Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  Bonnie was giving him an odd look.

  He smiled and nodded at her, then rapped on the door. Then he opened it.

  “Frank and Lenny,” he said. “According to my map, Moab is approximately the same distance from where we are now as San Jose. Therefore, we ought to have enough fuel on board to fly to Moab. I would like to file a new flight plan and go to Moab.”

  They looked at him like he was crazy. As he’d known they would. But the reality of it wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. It never was. The anticipation was always worse.

  “Moab, where the bomb went off?” asked Frank, who was the alpha pilot.

  “Yes. That Moab.”

  “I think that’s shut down,” said Lenny, the beta pilot. “I mean, the FAA won’t let us near there.”

  “Do you know that for a fact, Lenny, or is it just a reasonable surmise based on news and social media stuff?”

  Lenny looked to Frank.

  “Well, we haven’t actually contacted the FAA, if that’s what you mean,” Frank said.

  “I would like you to change course for Moab, and file the flight plan, and see what happens,” Corvallis said. “If the FAA won’t allow us to land there, maybe we can fly past it en route to somewhere farther away, and look down at it. All I really need is to see the town from above.”

  Frank and Lenny looked at each other. Frank nodded.

  “I’ll get on it, boss,” said Lenny.

  “Okay. Let me know how it goes. I’m really interested to hear any particulars about how the FAA behaves when you run this by them.”

  Corvallis got back to his laptop, and its live Miasmic news feeds, in time to see a big military chopper lifting off from the roof of that casino in Las Vegas. Dangling below it was something that looked heavy. It flew off in the direction of the nearby air force base, which was described as a top secret facility that had once been used for nuclear weapons testing. The all-clear was sounded in Vegas. But immediately it was swamped, on the news feeds, by reports of a precisely similar incident taking shape on the top floor of a skinny residential tower under construction in midtown Manhattan. This had to duel for airtime with shocking new footage just coming in from Moab, where, for the first time since it had all started, we were now seeing photos of horribly burned victims, and shaky video of their being unloaded from medical choppers. From outside the cordon, downwind of Moab, bloggers on horseback and all-terrain vehicles were now reporting elevated radiation levels. The mainstream media were ignoring, or actively suppressing, these reports, presumably because the government had admonished them not to spread panic. But social media were more effective at spreading what passed for news and so it scarcely mattered.

  Someone had finally got close enough to Moab to do a flyover with a drone. They couldn’t get too close because of military units that were interdicting travel in the area, and also because they didn’t want to expose themselves to radiation, but they were able to transmit some footage of the ruined town. The low frame rate, the bricky pixels, the compression artifacts in the image, the tendency of the camera to be aimed in the wrong direction as it flew through smoke and dust, all contributed to a feeling of cinema verité that was beginning to strike his increasingly jaded eye as too good to be true.

  Keeping an eye on Lyke’s internal email system, Corvallis noticed that Jason Crabb was online. Jason was a systems administrator for Nubilant who had jumped to Lyke in the wake of the acquisition. It had given him a pretext for moving to the Bay Area, which he’d been wanting to do anyway, because of a complicated girlfriend situation. Corvallis clicked on the little video camera icon next to Jason’s name. After a minute or so of user interface fuckery, he found himself looking at a moving image of Jason, who was sitting in his girlfriend’s bed, propped up on a lot of pillows. The upward camera angle of his laptop made Jason’s beard huge and magnificent in a rufous shaft of morning sunlight. He did not greet Corvallis but just stared at him, alert and expectant. On a day such as this one, “C-plus” would not have taken the unusual step of initiating a video call unless it was important.

  “Suppose there’s a company in Moab with a website, or some other kind of Internet presence of any kind whatsoever for that matter,” Corvallis began.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s off the air now, let’s say.”

  “No shit!”

  “Okay, but pretend for a moment we don’t actually know why. There are two possible explanations for its being off the air. You need to get all Sherlock and figure out which is the truth.”

  “Okay—??”

  “Scenario one is that Moab got nuked and the wires, or the optical fibers, don’t even reach into town anymore, they are just dangling from a burning telegraph pole in the desert. Scenario two is that Moab is still there but the ISP that serves it is being crushed under a DDoS attack.” Meaning, as Jason would know, “distributed denial of service.” “Or for that matter any kind of remote hack that would shut it down for a while. Is there a way you could distinguish between those two scenarios without getting out of bed?”

  “I have to pee,” Jason said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Probably.”

  “Okay, please do that and get back to me,” Corvallis said, and disconnected.

  Lots more was happening in Manhattan now, on news and social media sites, on talk radio. The wave had not crested yet. If Corvallis were among the billions who actually believed that Moab had been nuked, he’d have been fully absorbed. As it was he found himself in a weirdly peaceful and calm state.

  “I called an audible,” Frank was saying to him.

  Corvallis looked up to see the pilot standing in the aisle, looking down at him. His brain slowly caught up. Calling an audible was some kind of sports-based metaphor. It meant that Frank had made a decision on his own—improvised in a way he hoped Corvallis would later approve of.

  “I filed a flight plan to El Paso.”

  “El Paso?”

  “It’ll take us near Moab. Near enough that we can look down on it like you said. But we’ll be at forty thousand feet—above the box.”

  “The box?”

  “The box of airspace around Moab where the FAA doesn’t want us to go.”

  “El Paso’s a lot farther away,” Corvallis pointed out.

  Frank nodded. “The only thing that’s a little sketchy about this is that we really don’t have that much fuel. I mean, we could stretch it, but we’d be in the red zone. So we’ll have to land somewhere else, short of El Paso.”

  “That’s okay,” Corvallis said, “everything will be different by then.”

  “It’s okay for you,” Frank said, “but it makes me look like a fucking idiot for filing a flight plan that doesn’t make sense fuel-wise.”

  “Just tell me who I need to talk to. I’ll take responsibility.” Corvallis generally didn’t like looking people in the eye, but from watching Dodge he knew that there were certain times when it was a deal-breaker. So he forced himself to look Frank in the eye. “I will personally take responsibility for this and I will get you off the hook.” Frank shrugged, raised his eyebrows, and went back to the cockpit.

  Corvallis had been thinking about a detail that had passed under his gaze while he’d been clicking around learning about Maeve Braden. He had to dig surprisingly deep into his browser history to find it. This was complicated by the fact that he had been checking her out both on the public Miasma and in Lyke’s secure file system. Eventually he tracked it down in the latter. It was the personal data record associated with her account—the result of her having filled out a form, years ago, when she’d joined Lyke, and having clicked the “submit” button. Which, come to think of it, was a pretty strange bit of semantics. But anyway, she had listed several telephone numbers, including one that began with “011,” which was the prefix for dialing international calls from the United States. He had already learned of her Australian background and so upon scanning this for the first time he’d made the obvious assumptio
n that it was an Oz number. But it wouldn’t make any particular sense for her to go to the trouble of entering such a number into her profile unless she was actually spending a lot of time in Australia.

  On a second look, the country code was 881, which wasn’t Australia; it was a special code used by satellite phones.

  Corvallis wasn’t hugely knowledgeable about sat phones, but he knew a couple of people who owned them, either just because they were geeks or because they did a lot of travel in places with no cell phone coverage. It seemed pretty obvious that Maeve was one of the latter. Her whole job was taking groups of tourists on trips deep into the canyons of the Colorado River, where cell phone use was out of the question. Of course Canyonlands Adventures would own sat phones, and of course they’d issue them to their guides.

  Whether she would keep the thing turned on, and within easy reach, was another question. For all he knew, it might have been turned off and buried in a waterproof bag at the bottom of a raft. But then it might get dumped overboard if the raft flipped—which was exactly the kind of situation where you’d need it. It would make more sense for the lead guide to carry it on her person.

  It was worth a go, anyway. Corvallis’s cell phone wouldn’t work on the plane, but he had pretty good Internet and he could make voice calls through his laptop. He plugged in his headphones for better audio, booted up the relevant app, and typed in the number. There was a long wait—much longer than for conventional calls.

  “Hell-low!?” said a woman. She sounded Australian, and pissed off that someone would call her. In the background it was possible to hear other people chattering and laughing. Corvallis visualized them on the raft, in a quiet stretch of the Colorado. He heard a splash and a kerplunk. Someone had jumped in for a swim.

  Just from this, Corvallis had already learned what he needed to know: that Moab had not been nuked. But it seemed only polite to explain himself. “Maeve, I’m sorry to bother you but this is important. You don’t know me. My name is Corvallis Kawasaki.”

  “As in the town of Corvallis? Oregon?”

  “Yes. You can Google me when you get home, I’m an executive at Lyke. The social media company.”

  “You work for Lyke?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there something going wrong with my account? Did I get hacked or something?” He liked the way she asked it. Her tone wasn’t apprehensive. It was more as if she would find it wryly amusing to have been hacked.

  “No. Your account is fine. Everything is fine where you’re concerned.”

  She laughed. “Then why are you calling me? To ask me out on a bloody date?”

  “That would be a violation of our confidentiality policies,” Corvallis responded. “This is about something else that you should probably be aware of.” And he went on to explain, as best as he could without taking all day, what had been happening. During this time, Maeve didn’t say much. It was a lot to take in. And for all of its complexity, for all of the millions of people on the Miasma who sincerely believed in its reality, it must have seemed ridiculous and dreamlike to her, gliding down the Colorado with her sun hat pulled down over her head and her paddle on her lap, looking at the ancient rocks, watching the Jones family gambol in the cool water.

  “At about five twenty this morning, you were still in or near Moab, right?”

  “I was at the office,” she said, “loading up the van.”

  “In downtown Moab.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you see anything like a bright flash in the sky?” He already knew the answer, but he had to ask.

  “No. There was no such thing.”

  “But the Internet had gone down.”

  “I’d got up at four thirty and it worked. Half an hour later it had crashed. Nothing.”

  “Did you try to use your cell phone at all?”

  “The Joneses did. They tried to ring me at five thirty, five forty, something like that. Nothing worked.”

  “Why’d they want to call you?”

  “To tell me they’d be late.”

  “But you met at the sandbar and got off without anything unusual happening.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the sandbar is, what, only a couple of miles outside of Moab?”

  “That’s right. Hang on.” The phone went shuffly/muffly. Corvallis heard enough snatches of Maeve’s voice to guess that she was trying to explain matters to her clients, who had overheard enough to be curious.

  “I’m here,” she assured him.

  “Maeve? There’s a lot more we could say to each other,” Corvallis said, “but I’m betting that the Joneses have friends and family who know they were in Moab this morning and who are frantic with worry right now. You should probably hang up and call them.”

  “Why haven’t they called already, I wonder?”

  “They probably don’t have the sat phone number. To get the sat phone number, they’d have to reach your main office, and . . .”

  “And all the comms are down, yeah. All right. How can I call you back, Corvallis?”

  He gave her his number, and she recited it back to him, using the quasi-military “niner” in place of “nine,” which he found unaccountably confidence inspiring. Then she hung up without formalities.

  While all of this had been going on, Jason Crabb had emailed him back to tell him what he already knew, namely that the communications blackout in Moab appeared to be the result of a conventional DDoS attack.

  Corvallis called Laurynas, his boss, the fifty-ninth-richest man in the world, who answered the phone with “Don’t sell any of your stock.”

  “Huh?”

  “After the stock market reopens, that is. Legal’s sending out a company-wide blast.”

  It took Corvallis a few seconds to catch up with the logic. “You know the Moab event is a hoax.”

  “Yeah. It is becoming increasingly obvious.”

  “You’re worried it’s going to be a bloodbath for our stock. Because so much of it is happening on our network. We look negligent. People will sue us.”

  “But for now that is insider knowledge, C, and if you sell any of your stock, you are insider trading.”

  “Got it.”

  “Where are you, man? Other than on a plane.”

  “Headed for Moab.”

  Laurynas laughed. Corvallis had the sense it was the first time he had laughed all day. “No shit?”

  “When I got suspicious I asked the pilots to plot a new course.”

  “That is awesome.” Laurynas was ten years younger than him. “You going to try to land at Moab?”

  “Probably not. No real plan yet.”

  “You’re just calling an audible. That. Is. Awesome!”

  “Thanks.”

  “When did you first get suspicious, C?”

  “At a subconscious level? It was all that shit about the Moabites.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “In the video from the terrorists, where they take responsibility for the attack?”

  “Yeah. It’s a pretty long sermon,” Laurynas said, a little defensively. “I didn’t have time to sit through the whole thing.”

  “He quotes a lot of Old Testament crap about the ancient Moabites and how they were apparently the bad guys. Born of incest or something.”

  “As if that justifies the attack on Moab, Utah.”

  “Yeah, and on one level I’m thinking it sounds like the usual convoluted jihad-think but at the same time I’m like, ‘Come on, man, you could have nuked any old town you chose, and most would be easier to reach than Moab.’ I mean, why even bother with a warning shot?”

  “They were trying too hard,” said Laurynas, getting it. “Piling on a lot of verbiage to explain why they picked that town.”

  “Yeah. As if they were worried that people would see through it. When the real reason’s obvious.”

  “Yeah. If they did a nuke hoax in Paterson, New Jersey, people in the next town over would just check it out with fucking binocul
ars and say, ‘Nope, still there.’ It had to be somewhere isolated.”

  “It’s the key to the whole plan,” Corvallis said.

  “Yeah, it sets up the red-eye flight, the truck driver, and the rest. These guys are good.”

  “So if I were you, with the resources you’ve got, I’d be digging into the fake footage, the burn victims . . .”

  “We found some metadata suggesting it came out of a Nollywood special effects house.”

  “You mean Bollywood?”

  “Nollywood. November. Not Bravo. Nigerian film industry. Huge.”

  “Jeez, why is it always Nigeria?”

  “It isn’t,” Laurynas said flatly. “This is classic misdirection. Whoever did this knows that, when it comes to light, people will focus way too much attention on the Nigeria angle.”

  “Well, so what do you want me to do?” Corvallis asked, after they had both sat there quietly pondering Nigeria for some moments.

  “Save the company.”

  “And how do you think I might achieve that?”

  “By getting to Moab before the president of the United States gets there. Or, barring that, soon.”

  “How does that save the company?”

  “When people understand that this is a hoax, burning feces are going to fall out of the sky and bury us to a depth of six Empire State Buildings,” Laurynas said. “The best we can do is spread the blame—point out that all the other networks got used in the same way. This becomes infinitely more effective if we can say, ‘And look, our dude C was on the ground in Moab before sundown, personally establishing the ground truth.’”

  Laurynas was a Lithuanian basketball prodigy who had attended Michigan on a scholarship and then wrong-footed everyone by turning out to be actually smart. He would answer to “Lawrence.” He had picked up American tech-bro speech pretty accurately, but his accent broke the surface when he was envisioning something that he thought would be awesome.