Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  Corvallis spent a while explaining his hobby and how he had come to be here. She listened without showing any outward signs of disgust and asked a couple of questions. Then she shrugged. “At the end of the day, all that matters is if it makes you healthier. And you don’t look like some bludger who camps out in Mum’s basement.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You don’t get deltoids like that by typing.”

  Corvallis was unaccustomed to having his deltoids, or indeed any part of him, looked on in such a favorable way—let alone openly talked about—by a female observer. He had nothing to say for a few moments. He felt a brief tingle in his nuts and adjusted his tunic.

  The simple reality of blasting down a road in the Utah canyonlands having this conversation with this person somehow cut the Gordian knot that had been tied in his skull this morning by millions of people being wrong on the Internet.

  “You lift,” she said. Her tone was somewhere between question and statement. She was dourly resigned to the likelihood that he had a personal trainer in a fancy gym.

  “I lift shovels full of dirt,” he said.

  She liked that. “Is that some new hipster exercise?”

  “It is an old Roman military exercise,” he said. “When a legion made camp, it dug a ditch all around, and threw the dirt up on the inside to make a rampart above the ditch. When it broke camp, the ditch had to be filled in.”

  “That is a fuck-ton of digging.”

  “The original legionaries were like elite athletes, if you look at all the physical activity they performed day in and day out. I’m not putting myself in that class, but I’ll say that reenacting is the best exercise program I’ve ever had.”

  She was gazing off into the blue sky, trying to get her head around it. “To move all of that dirt—just to put it back—it seems, I don’t know—”

  “It’s the same as paddling a boat,” he pointed out, “except with dirt.”

  “Okay, fair.” She looked at him, which he found vaguely frightening and yet preferred to her not looking at him. “So when were you thinking of changing out of that getup?”

  “My original plan was to be doing it now, in the backseat of the truck. It didn’t work out that way. But you know what? The fact is I only have one clean set of normal-person clothes. A blazer and a dress shirt. Leather shoes. No point in getting them covered with road dust. I’ll change when we get to Moab.”

  “If,” she corrected him.

  “Bob’s pretty sure he can sneak us in somehow.”

  She sighed. “I wonder what this is going to do to our business.”

  “Long-term, it’s going to be great for your business. Because it’s going to bring attention to Moab, and that’s going to translate to clicks, and to revenue.”

  “Clicks,” she repeated. “That’s what it’s all about I suppose.”

  “If you write up the story of what’s happening right now and put it up on your social media accounts, it’ll get millions of page views.” Corvallis meant for this to be encouraging but he could tell he was getting nowhere. He was consistently getting the sense that she had a lot on her mind that she didn’t want to share with him, and that most of his conversational gambits were wide of the mark.

  “I thought you techies wore hoodies and T-shirts,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You said you had a blazer and a dress shirt.”

  “It’s what I wore to work the day I left Seattle. I had a board meeting.”

  “Why didn’t you wear a T-shirt to your board meeting? Isn’t that what you do?”

  “Yeah, but this wasn’t for a tech company. This is a private foundation. I serve on the board. It’s just a somewhat more conservative vibe. You’re in the room with lawyers and money people.”

  “What kind of foundation?”

  “A friend of mine died. He was rich. He’d made billions in the game industry. Some of his fortune went to this foundation.”

  “Was it an untimely death?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  “Thanks. Anyway, the foundation looks for ways to put game-related technology to use in solving various social problems.”

  They jounced over a calamitous pothole and she reached out to keep her artificial legs from jumping out of the truck.

  Corvallis was straining to remember some advice Zula had given him a couple of years ago after a date had gone bad.

  “You’ve asked a number of questions relating to clothing,” he pointed out. “Is that an interest of yours?”

  “All clothing is prosthetics,” she said. “That’s how I think about it. From this”—she plucked at her silver garment—“to this”—she patted a carbon-fiber leg—“is a matter of degree.”

  “The shirt is some kind of anti-sun thing?”

  “Yeah. Better than sunscreen.” She sighed. “I was studying design,” she admitted, as if it were a failing of some significance. “Hit a rough patch. Took a summer job paddling rafts. Got sidetracked.”

  “It’s pretty normal to take a gap year. Or two.”

  “I failed,” she announced.

  “As in, flunked out of design school or—”

  “Dropped out. To do a startup. Which failed.” She sighed. “I’m one of the losers in the war you won.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was my sister, Verna, and me. We got some angel money. Burned through it amazingly fast just getting our heads out of our arses. She got sick.”

  “Well, that alone would be enough to kill a lot of angel-funded startups.”

  Maeve shook her head. “It wasn’t that. I mean, it didn’t help. But what killed it was an awareness that came to me in the middle of the night.”

  “Awareness of what?”

  “That I’d been going about it wrong. That I hadn’t been thinking big enough.”

  “Scale is tricky.”

  “And that if I were to start thinking big enough, it would require much more capital than I could ever hope to raise. So I was stuck. And am still.” She pulled her sunglasses down so that she could look him in the eye. “Which is not me cracking on to you.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m not asking you for money.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  “Just wanted to be clear.”

  “Okay. Noted. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, can you talk about what you were doing in a way that is a little less abstract?”

  “Then you’ll get interested in it, and you’ll come up with ideas for how to make it work, and it’ll circle around to money.”

  “It’s a long ride to Moab, we have to talk about something.”

  “Well, I’ll just say that my idea of clothing as prosthetics, when I pursued it to the end of the line, led me out of my comfort zone. Because what we wear now is more than just material objects. We wear information. My avatar, my profile on social media, those do in cyberspace what clothing does in the world. And now you have blended situations—physical clothing with embedded electronics. I don’t know anything about those technologies.”

  “Other people do. You could find programmers, engineers—”

  “But then why me?”

  Corvallis didn’t have an answer.

  Maeve went on, “It’s as if I were a carpenter who had come up with an idea for a wooden boat. I started designing the boat and got halfway through and realized that it would be much better if it were made out of aluminium. Knowing fuck-all about aluminium, I would have to find a metalworker at that point. Whereupon, I would have to explain to my investors why it made sense for them to pay me to pay a metalworker.”

  Corvallis nodded. “You had thought yourself right out of a job.”

  “Yeah.”

  He shrugged. “It happens. That’s what angels are actually doing, you know. Paying people like you to try a bunch of stuff. To see what works. You can always move on.”

  She grimaced. “Not if you don’t actually
have the technical know-how.”

  “You’re too honest for your own good. If you were more of a BS artist you could talk your way through an investor pitch pretty easily.”

  “Thanks, I guess.” She looked away, disgusted. Relegated to the back of the truck, splayed out on other people’s luggage with her legs off—literally dismembered—a million miles away from Silicon Valley, left for dead, along with the rest of Moab, by the whole Miasma—stymied to perfect exasperation—she was the archetype of the failed entrepreneur.

  He was almost offended by the ease with which they drove into Moab. The roadblocks—supposing that they actually existed—would be on the state highway that ran through town and that provided its only link to places far away. Because their point was to stop outsiders from getting in. Most of Moab’s streets dead-ended at the foot of the stony pink hills that confined the town against the river, or trailed off into weedy ruts as they neared the watercourse. But at least one of them connected to a battered two-lane road that edged up the east bank of the Colorado, draining a maze of ranch tracks farther south. Since no connection could be made from there to the outside world, no one had put a roadblock on it. The river itself was being patrolled by a lone sheriff in a motorboat, but when he recognized Bob’s truck he just lifted one hand from the wheel to greet Bob. Bob responded by lifting two fingers from his own steering wheel, and with that they penetrated the world-famous cordon of military security that had enshrouded the smoking ruins of Moab and turned away from the river to follow a small tributary about a mile into town.

  A festive atmosphere prevailed along Main Street, which was what they called the part of the state highway that ran through the town’s business district. This had been turned into a temporary pedestrian mall by the closure of the road. Locals had taken advantage of it to park RVs and pickup trucks wherever they felt like it, and to erect pop-up shelters against the sun, which by now had burned through the cloud cover. Restaurants and bars were serving al fresco. A convoy of National Guard vehicles, mostly just Humvees, had drawn up in the middle of the street. Young men in hand-me-down Iraq War camo were standing around aiming their assault rifles at the pavement and wordlessly soaking up the admiration of an increasingly inebriated populace. A tourist hotel on the main drag had set up an outdoor television screen showing live network coverage from a satellite dish. By this point, all of the networks had scrambled their art departments and produced screens and banners to flash up when they cut back from commercial breaks. A typical example was NUCLEAR TERROR IN THE HEARTLAND, in a scary-looking typeface, superimposed on a montage comprising a mushroom cloud and a map of the United States with a red crosshairs centered on southeastern Utah. Corvallis wondered if the wording had been run by the networks’ lawyers. To call it a “nuclear strike” or “nuclear disaster” would be to suggest that it had actually happened. “Nuclear terror” only meant that some people were terrified. The network was hedging its bets. Because at some level, the people in charge must have figured out by now that it was a hoax. To come out and say as much would be to lose all of their viewers to competitors who were still acting as if it had really happened. Calling it “terror,” on the other hand, was no lie, and enabled them to keep pumping shit onto the air.

  Bob, now overwhelmingly under the emotional sway of the half-dozen Joneses with whom he was sharing the cab, drove straight to the office of the rafting company, which was only a block off of Main Street. The Joneses piled out of the cab. Their patriarch waddled over to the family vehicle, a beige Suburban that they’d left in the parking lot. He contemplated it for a while, as if looking for bubbled paint, melted tires, or other evidence of its having survived a nuclear detonation. Maeve had strapped her legs back on as they entered town and now stood up in the back of the truck to toss luggage down to the other Joneses. An internal family schism developed as to whether a bucket brigade should be established to move all of the bags to the Suburban, or individuals should just carry the bags a few at a time. Corvallis, an only child, found the spectacle inexplicably depressing. He cadged a key from Maeve, then vaulted out and went into the office. His careful attention to the all-important matter of rehydration, combined with the bouncing of the truck, had left him needing to take a vicious piss. The better to enjoy it, he locked himself in the restroom, pulled his tunic up around his waist, and sat down on the toilet. Stand-up peeing in a long flowing garment could lead to various mishaps.

  When he was done he stood in front of the sink for a few moments splashing water on his head and neck and arms, just to get the dust off. It occurred to him that he had now finally reached a location in which it would be convenient to change into his normal-person clothes, so he went out in search of his duffel bag. The Joneses’ Suburban was long gone. Bob and Maeve had entered the office and were sitting in its little waiting area drinking beverages from the office fridge and watching television coverage. A nurse from a burn unit in some unidentified hospital was being interviewed. Journalists had pounced on her when she had gone out on a Starbucks run. She was looking suitably traumatized, but not so much that she couldn’t deliver an eloquent and moving description of the suffering being endured by children who had been standing in the open when the flash of the bomb had burned all the skin on one side of their body. For according to the story these patients had been rescued from some kind of camp on the outskirts of town. Maeve and Bob were agreeing with each other that no such camp existed, and wanted Corvallis to know it too. But he’d long since come to terms with the sophistication and sheer ballsiness of the hoax.

  Corvallis went out to Bob’s truck and looked in the back, which was empty. Then he checked the cab.

  He went back inside. “Did you by any chance give the Joneses a blue duffel bag about yay long?” he asked Maeve, holding his hands out in front of him.

  “More than one, probably,” she answered. “Why?”

  “Never mind. Is there a place on Main Street where I could buy some clothes?”

  “Yeah. If they’re open.”

  “Belay that. I just remembered. My wallet was in the duffel bag.”

  She gazed at him sidelong while tipping a beer bottle into her mouth. “C’mon back,” she said.

  Bob sat up alertly. “I could go try to track ’em down if you like.”

  “Do you know which way they’re going?”

  “Not really.”

  “Sounds like Maeve is going to set me up with something,” Corvallis said. “Thanks though.”

  Bob was now perhaps sensing a change in the emotional tone, akin to the plunge in barometric pressure preceding a cloudburst, which was not directly measurable by any of the five human senses but which could be detected, in some people’s arthritic joints, as a certain kind of discomfort. And perhaps you could make the case that people who suffered from the sort of emotional arthritis that was endemic among those of Northern European descent who lived on farms and ranches felt that discomfort more acutely, and were therefore the most sensitive barometers. “I do believe I’ll be on my way anyhow,” he said, “unless you need me for anything?”

  “Well, at some point I’ll need to go back out and collect my plane,” Corvallis said, “but . . .” And he glanced at Maeve, who nodded.

  “I can give you a ride out there,” she said. “Have to go collect Tom and the rafts anyway.”

  So Bob said his goodbyes and went out to his truck. Maeve unlocked a door behind the front desk and beckoned Corvallis back.

  Things tended to be spacious in Moab, and this building was no exception—it was an older commercial property that showed signs of having served, in previous incarnations, as a bar, a clothing shop, and a real estate office. Only about a quarter of its ground-floor space was used as an office. The rest of it was storage for outdoor gear of various kinds, the ideal place to raid if civilization collapsed. The stuff was crammed onto a shantytown of shelves that had been made in a hurry by someone with a chop saw and a nail gun. “This is all heavy stuff we don’t like to carry up and do
wn the stairs,” Maeve explained, leading him back to the actual stairs in question: wooden steps leading down into a cool cellar. “Lightweight stuff—like clothing—is down here.”

  It seemed on one level like the opening scene of a horror movie in which Corvallis would never make it out of the basement, but having got this far, he followed her down. She took the stairs at a good pace but with certain precautions, one hand on each banister, pitching from side to side a bit more than a person with normal legs, and through her silver spandex garment he could see her back muscles and her triceps working. They reached the concrete floor of the basement, which seemed to have been poured by various drunk or indifferent people on different occasions. Light poured in from windows high in the walls, so she felt no need to turn the lights on. “Watch your step,” she admonished him, which he found curiously touching given that he had legs and feet.

  Cardboard boxes of different sizes and vintages had been stacked around the place according to some scheme that wasn’t obvious to him. Some of these were open. They were full of T-shirts, not folded, but thrown in willy-nilly. Most of these were printed with Canyonland Adventures logos, or other tourist-related insignia having to do with Moab, Utah, or the Colorado River. In one corner a rug had been laid out on the floor. On it was a huge pile of shirts all mixed up. The place had the clean smell of new textiles.

  “What’s Sthetix?” Corvallis asked, holding up a black T-shirt with a completely different sort of logo—not in any way, shape, or form touristy.

  “My dead company. See, if you take ‘prosthetics’ or ‘aesthetics’ and chop off the first bit . . .”

  “Got it.”

  “It’s from a Greek word meaning ‘strength,’” she insisted, as if he had been disputing it. “‘Prosthetics’ means ‘to add strength.’”

  He nodded. “Cool! It’s a cool name.”

  She held the compliment at arm’s length for a moment, then slapped it away. “Hard to pronounce. Every. Single. Fucking. Conversation we had was about how to say it, or how to spell it.”