Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  “It’s a good code name,” he said. “When you’re ready to go to market you hire a naming company to come up with a crowd-pleaser.” This appeared to settle her down. “Can I have one of these?” he asked, holding up a Sthetix shirt.

  “Why?”

  He thought better of explaining to Maeve that collecting swag from obscure, dead companies was a tech industry fetish.

  “I like the name, and what it means. And it’s a memento of this day.”

  She snorted. “The day Moab got nuked?”

  He said nothing for a moment, intimidated by her sardonic force. Everything felt awkward. There was a sense of being on a perfectly good road in a perfectly sound car that was, however, veering into a ditch.

  A thing happened where he simultaneously channeled both Forthrasts, Richard and Zula. “No,” he said, hearing his own voice strangely through blood-engorged ears. “The day I rode in the back of a truck with you.”

  She actually took a step back, and raised her eyebrows. “You can have one. Make sure it fits.”

  “Okay. No peeking.” He pulled his tunic up over his head and tossed it aside.

  “Fair’s fair,” she returned. He heard a clank and a thud followed by a hissing, slithering sound. He turned just in time to see her peeling her sun shirt off. This had necessitated shrugging off her red suspenders, so her cargo shorts had impacted the pavement a moment earlier. Now she was down to a garment that he identified, vaguely, as a sports bra, and a pair of granny panties.

  “Oh, excuse me,” he blurted.

  “You looked?” she returned, mock outraged. “It’s all right. Nothing you wouldn’t see at the beach, right?”

  He had turned his back on her and was pretending to sort through T-shirts. “Still . . . I didn’t mean to.”

  He could hear bionic footsteps. “Would you like me to help you with that?”

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  She came up very close behind him, reached around his body, and plucked out a T-shirt. “You’d look smashing in this. Turn around and we’ll check the size.”

  He turned to face her. She held the shirt up in front of him, pinning it against his shoulders with her thumbs, and looked him up and down. “It’s not long enough to hide your doodle,” she observed.

  He made a reasonable guess as to the meaning of the term. “Doodle containment’s an issue,” he admitted, “with boxers.”

  “One of these containers has some Sthetix men’s briefs,” she said. “Nice and tight.” She pulled the shirt away and tossed it into the box.

  They stood there for a few moments looking at each other from rather close. When she’d pulled the hood off, her hair had come loose and tumbled messily down her back. A bit of gentle tugging and head-shaking would have worked wonders, but she didn’t give a shit.

  Corvallis reached out slowly and put his hands on her hips.

  “After my friend died,” he said, “and I got over the shock, you know what happened? Like, around the time of the funeral?”

  “You got inappropriately horny and felt like fucking everything that moved?”

  “Yeah, has that ever happened to you?”

  “Yeah. When my dad died. When my company died. And now,” she said. “Even though no one died in this case.” She took a step forward, leaving maybe a quarter of an inch of clearance between her belly and the tip of his boxer-tented doodle. “It comes from thinking about mortality, right? Leads to a ‘life is short—let’s go’ mentality.”

  He pulled her into him and mashed his doodle, bolt upright, against her stomach. She wrapped her arms around his neck for purchase and mashed back. They went on to perform sexual intercourse on the big pile of T-shirts on the rug. These could be grabbed in bunches and wadded up and jammed under body parts to facilitate various positions. She wasn’t talking much, but he got the idea that she wanted to be able to touch herself while also looking him in the face. Fair enough. They found a way to make it happen by what would have been described, in a PowerPoint presentation, as agile deployment to leverage the T-shirts’ structural modularity. He came first, perhaps inevitably given that he hadn’t had sex with anyone in three years. But he stayed in while she finished up, staring at him the whole time through half-closed eyes.

  Somewhat later, at her suggestion, he gave her a piggyback ride up the stairs to the bathroom and deposited her in the shower stall, then went back and fetched her legs. While she showered, he attempted to clean up. As if blindly following its sole imperative, his semen had ended up all over the place, distributing itself over the maximum conceivable number of T-shirts as well as locations on the rug. There was a washing machine in the corner of the basement; he stuffed it full. He started the machine and, through the white noise of the plumbing above, heard Maeve denouncing him as some kind of fucker or other. He switched the cycle to cold.

  For a while now, the part of Corvallis that was a responsible executive had, as it were, been bound and gagged in a closet, trying to get his attention by banging his forehead on the floor in Morse code. Considering what the rest of him had been up to, this was pretty hopeless, but now that Corvallis was alone in the office in a Sthetix T-shirt and a pair of tight Sthetix undies, drinking a postcoital beer and listening to Maeve wash her hair, he began to hear a few of those distant thumps and to consider the larger context of the day. Laurynas wanted him to save the company, or something.

  He settled in behind the office computer and found the password yellow-noted on the underside of the keyboard. He made various efforts to use the Internet and satisfied himself that Moab’s sole ISP was still utterly screwed. His phone was showing three bars, but it still wouldn’t actually do anything. He reckoned that the best he could do was to document his presence in the city and squirt it out to the Internet when he could.

  Maeve emerged, fully reassembled and impossibly distracting. He studied her, partly because he could and partly for cues as to how lovey-dovey he was supposed to be at this moment. She seemed all business, though she did take the liberty of slapping him on the ass as he headed for the shower. So, mixed messages. By the time he emerged, she had pulled the company van around and hitched on a trailer that was pretty clearly designed to carry inflated rafts.

  She drove him to Main Street. He sat in the van in his underwear while she went into a store and came back with a pair of jams that would fit him. These were designed to appeal to a man half his age, which he assumed was her sense of humor at work. She took some photos of him partying with Moabites and talking in a really serious way to National Guardsmen and mugging with local kids, all composed to show as much authentic Moab background scenery as possible. Then a panorama of the whole street scene.

  They drove to Angel Rock Ranch to check on the jet and its crew. Bonnie had found refuge at the ranch lodge; the pilots were camped out in the plane, awaiting a delivery of jet fuel. Next stop was the lodge itself, where Corvallis was able to get through to Laurynas on a landline. Laurynas was desperate for the photos, so they split up for a couple of hours; Maeve drove down to the sandbar to fetch Tom and the rafts while Bob drove Corvallis up to the top of a mesa from which he predicted—correctly—that it would be possible to get cell phone coverage from another town, many miles from Moab and unaffected by the DDoS attack. From there Corvallis was able to transmit the photos, though it was slow. By the time all of those pictures had seeped down the pipe and Bob had driven him back to the landing strip, Maeve was back with Tom and the rafts, waiting for him.

  Maeve: Corvallis’s girlfriend. During this little excursion he had suddenly remembered this a few times and been delighted by the newness of it.

  A couple of years ago he had broken a bone in his hand during weapons practice and been obliged to wear a cast for some time. During the first few days, he’d forget it was there, and then be surprised by some new limitation as he would discover that he couldn’t hit the Return key on his keyboard or operate the shift lever on his car. Suddenly having a girlfriend was the opposite thing, with a
ll of the discoveries, so far, being good ones. Enhancements, not limitations. Prosthetics.

  As they were driving back into Moab, Tom—who had been relegated to a back seat—said, “Fuck me,” while looking significantly out a window on the left side of the vehicle. Maeve said, “Holy shit.” Corvallis nearly had to put his head into her lap to see what they were looking at: a blue-nosed 747 banking into its final approach for landing, a few miles to the northwest.

  “Air Force fucking One,” Tom said.

  This time, they actually were stopped on the outskirts of town, but once Maeve had explained herself, and the Secret Service guys had checked IDs and given the van and the trailer a once-over, they were allowed through. She ditched the vehicle, and Tom, in the parking lot of Canyonland Adventures, and then walked with Corvallis to Main Street.

  By the time the president had rolled into town and his press secretary and staff had finished arranging things and the media had set up their equipment, the day was in its last hour. Which might have been calculated, since the light was magical, and lit up the red rocks east of town perfectly while making everyone seem ten years younger and twice as good-looking. They found a place where the president could look into that light, with mountains and a big sign that said MOAB in the background of the shot. They set up the presidential lectern and handpicked people to stand to the left, and to the right, and behind it: uniformed National Guardsmen; Native Americans; salt-of-the-earth farmers; outdoorsy types with frizzy, sun-bleached hair; a minister; and an Asian-American tech executive with a disabled girlfriend. The president came online and announced to the world that Moab, the states of Utah and Colorado, the United States of America, and indeed the entire world had been the victims of a hoax that had been perpetrated almost entirely on the Internet. Nothing had happened here, save for a denial-of-service attack, originating overseas, that had shut down its Internet service and its cell phone towers. There had never been a bright flash of light; this was just a pattern of fake social media posts. The young actor at LAX was just that—a performer who had been hired to play a role, under the pretext that it was some kind of reality television show. Local police departments had been conned into setting up roadblocks by telephone calls that had originated overseas but been digitally tweaked to look as if they were local. A similar call had summoned the SWAT team in Las Vegas. They’d found nothing more than an empty suite that had been booked and paid for online. No one had ever checked in, but a package had arrived from overseas and been delivered to the suite by hotel staff. It turned out to be some old radium-dial watches in a scary-looking box: enough to make the cops’ Geiger counters click but not in any way dangerous. A similar gambit had been used in Manhattan. All of the confirmatory posts that had hit the Internet in the next hours—the burn victims, the fallout samples, the Los Alamos press conference—had been faked and injected onto the Internet via social media accounts and domains controlled through untraceable overseas shell companies.

  Much of this was just placing an official stamp on information that legitimate news organizations had been piecing together all day but been unable to articulate loudly enough to be heard over the din. It brought out a kind of bloodlust in the assembled White House press corps, which was gathered right there in the middle of Main Street. During the wait, they’d had plenty of time to sample Moab’s impressive range of locally produced microbrewery offerings. Having spent the whole day sifting through incredibly depressing news reports, they were bouncing back to a kind of giddy frame of mind brought on by a combination of completely natural and understandable happiness that Moab was fine; beer; and schadenfreude directed at the social media companies that had been chipping away at their industry and their job security for the last couple of decades. Pointed questions were asked about how just unbelievably irresponsible those companies had been today and whether the scorpion-filled pits into which their executives should now be lowered should be a thousand meters deep or two thousand. After the third such question, the president was handed a note by his press secretary. He read it, then raised his head and glanced over to his right, scanning his way down the line of nearby Moabites until he found the one person there whose last name could possibly be Kawasaki. “Why don’t you direct your questions to someone who knows? Mr. Kawasaki, from Lyke, has been here all day, working hard to establish the ground truth.”

  11

  Maeve didn’t want to think of herself, or to be seen, as someone who had been in need of getting rescued by a Prince Charming in a jet, and so this added a lot of texture to her relationship with Corvallis in the early going. Fortunately for that relationship, but not so much for Maeve and her family in Australia, those issues were soon swamped by something else.

  All of the people in the Miasma’s conspiracy/troll ecosystem had been sucked into the vortex of Moab and begun to devote excruciating levels of attention to the entire cast of characters: the actor from the red-eye, all of the other performers in all of the fake videos, the cops who had searched the penthouse suite in Vegas, the sheriff’s deputies who had manned roadblocks, et cetera.

  And, of course, Corvallis Kawasaki and Maeve Braden. For he had been identified by name, on national television, by the president of the United States, and had been a reasonably well-known person to begin with. And she had been standing next to him. So within twenty-four hours, the citizens of Crazytown had compiled a huge dossier of mostly wrong material on him, and begun to evince interest in her; and within a week, she had become a figure of greater significance, in the collective mind of Crazytown, than he.

  Crazytown was repelled by facts and knowledge, as oil fled from water, but was fascinated by the absence of hard facts, since it provided vacant space in which to construct elaborate edifices of speculation. Toward power it felt some combination of fear and admiration, and Corvallis was powerful. Toward vulnerability it was drawn, in the same way that predators would converge on the isolated and straggling. Within a week, Maeve—who suffered from the fatal combination of being mysterious, vulnerable, and female—had been doxxed. Canyonland Adventures, as a business, had been destroyed by a flood of fake negative reviews and various other hacks. Maeve sought refuge at Angel Rock Ranch, but after a couple of days, Bob’s wife decided to believe some of the more wildly slanderous posts being made about Maeve on social media and decided it was time for her to leave. Tom, having nothing else to do now that the business was wiped out, bundled Maeve into a car, handed her a shotgun, and drove her to Salt Lake City, where he dropped her off (minus the shotgun) at the private jet terminal to await a jet that Corvallis had dispatched. Maeve only went into the waiting lounge long enough to use the toilet. Her legs were visible under the stall door. They were glimpsed in a mirror by a young woman who was standing in front of a sink freshening up. She was the best friend of another young woman who was the daughter of a hedge fund manager and private jet owner; they, along with other friends and family, were all on some kind of one-percenter vacation trip. The two young women, having recognized Maeve, took pictures of her and posted them on their poorly secured social media accounts. One of the pictures included the tail number of the private jet that Maeve boarded en route to Seattle. Its flight plan was obtained from the Miasma. More Moab truthers were awaiting Maeve in Seattle; they weren’t allowed into the private jet terminal at Boeing Field, but nothing prevented them from witnessing Corvallis’s arrival in his Tesla.

  And so it went. All they could do was let it burn. Maeve’s harassment became the topic of hand-wringing coverage by the decent folk of the Miasma, but the mere fact that people were defending her only drove the truthers into higher transports of rage or made it that much more amusing for trolls to go after her. Maeve’s entire family was doxxed. Business records of Sthetix were pulled up from somewhere and laid bare. That she was now under Corvallis’s wing dampened the truthers’ ardor, since they were sadists and preferred to focus their energies on the helpless. But they did manage to find her sister, Verna, who lived in a bedroom community outs
ide of Adelaide. After a first round of surgery and chemo, she’d enjoyed three years’ remission from her cancer, but it had now come back. She was on chemo again. Through a combination of social engineering and poor security precautions, a particularly avid set of nihilist hackers tracked her down to a hospital in Adelaide, and phoned in a bomb threat, and SWATted the place for good measure. All of the patients had to be taken out of the wing of the building where Verna was receiving her treatment. Not enough gurneys were available, and she was strong enough to walk with assistance, and so she ended up lying on the ground in the shade of a gum tree, dressed only in her hospital gown, still hooked up to the wheeled apparatus that was dripping the chemo drug into her IV line. A local truther, positioned outside the place with a long-lensed camera, was able to capture video of her rolling onto her side to puke. It went up on the message board favored by the truthers and became a humorous meme. The mother of Maeve and Verna got really angry and ventured out onto the front stoop of her house to denounce the hackers; a still frame of her indignant, tear-stained face became another meme.

  Corvallis chartered a larger, longer-range jet to take him and Maeve to Australia. They drove to Boeing Field. The jet wasn’t quite ready yet and so they had to wait in the lounge for half an hour.

  Shortly before they boarded, Pluto showed up.

  Pluto had been one of the cofounders of Corporation 9592 and had made a corresponding amount of money. For a while, Corvallis had seen him every day, but after his switch to Nubilant, they’d lost contact and had not communicated at all except for a brief, awkward exchange at Dodge’s funeral. Pluto, well aware of his own social ineptitude, had obviously pored over an etiquette manual before showing up, and so, during his rote interactions with Zula and other immediate family members, had acquitted himself well if bizarrely, addressing them in high-Victorian grief speech straight out of whatever scanned and archived Emily Post book he’d memorized.