The Big U

by Neal Stephenson

  “You’ve got a hell of a lot of firepower. You guys are the most powerful force in the Plex. How are you using it?”

  The student shrugged. “What do you mean? We protect our crews and equipment. All the barbarians are afraid of us.”

  “Right, obviously,” I said. “But I noticed recently that a lot of people around here are starving, being raped, murdered—you know, a lot of bum-out stuff. Do those guards try to help out? You can spare a few.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” he said uncomfortably. “That’s kind of network-level policy. It goes against the agreement. We can go anywhere as long as we don’t interfere. If we interfere, no agreement.”

  “But if you’ve already negotiated one agreement, can’t you do more? Get some doctors into the building, maybe?”

  “No way, man. No fucking way. We journalists have ethics.”

  The camera crew turned back when we reached the border of the Geoanthropological Planning Science Department, a bloc with only two entrances. My office was here, and I hoped I could get us through to the other side. The heavy door was bullet-pocked, the lock had been shot at more than once, but it was blocked from the other side and we could hear a guard beyond. Nearby, in an alcove, under a pair of drinking fountains, stretched out straight and dead on the floor, was a middle-aged faculty member, his big stoneware coffee mug still clenched in his cold stiff fingers. He had apparently died of natural causes.

  As it turned out, the guard was a grad student I knew, who let us in. He was tired and dirty, with several bandages, a bearded face, bleary red eyes and matted hair—just as he had always looked. Three other grads sat there in the reception room reading two-year-old U.S. News and World Reports and chomping hunks of beef jerky.

  While my friends took a breather, I stopped by my office and checked my mailbox. On the way back I peeked into the Faculty Lounge.

  The entire Geoanthropological Planning Science faculty was there, sitting around the big conference table, while a few favored grad students stood back against the walls. Several bowls of potato chips were scattered over the table and at least two kegs were active. The room was dark; they were having a slide show.

  “Whoops! Looks like I tilted the camera again on this one,” said Professor Longwood sheepishly, nearly drowned out by derisive whoops from the crowd. “How did this get in here? This is part of the Labrador tundra series. Anyway, it’s not a bad shot, though I used the wrong film, which is why everything’s pink. That corkscrew next to the caribou scat gives you some idea of scale—” but my opening the door had spilled light onto the image, and everyone turned around to look at me.

  “Bud!” cried the Chair. “Glad you could make it! Want some beer? It’s dark beer.”

  “Sounds good,” I said truthfully, “but just stopping in.”

  “How are things?” asked Professor Longwood.

  “Fine, fine. I see you’re all doing well too. Have you been outside much? I mean, in the Plex?”

  There was bawdy laughter and everyone looked at a sheepish junior faculty member, a heavyset man from Upper Michigan. “Bert here went out to shoot some slides,” explained the Chair, “and ran into some of those hayseeds. He told them he was a journalist and they backed off, but then they saw he didn’t have a press pass, so he had to kick one of them in the nuts and give the other his camera!”

  “Don’t feel bad, Bert,” said a mustachioed man nearby. “We’ll get a grant and buy you a new one.” We all laughed.

  “So you’re here for the duration?” I asked.

  “Shouldn’t last very long,” said a heavily bearded professor who was puffing on a pipe. “We are working up a model to see how long the food needs of the population can last. We’re using survival ratios from the 1782 Bulgarian famine—actually quite similar to this situation. We’re having a hell of a time getting data, but the model says it shouldn’t last more than a week. As for us, we’ve got an absolute regional monopoly on beer, which we trade with the Journalism people for food.”

  “Have you taken into account the rats and bats?” I asked.

  “Huh? Where?” The room was suddenly still.

  “We’ve got giant rats downstairs, and billions of bats upstairs. The rats are this long. Eighty to a hundred pounds. No hearts. I hear they’ve worked their way up to the lower sublevels now, and they’re climbing up through the stacks of garbage in the elevator shafts.”

  “Shit!” cried Bert, beating his fists wildly on the table. “What a time to lose my fucking camera!”

  “Let’s catch one,” said his biologist wife.

  “Well, we could adjust the model to account for exogenous factors,” said the bearded modeler.

  “We’d have people eating rats, and rats eating people,” said the mustachioed one.

  “And rats eating bats.”

  “And bats eating bugs eating dead rats.”

  “The way to account for all that is with a standard input/output matrix,” said the Chair commandingly.

  “These rats sound similar to wolverines,” said Longwood, cycling through the next few slides. “I think I have some wolverine scats a few slides ahead, if this is the series I think it is.”

  Seeing that they had split into a slide and a modeling faction, I stepped out. A few minutes later we were back on the road.

  We were attacked by a hopeless twit who was trying to use a shotgun like a long-range rifle. I was nicked in the cheek by one ball. Hyacinth splashed him all over a piece of abstract sculpture made of welded-together lawn ornaments. The GASFers, who were humiliated that a female should carry the big gun, were looking as though they’d never have another erection.

  We passed briefly through the Premed Center, which was filled with pale mutated undergrads dissecting war casualties and trying to gross each other out. I yelled at them to get outside and assist the wounded, but received mostly blank stares. “We can’t,” said one of them, scandalized, “we’re not even in med school yet.”

  From here we entered the Medical Library, and from there, the Library proper.

  Huge and difficult to guard, the Library was the land of the refugees. It had no desirable resources, but was a fine place in which to hide because the bookshelves divided into thousands of crannies. Waves of refugees made their way here and holed up, piling books into forts and rarely venturing out.

  The first floor was unguarded and sparsely occupied. We stuck to the open areas and proceeded to the second floor.

  Here was a pleasant surprise. An organized relief effort had been formed, mostly by students in Nursing, Classics, History, Languages and Phys. Ed. By trading simple medical services to the barbarians they had obtained enough guns to guard the place. An incoming refugee would be checked out by a senior Nursing major or occasional premed volunteer, then given a place in the stacks—“your place is DG 311 1851 and its vicinity”—and so on. Most of the stragglers could then hide out between bulletproof walls of paper, while the seriously wounded could be lowered out the windows to the Red Cross people below. In the same way, food, supplies and brave doctors could be hoisted into the Plex. The atmosphere was remarkably quiet and humane, and all seemed in good humor.

  The rest of our journey was uneventful. We climbed to the fourth floor and wended our way toward Emeritus’ study. Soon we could smell smoke, and see it hanging in front of the lights. To the relief of Emeritus, it came not from his office but from the open door of the one labeled “Embers, Archibald.”

  Three men and a woman, all unarmed, sat around a small fire, occasionally throwing on another book. They had broken out the window to vent the smoke.

  The woman shrieked as I appeared in the door. “Jesus! If I had a gun, you’d be dead now. I react so uncontrollably.”

  “Good thing you don’t,” I observed.

  “It’s really none of your business,” intoned a thin, pale man. “But I suppose that since you have that wretched gun, you’re going to have us do what you want. Well, we don’t have anything you could want here. And forge
t about Zelda here. She’s a lousy lay.”

  Zelda shrieked in amusement. “It’s a good thing you’re witty when you’re a bastard, Terence, or I’d despise you.”

  “Oh, do go ahead. I adore being despised. I really do. It’s so inspiring.”

  “Society despises the artist,” said Embers, lighting a Dunhill in the bookfire, “unless he panders to the masses. But society treats the artist civilly so he can’t select specific targets for his hatred. Open personal hatred is so very honest.”

  “Now that’s meaningful, Arch,” said the other man, a brief lump with an uncertain goatee.

  “How come you’re burning books?” I asked.

  “Oh, that, well,” said Embers, “Terence wanted a fire.”

  Terence piped up again. “This whole event is so very like camping out, don’t you agree? Except without the dreadful ants and so forth. I thought a fire would be very—primal. But it smoked dreadfully, so we broke out the window, and now it’s very cold and we must keep it going ceaselessly, of course. Is that adequate? Is that against Library rules?”

  “We’ve been finding,” added Embers, “that older books are much better. They burn more slowly. And with their thin pages, Bibles and dictionaries are quite effective. I’m taking some notes.” He waved a legal pad at me.

  “Also,” added the small one, “old books are printed on acid-free paper, so we aren’t getting acid inside of our lungs.”

  “Why don’t you just cover the window and put it out?” I asked.

  “Aren’t we logical?” said Terence. “You people are all so tediously Western. We wanted a fire, you can’t take it away! What happened to academic freedom? Say, are you quite finished with your bloody suggestions? I’m trying to read one of my fictions to these people, Mr. Spock.”

  I followed my friends into Emeritus’ office. Behind me Terence resumed his reading. “The thin stream of boiling oil dribbled from the lip of the frying pan and seared into the boy’s white flesh. As he squirmed against the bonds that were holding him down, unable to move, it ran into the bed of thorny roses underneath him; the petals began to wither like a dying western sunset at dusk.”

  A minute or two later, as we exited with Emeritus’ papers, there was a patter of applause. “Ravishing, Terence. Quite frankly, it’s similar to Erasmus T. Bowlware’s Gulag Pederast. Especially the self-impalement of the heroine on the electric fencepost of the concentration camp as she is driven into a frenzy by psychic emanations from the possessed child in the nearby mansion where the defrocked epileptic priest gives up his life in order to get the high-technology secrets to the Jewish commandos. I do like it.”

  “When do I get to read my fiction?” asked Zelda.

  “Is this from the novel about the female writer who is struggling to write a novel about a woman writer who is writing a novel about a woman artist in Nazi Germany with a possessed daughter?” asked Embers.

  “Well, I decided to make her a liberated prostitute and psychic,” said Zelda; and that was the last I heard of the conversation, or of the people.

  We deposited Emeritus in the refugee camp on the second floor and made it back to the Science Shop in about an hour. There, Sarah and Casimir were deep in conversation, and Ephraim Klein was listening in.

  Casimir’s finished suit of armor used bulletproof fabric taken from a couple of associate deans. The administration was unhappy about that, but they could only get to Casimir by shooting their way through the Unified Pure Plexorian Realm. Underneath the fabric, Casimir wore various hard objects to protect his flesh from impact. On legs and knees he wore soccer shinguards and the anti-kneecapping armor favored by administration members. He wore a jockstrap with a plastic cup, and over his torso was a heavy, crude breastplate that he had endlessly and deafeningly hammered out of half a fifty-five gallon oil drum. Down his back he hung overlapping shingles of steel plate to protect his spine.

  His head was protected by a converted defensive lineman’s football helmet. He had cut the front out of a fencing mask and attached the wire mesh over the plastic bars of the helmet’s facemask. Over the earholes he placed a pair of shooter’s ear protectors. So that he would not overheat, he cut a hole in the back of the helmet and ran a flexible hose to it. The other end of the hose he connected to a battery-powered blower hung on his belt, and to get maximum cooling benefit he shaved his head. The helmet as a whole was draped with bulletproof fabric which hung down a foot on all sides to cover the neck. And as someone happened to notice, he took his snapshot of Sarah and Hyacinth and taped it to the inside of the helmet with grey duct tape.

  When Casimir was in full battle garb, his only vulnerable points were feet, hands and eye-slit. Water could be had by sucking on a tube that ran down to a bicyclist’s water bottle on his belt. And it should not go unmentioned that Casimir, draped in thick creamy-white fabric, with blazing yellow and blue running shoes, topped with an enormous shrouded neckless head, a faceless dome with bulges over the ears and a glittering silver slit for the eyes, a sword from the Museum in hand, looked indescribably terrible and fearsome, and for the first time in his life people moved to the walls to avoid him when he walked down the hallways.

  It was a very smoke-filled room that Casimir ventilated by swinging in through the picture window on the end of a rope. Through the soft white tobacco haze, Oswald Heimlich saw his figure against the sky for an instant before it burst into the room and did a helpless triple somersault across the glossy parquet floor. Heimlich was already on his feet, snatching up his $4,000 engraved twelve-gauge shotgun and flicking off the safety. As the intruder staggered to his feet, Heimlich sighted over the head of the Trustee across from him (who reacted instinctively by falling into the lap of the honorable former mayor) and fired two loads of .00 buckshot into this strange Tarzan’s lumpy abdomen. The intruder took a step back and remained standing as the shot plonked into his chest and clattered to the floor. Heimlich fired again with similar effects. By now the great carved door had burst open and five guards dispersed to strategic positions and pointed their UZIs at the suspicious visitor. S.S. Krupp watched keenly.

  The guards made the obligatory orders to freeze. He slowly reached around and began to draw a dueling sword from the Megaversity historical collections out of a plastic pipe scabbard. Tied to its handle was a white linen napkin with the AM coat of arms, which he waved suggestively.

  “I swear,” said S. S. Krupp, “don’t you have a phone, son?”

  No one laughed. These were white male Eastern businessmen, and they were serious. Heimlich in particular was not amused; this man looked very much like the radiation emergency workers who had been staggering through his nightmares for several nights running, and having him crash in out of a blue sky into a Board of Trustees meeting was not a healthy experience. He sat there with his eyes closed for several moments as waiters scurried in to sweep up the broken glass.

  “I’ll bet you want to do a little negotiating,” said Krupp, annoyingly relaxed. “Who’re you with?”

  “I owe allegiance to no man,” came the muffled voice from behind the mask, “but come on behalf of all.”

  “Well, that’s good! That’s a fine attitude,” said Krupp. “Set yourself down and we’ll see what we can do.”

  The intruder took an empty chair, laid his sword on the table and peeled off his hood of fabric to reveal the meshed-over football helmet. A rush of forced air was exhaled from his facemask and floated loose sheets of paper down the table.

  “Why did you put a nuclear waste dump in the basement?”

  Everyone was surprised, if genteel, and they exchanged raised eyebrows for a while.

  “Maybe Ozzie can tell you about that,” suggested Krupp. “I was still in Wyoming at the time.”

  Heimlich scowled. “I won’t deny its existence. Our reasons for wanting it must be evident. Perhaps if I tell you its history, you’ll agree with us, whoever you are. Ahem. You may be aware that until recently we suffered from bad management at the presidential level
. We had several good presidents in the seventies, but then we got Tony Commodi, who was irresponsible—an absolute mongoloid when it came to finance—insisted on teaching several classes himself, and so forth. He raised salaries while keeping tuition far too low. People became accustomed to it. At this time we Trustees were widely dispersed and made no effort to lead the university. Finally we were nearly bankrupt. Commodi was forced to resign by faculty and Trustees and was replaced by Pertinax Rushforth, who in those days was quite the renascence man, and widely respected. We Trustees were still faced with impossible financial problems, but we found that if we sold all the old campus—hundreds of acres of prime inner-city real estate—we could pull in enough capital to build something like the Plex on the nine blocks we retained. But of course the demographics made it clear that times would be very rough in the years to come. We could not compete for students, and so we had to run a very tight ship and seek innovative sources for our operating funds. We could have entered many small ventures—high technology spinoffs, you see—but this would have been extraordinarily complex, highly controversial and unpredictable, besides raising questions about the proper function of the university.

  “It was then that we hit upon the nuclear waste idea. Here is something that is not dependent on the economy; we will always have these wastes to dispose of. It’s highly profitable, as there is a desperate demand for disposal facilities. The wastes must be stored for millennia, which means that they are money in the bank—the government, whatever form it takes, must continue to pay us until their danger has died away. And by its very nature it must be done secretly, so no controversy is generated, no discord disrupts the normal functions of the academy—there need be no relationship between the financial foundation and the intellectual activities of the university. It’s perfect.”

  “See, this city is on a real stable salt-dome area,” added a heavy man in an enormous grey suit, “and now that there’s no more crude down there, it’s suitable for this kind of storage.”