Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  “Before sundown?” Corvallis repeated.

  “That would be preferable. Darkness, video, not a good fit.” Laurynas was laughing as he hung up. He had the big man’s joviality when it came to the doings of small people.

  On a Miasma news feed, some scientists in white lab coats were giving a press conference in front of a backdrop covered with many copies of the logo and name of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Corvallis listened to it for a while. It was perfect. The actors portraying the scientists were well cast: There was the eminence grise who didn’t say much but who conveyed huge gravitas and authority when he did. The engaging young beard who did most of the talking and reminded you of your favorite science teacher who rode around campus on a recumbent bicycle. The demure, middle-aged, maternal, but still-kind-of-hot woman. The introverted Asian dude showing flashes of wry humor. Whoever had produced this counterfeit had completely nailed the sound: you could hear chairs scraping, shutters clicking, fingers pounding laptop keyboards, people’s cell phones going off, all conveying the sense that a hundred journalists were crammed into the room. The payload—the informational warhead on the tip of this social media rocket—was that they had performed isotopic analysis of fallout collected by volunteers downwind of Moab and confirmed that it matched the fingerprint of half a dozen Soviet-era suitcase nukes that had gone missing in Uzbekistan some years ago.

  Even as C-plus was admiring the quality of the pseudoscientific dialogue being spouted by these actors, the “news conference” was suddenly “shut down” as the room was invaded by a squad of beefy-looking guys in beards and wraparound sunglasses who looked like they had just stepped out of a casting call for a SEAL Team Six movie. Their leader’s face was visible only for a few frames as he reached out and swiped at the camera’s lens. The camera ended up on the floor, sideways, transmitting a close-up of a knocked-over Starbucks cup and some chair legs, with murky sound of the scientists protesting as they were hustled out of the room.

  A logo at the bottom of the screen claimed it was live on CNN. Which was by definition wrong, since Corvallis wasn’t actually watching it on CNN. He had found it on YouTube by clicking on a Twitter link in which some concerned citizen watchdog claimed that they had captured this sensational footage earlier on the live CNN feed and were just posting it for the benefit of the general population and that everyone should download it and copy it and post it everywhere before the government suppressed the news.

  Out of curiosity, Corvallis went over to CNN’s Twitter feed and found a tweet from twenty minutes ago insisting that the press conference footage on YouTube was not genuine CNN content, had never aired on CNN, and was some sort of hoax. It had already drawn thousands of angry and skeptical replies from people saying that CNN was obviously being controlled by deep-state actors.

  Temporarily at a loss for anything to do, Corvallis rewound the fake press conference video to a close-up of the woman scientist, took a screen grab of her face, and pasted it into Lyke’s face-recognition app. Within seconds he was reading the IMDb profile of this actress, a veteran of numerous television commercials and a few indie films. He didn’t waste his time repeating the experiment with the other members of the cast. Or for that matter with the scruffy young actor who had climbed off the red-eye earlier and released the mushroom cloud footage to the world. Or the truck driver in Utah. Or Larry Proctor, the blogger. It would be the same with all of them. And when the hoax was discovered and quashed, all of them would be tracked down by vengeful Miasma sleuths and all of them would probably tell a similar story: they had been recruited by a production company working on a low-budget indie thriller, they had gone to certain soundstages and recited certain lines. They and the production crew had all been paid in some untraceable way, through Bitcoin or whatever, and they’d moved on to the next job.

  A text came through from Laurynas: We found the people who made the mushroom cloud sim—a CGI house in the Philippines.

  He Googled Moab hoax and found a basically infinite amount of stuff already posted. Much of it was right for the wrong reasons. Ninety percent of it was about the bioweapon theory.

  These people—the people who had done this—were awesome. They knew that some people would see through the hoax and denounce it as such. Those skeptics couldn’t be silenced. But they could be drowned out. So, the hoaxers had inoculated the Miasma with a ready-made hoax narrative that was obviously ridiculous, and tailor-made to appeal to the vociferous citizens of Crazytown. Right now everyone’s uncle Harry—the angry truther at Thanksgiving dinner—was typing as fast as he could with the caps lock key in effect. If you were a member of the reality-based community who suspected that it was a hoax, you had to wade through a hundred zombie-related postings in order to find one that made sense, and wherever you went on the Miasma to argue for a skeptical and reasoned approach, you were lumped in with the zombie truthers, ridiculed and downvoted. As an example, he found a thread in which zombie truthers were being shouted down by people who had just seen the fake Los Alamos news conference on YouTube and were using it as evidence that Moab had been nuked by foreign terrorists, not by the United States government.

  Frank’s voice came through on the intercom. “Moab is under cloud cover.”

  Of course it was under cloud cover. Corvallis wondered if the authors of this hoax had waited for a cloudy day in Moab before pulling the trigger.

  He went up to the cockpit so that he could look out the windshield over the pilots’ shoulders. The weather was generally clear, but clouds were stuffed like cotton into low places in the landscape, including the valley of a prominent river that Corvallis assumed was the Colorado. No-fly zone or not, people could fly over Moab all day long and not be able to come back with a definitive answer as to whether it still existed.

  “We need to land,” Corvallis announced.

  “The Moab airport is closed,” Frank told him.

  Without thinking, Corvallis said what Dodge would have said: “I didn’t say anything about an airport. See if there’s an airstrip or a straight stretch of highway.”

  “Highway!?”

  “I might be able to contact someone who knows the area,” Corvallis said, and stepped out of the cockpit. His phone was ringing. Or rather, the app running on his laptop that did what a phone did, except over the Internet. He strode up the aisle and pivoted to look at the screen. A window had popped up, making him aware of an incoming call from an international number with an 881 area code.

  Corvallis fell in love with Maeve.

  It was another one of those transitions like being rear-ended and clubbed in the base of the skull by the headrest. To say that he wasn’t aware of it would’ve been wrong. It was palpable. But the part of his nervous system that had registered it was way down in the boiler room, as it were, sending out email alerts that would take a long time to make their way through the spam filters and middle-management layers of his brain. Weeks might pass before the meeting in which, sitting in the boardroom of his soul, Corvallis Kawasaki would be confronted by a PowerPoint slide, projected eight feet wide, announcing in no-nonsense sans-serif type, “IN LOVE WITH MAEVE.” What he had just experienced was more like the subtle click of a really well-engineered piece of machinery being snapped together.

  He plugged in his headphones and answered the call. “Maeve?”

  “This is all a bit surreal,” she announced. “The Joneses have been talking to their freaked-out relatives. They have a bloody lot of them. High-strung family I gather.”

  “So you kind of know what’s going on.”

  “I know what’s going on in their little minds,” she said. The same words spoken by a tech geek would have seemed impossibly arrogant, but from her came off as more affectionate/exasperated.

  Corvallis’s primary emotion was hopeful gratification over the fact that, right now, he was the only human in the world Maeve could talk to. It was beside the point and probably inappropriate. He was with other people, but basically alone in a private jet. Sh
e was with other people, but basically alone on a raft thirty thousand feet below him (for the jet had begun descending).

  “Do they want to bail out?” he asked.

  “What are you asking?”

  “How long is the trip supposed to last?”

  “Three days. Two overnight stays. We come out on the other end of the park.” Meaning, as he could infer, Canyonlands National Park.

  “Are you in the park yet?”

  “Not quite. We stopped on a sandbar for lunch and endless phone chatting.”

  “If they could cancel it now, would they? And go home to their freaked-out family members?”

  “Is it good and ruined, you’re asking. Can they really enjoy the next three days.”

  “Yeah, and on that note, is there an airstrip near you?”

  Her answers turned out to be yes—the Joneses wanted to bail out—and yes: there was an airstrip near them, belonging to a ranch adjoining the park. Half an hour later, the jet was on the ground there. The descent and landing seemed normal to him, but after the plane had come to a full stop, Frank and Lenny high-fived each other. Bonnie looked out the tiny window in the door and thought better of changing back into her heels. She opened the door, deployed the stairway, and stood at attention holding Corvallis’s wool cloak. The scent of sagebrush flooded into the plane.

  Corvallis had been hoping for something authentically rustic, but the ranch had remade itself as a tourist operation and so the first thing he saw was its swag kiosk, currently unmanned. He watched disbelievingly as an actual tumbleweed blew past it. The airstrip had been laid down on a dry lake bed or something, so it was surrounded by low hills of rubble from which sprouted cool-looking outcroppings of rock. Maybe that explained the pilots’ high five.

  Approaching was one of those especially huge pickup trucks with double rear wheels and a crew cabin. It was skidding around switchbacks and kicking up rooster tails of ocher dust.

  Corvallis was pretty sure that, at this moment, he was closer (twenty miles) to Moab than any other C-suite executive of a major social media company. He felt he should commemorate that with a text message. But his phone reported no service. He didn’t have a sat phone. He had no more communications technology at his disposal than a Roman legionary. Probably less, since those guys had messengers and pigeons and so on.

  Speaking of which, Lenny got his bag out of the luggage compartment and hustled it over and thrust it at him in a manner suggesting that it might be time to change his clothes. He accepted the bag and slung it over his shoulder for now. There was no place to change here unless he wanted to kick down the door of the kiosk.

  Blazoned on the door of the pickup was the logo of the Angel Rock Ranch, which he recognized from having seen it on the Miasma half an hour ago. Aesthetically, this occupied a curious niche that hadn’t existed until fairly recently: On the one hand it was too professional and slick for what this place was, because they’d used stock images and typefaces. On the other, it was homespun, amateur work, because they’d cobbled it together themselves. They knew nothing of kerning. The truck crossed the runway some distance from the plane and then swung around it in a wide U, giving the plane a suitably wide berth and crunching to a stop near Corvallis and Lenny. The driver’s-side door opened, and out climbed a lean shovel-faced man in a baseball cap. He was wearing jeans, work boots, and a plaid snap-up shirt. He had the waistline of a young man and the trifocals of an older one. A line of sunscreen snaked along the rim of his left ear. He kept his gaze on Corvallis’s face as if willing himself not to glance down at the tunic; perhaps he’d already sated his curiosity staring through the tinted window of his truck. For his part, Corvallis managed to conceal a pang of boyish disappointment over the fact that this man wasn’t wearing a cowboy hat.

  “Mr. Kawasaki, I presume. Welcome to the Angel Rock Ranch. I am Bob Nordstrom and I am the ranch manager and I am here to assist you.” He stuck out his hand and Corvallis shook it.

  “Nice to meet you. You might find it more convenient to call me C, which is kind of like my nickname.”

  “I would have Googled you to learn more but—”

  “Your Internet has been down all day. Your ISP is in Moab, I take it.”

  “That’s right, C.”

  “Well, you might like to know that your site is still up and running—evidently it’s hosted somewhere else.”

  “That is reassuring to know,” Bob said. After pondering this news for a moment, he changed his tone of voice and said, “So, you have had Internet access recently. On that thing, I guess.” He glanced at the jet.

  Corvallis nodded.

  Bob said, “I know something weird is happening around Moab but I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

  “It’s happening everywhere in the world except Moab,” Corvallis said. “It’s an Internet hoax. A very sophisticated one. Nothing bad has actually happened to anyone in Moab, as far as I can tell. It’s kind of a long story. I would be happy to catch you up in the truck—we have a little bit of driving to do, I take it?”

  Bob nodded. “From here it’s about a half-hour drive to the river landing. I understand that the family wishes to be taken back to Moab? That will be another hour.”

  Corvallis checked his watch and was startled to find it wasn’t even noon yet. They could be in Moab by midafternoon. Assuming they’d be allowed in. “What do you know about roadblocks and so on?”

  “I am confident,” Bob said, “that I can find my way into Moab.”

  Bob had more to say on that as he and Corvallis drove up out of the lake bed. “There’s a bunch of ways into town,” he said. “Worst comes to worst, we just transfer to ATVs and avoid roads altogether. And if that fails, we have a little boat with an outboard motor. We can ride it straight up the river.”

  They topped the divide between the lake bed behind them and the valley of the Colorado ahead. The scenery made it obvious why the proprietors of this ranch had decided to throw in the towel on ranching per se and make it over into a tourist attraction. Bob pointed along the azimuth of the main ranch house, which was too far away to be seen with the naked eye. Someone there was still operating a ham radio rig, which had come in handy this morning as Corvallis’s support staff had patched it together with emails from the jet and calls to Maeve’s sat phone to make all of these arrangements.

  The drive down to the river landing—the last place to take a raft out of the Colorado River before entering the national park—demanded all of Bob’s attention and so he didn’t say much as Corvallis gave him a rundown of what had been going on with the hoax. Along the way he caught occasional glimpses of the brown water of the river, but famously it was a very small trickle of water embedded in a ridiculously huge canyon system and so mostly what he saw was interesting rocks. The final approach wasn’t on a road per se, it was just chundering down a dry arroyo that plunged straight into the Colorado. During the times when it actually carried water, it had deposited a rocky bar along the bank of the river, and it was there that Maeve and her colleague Tom had pulled two rafts up out of the water and set up a little day camp under a pop-up awning. Older Joneses were huddled in the shade of it, looking beleaguered. Younger ones were splashing in the river, completely unconcerned. Bob piloted the truck carefully across a shallow backwater and up onto the surface of the bar and stopped a few yards short of the camp. Directly on exiting the vehicle he was engaged by stressed-out moms and dads who were so glad to see him. This left Corvallis free to sneak out the passenger door and cut around the back of the truck and head toward the rafts, where Maeve and Tom were sorting through luggage, taking out the Joneses’ personal stuff while leaving company gear in the raft.

  “Nice getup” was Maeve’s verdict on what Corvallis was wearing. She had given him a head-to-toe scan with eyes that were such a pale shade of blue as to be somewhat weird-looking.

  “Right back at you,” Corvallis responded. Maeve was wearing a shirt of silvery Lycra. It had long sleeves, anchored at the ends by
thumb holes. Her hands were covered in paddling gloves made of wetsuit material. The garment didn’t have a collar; it developed into a hood that covered her whole neck and head except for an oval around the face where a few strands of sun-bleached hair had escaped. A lump in the back suggested that she had long hair, kept in a bun. Over that she was wearing a sun visor. An assortment of eyewear dangled on her chest. Red suspenders kept her massively overloaded cargo shorts from simply falling off. Projecting from the leg holes were the stump cups, knee joints, carbon-fiber shins, and plastic feet of her prosthetic legs.

  “Thanks for picking us up.” She took a couple of steps toward him in a better-than-you’d-think-but-not-quite-right gait, and peeled the glove from her right hand to shake. Her hand was cold, sandy, and strong. The shake was perfunctory.

  “I didn’t do much besides reading my credit card number over the phone.” Stupid thing to say. He was trying to be modest but came off sounding rich and petulant.

  “We’ll make you whole.”

  There were five available seats in the truck’s cab, and six Joneses, but some of them were small enough to double-buckle. Corvallis and Maeve ended up sitting in the vehicle’s open back, using luggage and camp mats for cushioning. Maeve loaned him a sun hat and looked with disfavor on his bare arms. The climb up the arroyo was such rough going that they ended up standing and holding on to the roll bar, absorbing the jounces with their leg muscles. Once they had made it to something that could pass for a proper road, they made themselves comfortable and he got her settled down by applying sunscreen to his arms.

  “Do you mind?” she asked, and unstrapped one leg, then the other, and put them to one side so that she could air out her stumps. “Sand gets in there.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of objecting to your making yourself comfortable,” Corvallis said.

  The elaborate wording got her attention. She had put on dark wraparound sunglasses, but it was clear from the set of her face that she was giving him a close look. “What is that garment you’re wearing?”