Werfers and see the bodies fall screaming into the scarlet brine. In Holland, a Nazi amphibious force made ready to assault Britain. In front of Virgil, lined up on the edge of the table as trophies, sat the four Iowa-class battleships, the Hornet, and other major ships of the American navy.

  Chip Dixon was increasingly manic, his blood pressure pumped to the hemhorrage point by massive overdoses of salt and Diet Pepsi, his thirst insatiable because of the nearly empty Jumbo Pak of Cheetos. Sweat dripped from his brow and fell like acid rain on Scandinavia. He bent over and tried to move a stack of recently mobilized Russians toward Moscow, but as he shoved one point of his tweezers under the stack he hiccupped violently and ended up scattering them all over the Ukraine. “Shit!” he screamed, dashing a Cheeto to the floor. “I’m sorry, Consuela, I forget which hex it was on.”

  Consuela did not react for several seconds, and the reflection of the rule book in her glasses gave her an ominous, inscrutable look. Everyone was still and apprehensive. “Okay,” she said in soft, level tones, “that unit got lost in the woods and can’t find its way out for another turn.”

  “Wait!” yelled Chip Dixon. “That’s not in the Rules!”

  “It’s okay,” said Virgil patiently. “That stack contained units A2567, A2668, A4002, and I26789, and was on hex number 1,254.908. However, unit A2567 clashed with Axis A1009 last turn, so has only half movement this turn—three hexes.”

  Cowed, Chip Dixon breathed deeply (Fred Fine’s suggestion) and reassembled the stack. Unit A2567 was left far behind to deal with a unit of about twenty King Tiger Tanks which was blasting unopposed up the Dniepr. Chip Dixon then straightened up and thought for about five minutes, ruffling through his notes for a misplaced page. Consuela made a gradated series of noises intended to convey rising impatience. “Listen, Chip, you’re already way over the time limit. Done?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Any engagements?”

  “No, not this turn. But wait ’til you see what’s coming.”

  “Okay, Virgil, your turn.”

  Virgil reached out with a long probe and quickly shoved stacks of cardboard from place to place; from time to time a move would generate a gasp from the crowd. He then ticked off a list of engagements, giving Consuela data on what each stack contained, what its combat strength was, when it had last fought and so forth. When it was over, an hour later, there was long applause from the membership of MARS. Chip Dixon had sunk to the floor to sulk over a tepid Cola.

  “Incredible,” someone yelled, “you conquered Stalingrad and Moscow and defeated D-Day and landed in Scotland and Argentina all at the same time!”

  At this point Chip Dixon, who had refused to concede, stood up and blew most of the little cardboard squares away in a blizzard of military might. Fred Fine was angry but controlled. “Chip, ten demerits for that. I ought to bust you down to Second Looie for that display. Just for that, you get to put the game away. And organize it right.” Chastened, Chip and two of his admirers set about sorting all of the pieces of cardboard and fitting them into the appropriate recesses in the injection-molded World War II carrying case. Fred Fine turned his attention to Virgil.

  “A tremendous victory.” He drew his fencing foil and tapped Virgil once on each shoulder as Virgil looked on skeptically. “I name you a Colonel in MARS. It’s quite a jump, but a battlefield commission is obviously in order.”

  “Oh, not really,” said Virgil, bored. “It’s more a matter of a good memory than anything else.”

  “You’re modest. I like that in a man.”

  “No, just accurate. I like that.”

  Fred Fine now drew Virgil aside, away from the dozen or so wargame aficionados who were still gaping at one another and pounding their heads dramatically on the walls. The massively corpulent Consuela was helped down from her eleven-hour perch by several straining MARS officials, and began to roll toward them like a globule of quicksilver.

  “Virgil,” said Fred Fine quietly, “you’re obviously a special kind of man. We need men like you for our advanced games. These board games are actually somewhat repetitive, as you pointed out. Want a little more excitement next time?”

  Virgil
drew away. “What do you have in mind?”

  “You’ve heard of Dungeons and Dragons?” A gleam came to Fred Fine’s eye, and he glanced conspiratorially at Consuela.

  “Sure. Someone designs a hypothetical dungeon on graph paper, puts different monsters and treasure in the rooms, and each player has a character which he sends through it, trying to take as much treasure as possible. Right?”

  “Oh, only in its crudest, simplest forms, Virgil,” said Consuela.

  “This one and his friends prefer a more active version.”

  “Sewers and Serpents,” said Consuela, nodding happily.

  “The idea is the same as D & D, but we use a real place, and real costumes, and act it all out. Much more realistic. You see, beneath the Plex is a network of sewer tunnels.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Virgil. “I’ve got the blueprints for this place memorized, remember.”

  Fred Fine was taken aback. “How?”

  “Computer drew them for me.”

  “Well, we’d have to give you a character who had some good reason for knowing his way around the tunnels.”

  “Like maybe, uh,” said Consuela, eyes rolled up, “maybe he happened to see a duel between some hero who had just come out of the Dungeon of Plexor”—

  “That’s what we call the tunnels,” said Fred Fine.

  —“and some powerful nonsentient beast such as a gronth, and the gronth killed the hero, and then Virgil’s character came and found a map on his body and memorized it.”

  “Or we could make him a computer expert in Techno-Plexor who got a peek at the plans the same way Virgil did.”