The Big U

by Neal Stephenson

  This clearly meant a lot to him, and I did not say “So? Write up some new ones!” For him, apparently, it was a fatal blow.

  “You see,” he continued, sounding stronger now that his secret was out. “Ahem. There is in my field a large corpus of basic knowledge, absolutely fundamental. It must be learned by any new student, which is why it appears in my courses and so forth. I, er, I’ve forgotten it entirely. Somehow. With my engagements and editorial positions, conferences, trips, consultations, et cetera, and of course all my writing—well, there’s simply no room for trivia. So if I am hired away by another university and asked to teach, or some dreadful thing—you can imagine my embarrassment.”

  I was embarrassed myself, remembering now a snatch of overheard conversation among three grad students, one of whom referred contemptuously to “Emeritus Home-free Etcetera,” who apparently was making him do a great deal of pointless research, check out books for him and pay the fines, put money in his parking meters and so on. If that was Forthcoming’s style, I could understand what this break in routine would do to his career. He was only a scholar when there was a university to say he was.

  A distant machine-gun blast echoed down the hallway. “Mr. Forthcoming,” I said firmly. “I’d like to help you out, but for the moment it’s not possible. I guess what I’m trying to say is…let’s get the hell out of here!”

  He wouldn’t move.

  “Look. Maybe if we get down to a safe place, we can see about getting your lecture notes back.”

  He looked up with such relief and hope that I wanted to spit. My unfortunate statement had given him new life. He stood up shakily, began to chatter happily and set about packing pipes and manuscripts into his briefcase.

  As ever, the Burrows were calm. The GASF guards let us past the border after quick checks over their intercoms, and we were suddenly in a place unchanged since the days of old, where students roamed the hallways wild and free and research and classes continued obliviously. Most of the Burrows folk regarded the entire war/riot as a challenge for their ingenuity, and those who had not been sucked into Fred Fine’s vortex of fantasy and paranoia set about preserving the ancient comforts with the enthusiasm of Boy Scouts lost in the woods.

  The Science Shop was an autonomous dependency of Fred Fine’s United Pure Plexorian Realm, and the hallway that led there was guarded, mostly symbolically, by Zap with his sawed-off shotgun and his favorite blunt instrument. He waved us through and we came to our haven for the war.

  The vacuum of authority that filled the Plex for the first two weeks of April resulted from events in the Nuke Dump. The occupying terrorists warned that any attempt by authorities to approach the building would be met by the release of radioactive poisons into the city. The city police who ringed the Plex late on April First had no idea of how to deal with such a threat and called the Feds. The National Guard showed up a day later with armored personnel carriers, helicopters and tanks, but they, too, kept their distance. The Crotobaltislavonians had obviously intended to establish their own martial law in the Plex, enforcing it through their SUB proxies and the SUB’s Terrorist proxies. But the blocked elevator shaft and the giant rats made their authority tenuous, and unbelievably fierce resistance from GASF and TUG kept the SUB/Terrorist Axis from seizing any more than E and F Towers. Instead of National Guard authority or Crotobaltislavonian authority, we ended up with no central authority at all.

  The Towers were held by the best-armed groups. The Axis held E and F, the GASF held D, the administration anti-Terrorist squads B and C, and TUG held A, H, and G, prompting Hyacinth to remark that if this were tic-tac-toe the TUG would have won. The towers were easy to hold because access was limited; if you blocked shut the four outer fire stairs of each wing, you could control the only entrances to the tower with a handful of soldiers in the sixth-floor lobby. The base of the Plex was a bewildering 3-D labyrinth. Here things were much less stable as several groups struggled for control of useful ground, such as bathrooms, strategic stairways, rooms with windows and so forth. Many of these were factions that had split away from the Terrorists, finding the strict hierarchy and tight restrictions intolerable. Other important groups were made up of inner-city financial-aid students, who at least knew how to take care of themselves; one gang of small-towners from the Great Plains, also adept at mass violence; the hockey-wrestling coalition; and the Explorer post, which had a large interlocking membership with the ROTC students.

  Those who were not equipped or inclined to fight fared poorly. Most ended up trapped in the towers for the duration, where all they could do was watch TV and reproduce. Escape from the Plex was impossible, because the nuclear Terrorists allowed no one to approach it, and snipers in the Axis towers made perilous the dash from the Main Entrance. Those who could not make it to the safety of a tower were not wanted by the bands of fighters in the Base, and so had to wander as refugees, most ending up in the Library. It was a very, very bad time to be an unescorted woman. We tried to make raids against weaker bands in order to rescue some of these unfortunates, but only retrieved thirty or so.

  Fire in the Plex was not the problem it had been feared to be. The plumbing still worked reasonably well and most people had enough sense to use the fire hoses. Many areas were smoky for days, though, to the point of being hostile to life, and bands driven from their own countries by smoke accounted for a good deal of the fighting. The food problem was minor because the Red Cross was allowed to distribute it in the building. Unfortunately there was no way to remove garbage, so it piled up in lobbies and stairwells and elevator shafts. Insects, invading through windows that had been broken out or removed to vent smoke, grew fruitful and multiplied; but this plague then abated, as the bat population swelled enormously to take advantage of the explosion in their food supply. By the end of the crisis, the top five floors of E Tower had been evacuated to make room for bats, who were moving down the tower at the rate of one floor every three days.

  There were stable areas where well-armed people settled in and organized themselves. The Burrows were exceptionally stable, brilliantly organized by Fred Fine, and Virgil’s Science Shop was an enclave of stability within that. About twenty people lived in the Shop; we slept on floors and work-benches, and cooked communally on lab burners. Fred Fine allowed us this autonomy for one reason: Shekondar the Fearsome/JANUS 64 had selected Virgil as his sole prophet.

  Of course it was not really so simple. It was actually the Worm, and Virgil’s countermeasures. As Virgil explained it, he had signed on to his terminal on March 31 to find a message waiting:

  WELL MET WORM-HUNTING MERCENARY. YOU ARE ADEPT. LET US HOPE YOU ARE WELL PAID. SO FAR I HAVE ONLY FLEXED MY MUSCLES. NOW BEGINS THE DUEL.

  The next day, of course, civilization had fallen. As soon as Virgil had been sure of this, he had signed on to find that his terminal had been locked out of the system by the Worm. This he had anticipated, and so he calmly proceeded to the Operator’s Station, ejected Consuela and signed on there under a fake ID. Virgil had then commandeered six tape drives (to the dismay of the hackers who were using them) and mounted six tapes he had prepared for this day. He went to the Terminal Room, where sat hundreds of terminals in individual carrels. Here Virgil signed on to eighteen terminals at once, using fake accounts and passwords he had been keeping in reserve. On each terminal he set in motion a different program—using information stored on the six special tapes. Each of these programs looked like a rather long but basically routine student effort, the sort of thing the Worm had long since stopped trifling with. But each did contain lengthy sections of machine code that had no relevance to the program proper.

  Virgil returned to the Operator’s Station and entered a single command. Its effect was to draw together the reins of the eighteen sham programs, to lift out, as it were, all those long machine code sections and interleave them into one huge powerful program that seemed to coalesce out of nowhere, having already penetrated the Worm’s locks and defenses. This monster program, then, had
calmly proceeded to wipe out all administrative memory and all student and academic software, and then to restructure the Operator to suit Virgil’s purposes. It all went—payroll records, library overdues, video-game programs. From the computer’s point of view, American Megaversity ceased to exist in the time it took for a micro-transistor to flip from one state to the other.

  A mortal wound for the university, but the university was already mortally wounded. This was the only way to prevent the Worm from seizing the entire computer within the next week or so. Virgil’s insight had been that although the Worm had been designed to take into account any conceivable action on the Computing Center’s part, it had not anticipated the possibility that someone might destroy all the records and dismantle the Operator simply to fight the Worm.

  The Worm’s message to Virgil had been the key: it had identified him as an employee of the Computing Center, a hired hit man. That was not an unreasonable assumption, considering Virgil’s power. But it was wrong anyway, proving that the Worm could only take into account reasonably predictable events. The downfall of the university wasn’t predictable, at least not to sociopath Paul Bennett, so he hadn’t foreseen that anyone would take Virgil’s pyrrhic approach.

  Virgil now had enough processing power to run a large airline or a small developing country. The Worm could only loop back and start over and try to retake what it had lost, and this time against a much more formidable foe. So on hummed the CPU of the Janus 64, spending one picosecond performing a task for the Worm, the next a task for Virgil. The opponents met and mingled on the central chip of the CPU, which evenhandedly did the work of both at once, impassively computing out its own fate. Fred Fine noticed that no one could sign on now except Virgil, and concluded the obvious: Virgil was the Prophet of Shekondar, the Mage.

  So we saw little of Virgil, who had absorbed himself completely in the computer, who mumbled in machine language as he stirred his soup and spent fifteen hours a day sitting alone before the black triangular obelisk staring at endless columns of numbers.

  Sarah, Hyacinth, Lucy and friends showed up late in the evening of the First, giddy and triumphant, and we had a delighted reunion. Ephraim Klein showed up at five in the morning bleeding from many small birdshot wounds, moving with incredible endurance for such a small, unhealthy-looking person. After establishing that the shot in his legs was steel, not lead, we sent him to Nirvana on laughing gas and generic beer and sucked out the balls with a large electromagnet. Casimir turned up suddenly, late on April second, slipping in so quietly that he seemed just to beam down. He dumped a load of clothing and sporting gear on a bench and set to work in a white creative heat we did not care to disturb.

  “I told you,” Ephraim said to Sarah, as he recovered. “We should blow this place up. Look what’s happened.”

  “Yeah,” said Sarah, “it’s a bad situation.”

  “Bad situation! A fucking war! How many other universities do you know where a civil war closes off the academic year?”

  Sarah shrugged. “Not too many.”

  “So why do you think we’re having one? These people are a totally normal cross-section of the population, caught in a giant building that drives them crazy.”

  “Okay. Lie down and stop moving around so much, okay?” She wandered around the shop watching a goggled Casimir slice into a fencing mask with a plate grinder. In one corner, Hyacinth was teaching the joys of bunsen-burner cuisine to a small child who had been caught up in the fighting and sent down here by grace of the Red Cross. Sarah suddenly walked back to Ephraim.

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “It’s nothing to do with the Plex. What people do isn’t determined by where they live. It happens to be their damned fault. They decided to watch TV instead of thinking when they were in high school. They decided to take blow-off courses and drink beer instead of reading and trying to learn something. They decided to chicken out and be intolerant bastards instead of being openminded, and finally they decided to go along with their buddies and do things that were terribly wrong when there was no reason they had to. Anyone who hurts someone else decides to hurt them, goes out of their way to do it.”

  “But the pressures! The social pressures here are irresistible. How…”

  “I resisted them. You resisted them. The fact that it’s hard to be a good person doesn’t excuse going along and being an asshole. If they can’t overcome their own fear of being unusual, it’s not my fault, because any idiot ought to be able to see that if he just acts reasonably and makes a point of not hurting others, he’ll be happier.”

  “You don’t even have to try to hurt people here. The place forces it on you. You can’t sit up in bed without waking up your goddamn neighbor. You can’t take a shower without sucking off the hot water and freezing the next one down. You can’t go to eat without making the people behind you wait a little longer, and even by eating the food you increase the amount they have to make, and decrease the quality.”

  “That’s all crap! That’s the way life is, Ephraim. It has nothing to do with the architecture of the Plex.”

  “Look at the sexism in this place. Doesn’t that ever bother you? Don’t you think that if people weren’t so packed together in this space, the bars and the parties wouldn’t be such meat markets? Maybe there would be fewer rapes if we could teach people how to get along with the other sex.”

  “If you want to prevent rapes, you should make a justice system that protects our right not to be raped. Education? How do you pull off that kind of education? How do you design a rape-proof dorm? Look, Ephraim, all we can do is protect people’s rights. We wouldn’t get a change in attitude by moving to another building. The education you’re talking about is just a pipe dream.”

  “I still think we should blow this fucker up.”

  “Good. Work on it. In the meantime I’ll continue to carry a gun.”

  Professor Forthcoming, or “Emeritus” as Hyacinth called him, followed me around a great deal, jabbering about his lecture notes, prodding my latissimus muscles and marveling at how easy it would be for me, a former first-string college nose guard with a gun, to rescue them from the Library. I did not have the heart to discourage him. In the end, all I could do was make sure he paid for it: made him promise that he would sit down and study those notes so that he could rewrite them if he had to. He promised unashamedly, but by the time we organized the quest he was already looking forward to a conference in Monaco in the fall, and listening to the casualty reports on the radio to hear if any of his key grad students had been greased.

  No, said Fred Fine, the APPASMU was not available for raids on the Library. But we could have some soldiers and one AK-47, on the condition that, given the choice between abandoning the quest and abandoning the assault rifle, we would abandon the quest. I loudly agreed to this before Emeritus could sputter any disagreements. Our party was me, Hyacinth, Emeritus, four GASF soldiers and the Science Shop technician Lute. Sarah stayed behind reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

  Our route took us through fairly stable academic blocs, and other areas controlled by gangs. We could not avoid passing through the area controlled by Hansen’s Gang, the small-towners of the Great Plains. They were not well armed, but neither was anyone else in the base, and they had jumped into the fray with the glee of any rural in an informal blunt-instruments fight and come out winners. This was their idiom. Our negotiations with their leader were straightforward: we showed them our AK-47 and offered not to massacre them if they let us pass without hassle. Their leader had no trouble grasping this, but many of the members seemed to have a bizarre mental block: they could not see the AK-47 in Hyacinth’s hands. All they saw was Hyacinth, the first clean healthy female they had seen in a week, and they came after her as though she were unarmed. “Hey! She’s mine!” yelled one of these as we entered their largest common area.

  “Fuck you,” said another, swinging a motorcycle chain past his brother’s eyes at high speed. He turned a
nd began to trudge toward Hyacinth, hitching up his pants. “Hey, bitch, I’m gonna breed you,” he said cheerfully. Hyacinth aimed the gun at him; he looked at her face. She pulled the bolt into firing position and squared off; he kept coming. When I stepped forward he brandished his chain, then changed course as Hyacinth stepped out from behind me.

  “Go for it,” and “All right, for sure, Combine,” yelled his pals.

  “Hyacinth, please don’t do that,” I said, plugging my ears. She fired off half a clip in one burst and pulverized a few square feet of cinderblock wall right next to the man’s head. The lights went out as a power cable was severed. Courtesy of a window, we could still see.

  “Shit, what the fuck?” someone inquired.

  Rather than trying to explain, we proceeded from the room. “I like that bitch,” someone said as we were leaving, “but she’s weird. I dunno what’s wrong with her.”

  The Mailroom was an armistice zone between Hansen’s Gang and the Journalism Department. The elevators here descended to the mail docks, making this one of the few ports of entry to the Plex. The publicity-minded Crotobaltislavonians had worked out an agreement with one of the networks—you know which, if you watched any news in this period—allowing the camera crews to come and go through this room. The network’s hired guards all toted machine guns. We counted twenty automatic weapons in this room alone, which probably meant that the network had the entire Axis outgunned.

  In exchange for a brief interview, which was never aired, and for all the information we could provide about other parts of the Plex, we were allowed into the Journalism bloc. Here we picked up a three-man minicam crew who followed along for a while. Emeritus was magnificently embarrassed and insisted on walking behind the camera. One of the crew was an AM student, and I talked to him about the network’s operations.