Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  “I already told you it wasn’t me.”

  “And I believe you. But I wonder if you know the perpetrator. Not personally but through their PURDAH. I’m wondering if they are part of your loose ENSU network.”

  Pluto shrugged. “There’s a lot of interest in the topic of distributed organizations. Which means, a network of PURDAHs that operates by an agreed-on set of rules just like a normal company, but with no identifiable center.”

  “You’re saying that the people who ran the Moab hoax could have secretly set up one of these distributed organizations to do it. And they didn’t invite you, because you didn’t know the secret handshake or you said the wrong thing once in a discussion thread.”

  “It’s possible. But I doubt it.”

  “Who do you think did it?”

  “Russians again?”

  “What’s their upside in running something this big, though?” Corvallis asked. “Who benefits from Moab?”

  “What’s your opinion?” Pluto asked.

  “ENSU benefits. People who hate the Miasma for being so unreliable, who have been dreaming of replacing it with something better, more secure.”

  “I can’t argue with that!” Pluto said, with a delighted chuckle. And something in that childlike expression of enjoyment twigged Corvallis to a flaw in his own argument. Pluto had an infinite amount of money, sure. So he had means. But did he have a motive? Well, sort of. He and thousands of other hackers, including all of his ENSU buddies, were perpetually annoyed with the Miasma’s security deficiencies. But was that alone sufficient motive to perpetrate a hoax on the scale of Moab? People had died. Thirty-one, at last count, had perished in traffic accidents or of heart attacks and strokes suffered while fleeing from imaginary bombs. Who would do something like that?

  The obvious motive was money. Someone had figured out a way to profit from the hoax, most likely by short-selling stock. And no doubt the SEC was already investigating that angle, combing through stock exchange records for suspicious patterns of activity in the days leading up to it. Or maybe it was a more subtle play, something that the SEC wouldn’t be able to pin on anyone.

  But it seemed like a roundabout and uncommonly irresponsible way to get slightly richer. Anyone with the brains and the technical acumen needed to pull this off would have other opportunities.

  Corvallis pondered it as the jet winged south and west, across the equator, across the international date line. Pluto fell asleep in front of his laptop, which obligingly shut itself off, plunging the cabin into darkness. Corvallis looked out the window and saw nothing but stars, and a single, isolated light down below that must have been a ship.

  He realized that it had been done by Elmo Shepherd.

  The awareness came full-blown into his brain. No train of thought led to it and no evidence supported it, but he knew it as certainly as if El had been sitting across from him in the jet and confided in him personally. Like a scholar looking at an anonymous holograph in a library, Corvallis had simply recognized El’s handwriting.

  Australia—at least the first bit of it that hove into view—was greener than Corvallis had been led to expect. He was debating whether to wake Maeve up, but some internal alarm seemed to have gone off in her head alerting her to their arrival in her home country’s airspace. He dreaded asking her whether she’d made a choice regarding what Pluto had proposed. She had a placid confidence about her that he hadn’t seen since she’d found herself in the crosshairs of the Moab truthers. After enjoying a heavy breakfast served up by the flight attendant, she took over the bathroom for half an hour and emerged in triumphal makeup. Maeve took an all-or-nothing approach to makeup, going completely without it most of the time but turning it into an impressive production when she had decided the occasion was right. Corvallis hadn’t known her long enough to be able to predict what those occasions would be; it wasn’t always the obvious triggers, like going on a date. He knew without asking that it was all tied in with Sthetix and that, if he dared ask, she’d explain to him that makeup was just another prosthetic, and she’d remind him that the root of the word had something to do with strength. She looked strong when she came out of the plane’s bathroom, though not necessarily strong in a way that would be recognized or respected by her legions of Miasma detractors. She was getting ready to use her face to send a message to her family, written in a code of incredible sophistication that he would never understand.

  By that time Australia had turned red-beige and begun to make Utah look, by comparison, like a rain forest. She spent the last hour of the flight quizzing Pluto about APEs and about how it was all going to work once he unleashed them. They agreed it would be better to wait for a day or two so that she could explain matters to her mother and her sister.

  Once they had landed and cleared customs, they dropped into family mode, which from a fundamentalist nerd standpoint meant a way of being that caused vast amounts of time to disappear while people pursued activities that ruled out getting any sort of productive work done. The first few hours were entirely devoted to collecting Mary Catherine, who was the mother, and Lady, the imperiled Lhasa apso. Lady got dropped off at a kennel for a few days. From there they went to the hospital to pick up Verna, who had finished her round of chemo. They drove out to the McLaren Vale, south of town. An acquaintance of Corvallis—the centurion of a Roman legion reenactment group in South Australia—had recommended a certain retreat center embedded in a winery, and Corvallis’s assistant had booked a little villa there. They moved Verna and her support technology into its best bedroom so that she could recuperate. Never until now had Corvallis been close enough to a chemotherapy patient to be exposed to all of the details. He saw that Cancer Land was a whole alternate civilization, as complicated as everything he did for a living.

  Only after a few hours of getting to know the family and sharing a meal and getting Verna squared away was Corvallis able to get some time to himself and alert his colleagues at Lyke to what was in the works. Most of his nerd mind, however, was still fixated on Elmo Shepherd. Not clear to him was whether El might somehow sense that Corvallis had figured it out—might indeed be disappointed in Corvallis, as a teacher is disappointed with a prize pupil, if Corvallis failed to say anything the next time they encountered each other.

  And encounter each other they would. For El and his panoply of non-, not-for-, and for-profit entities had become inextricably intertwined with the fate of Dodge and Dodge’s brain. A disproportionate amount of the time that Corvallis spent on his own foundation and nonprofit work was devoted to puzzling out the latest gambits of El’s attorneys. Indeed the last board meeting that he had attended, the day he had driven out to the Roman-legion camp in Montana, had been dominated by a discussion of a new maneuver that had only just been initiated by El. He could not help wondering now whether there was some connection between that and the launching of the hoax—a link that would only become obvious to him years from now. For he always had the sense that he was playing tic-tac-toe while El was playing four-dimensional hyperspace chess.

  Australia in general, and this winery in particular, were fine places to reside while a stupendous onslaught of Miasma defamation was launched against Maeve Braden. Astonishing birdcalls were woven through its dry, quiet air, which was scented with eucalyptus and softened with a haze of reddish dust filtering down from the great desert to the north. Broad tin roofs and heavy steel screens sheltered them from sun and bug while somehow making them feel they were right in the middle of the trees and the vines. The design of the place was simple and comfortable without any taint of what was normally thought of as luxury. Verna’s bedroom opened onto a second-story verandah under deep eaves, which felt like a treehouse. Maeve would sit there for hours with her, chatting and drinking tea, while Mary Catherine bustled and fussed. She was first-generation Irish-Australian, messily divorced from the father of Maeve and Verna, who had some kind of complicated-sounding dual citizenship that enabled him to flee to America when his relatives in Oz were sick
of him, and vice versa. The Miasma had long since doxxed him and gleefully posted mug shots commemorating his brushes with the law in jurisdictions that were so improbably far-flung as to deliver a certain dry comedic payload. Mary Catherine’s obsessive devotion to small, nearby, concrete matters, such as scones and the doings of nearby birds, was the perfect antidote to the Miasma.

  As Verna got her energy back, he spent more time with her. In the early going, Maeve was always in the room to keep an eye on things and nudge the conversation forward when it stalled, but as the days went by the discourse between Corvallis and Verna became more and more geeky, and Maeve withdrew by degrees, sitting in the corner reading or knitting, then absenting herself. Verna turned out to be the real deal: a programmer, largely self-taught, who, once the chemo fog had abated, was able to hold up her end of a conversation with C-plus. Had the situation been different, he’d have considered hiring her. She’d have come in for interviews. Other programmers would have circled round her warily. They’d have reached the conclusion that she was “awesome” but they’d have found reasons to reject her due to a lack of cultural fit, and they’d have passed her on to smaller, more offbeat startups run by friends. All of which was still possible in theory. But having cancer was still going to be a full-time job for her for a while.

  He wished he could have introduced her to Dodge.

  He checked in with Pluto, who had ensconced himself in the most expensive hotel suite that was to be had in Adelaide. He contacted Corvallis every few hours on a “burner” phone that Corvallis had picked up on arrival in Australia, when he’d discovered that his usual phone number had been doxxed and rendered useless by a festival of reckless hatred originating from a cluster of racist conspiracy theorists. It wasn’t until forty-eight hours after they’d landed in Australia that Pluto was ready to spawn his troop of APEs, and Lyke was ready to fend them off. Pluto called Corvallis to inform him that his right pinky was hovering over the Enter key on his keyboard, and that if said key were momentarily depressed, it would all happen.

  Corvallis received the call while pacing aimlessly around the villa’s ground floor. “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay as in you have understood what I just said?” Pluto asked. “Or okay as in ‘Yes, go ahead and do it’?”

  “Go ahead and do it.”

  “Do you want to check one last time with Maeve?” Pluto inquired, showing, for him, an unusual degree of sensitivity.

  “If I ask her one more time she’ll probably slap me,” Corvallis said. “Here, it’s a done deal. She and her sister are discussing what to do next—hatching a plan.”

  “Okay, here goes,” Pluto said, and let Corvallis hear the key getting whacked before hanging up the phone.

  Corvallis sent a text message to his colleagues at Lyke and then shut off his phone.

  If everything went according to plan, the Ethical Network Sabotage Undertaking would now issue a press release announcing its existence and explaining what it was doing. It would include a signed statement, as well as a video clip, from Maeve Braden, announcing that she was completely fine with all of this. Also included were links to servers where all of the APE-related code was available in the form of a carefully documented open-source code package, complete with sample projects that programmers could use to modify and extend it in various ways. Following up on an idea that had emerged during the conversation on the jet, ENSU also made public a list of several hundred completely imaginary, nonexistent people against whom campaigns of reckless slander and defamation could now be unleashed, as well as an easy-to-use tool that anyone could exploit to create new such fake persons and reasonably convincing social media shaming campaigns that would make those fake persons the object of real, genuine, sincere obloquy on the part of millions of social media users who were dumb enough to believe everything that scrolled across their screens. Following a brief pause for all of this to propagate, the APE troop would come online at an initial pace of one gigaBraden. Pluto would sit up for a few hours watching its progress through a control panel UI he had running on his laptop, which would plot various metrics for him in real time, using a comprehensive suite of data visualization tools. Then he would sleep for eight hours. Then he would get up and take stock of how it was all going, and make any adjustments he felt were necessary, such as upping the pace to ten gigaBradens if that seemed like a good idea.

  Corvallis got a deck of cards out of the cabinet in the living room and played solitaire for half an hour. Then he went for a walk with Maeve, who was, at least for a day, the most famous woman in the world. She told him about an idea she and Verna had been hatching, somewhere between tech startup, performance art, fashion accessory, and political manifesto. They were going to bring back the veil.

  They waited three more days before holding a press conference. They announced it only an hour ahead of time, then drove into Adelaide and held it in a conference room at Pluto’s hotel. The short notice ensured that it was dominated by Australian media. This worked well. They could be every bit as superficial and tabloidy as media elsewhere, of course, but there was something about this project that seemed to appeal to their collective sense of humor. The atmosphere in the room was jokey and celebratory, and pervaded by a general sense that the Aussies had pulled one over on the rest of the world and that everyone here was in on the joke.

  It was a week before the Bradens went back to something approximating their normal life. By then Pluto had already flown home. Corvallis went back alone on the jet, and Maeve followed him two weeks later. By that point it was possible to stand back and tally the numbers from the Moab hoax and from the ENSU project, which were now increasingly being viewed as two phases of the same basic event—the week that the Miasma had fallen.

  Corvallis and Maeve carried on an odd, colorful long-distance relationship for the next two years. She got pregnant and moved in with him to a big old house in an expensive Seattle neighborhood, which they fixed up for the purpose of raising a family. It was a boy; they named him Vern, after Verna, who died from another recurrence of her cancer a month before he was born. Lucid to the end, Verna donated her brain to science. Specifically, she entrusted it to the Forthrast Family Foundation. The legal documents by which she did so grew more and more complex as the lawyers dreamed up more and more hypothetical contingencies. Having literally no time for such things, she ended up cutting the Gordian knot by saying she wanted “most favored nation” treatment, meaning that whatever was done with Richard Forthrast’s brain should also be done with hers. When Verna’s condition took a turn for the worse, Corvallis and Maeve flew her to Seattle, so that when she died her remains weren’t encumbered by any discrepancies between Australian and U.S. law.

  On a ranch just outside of Moab, they maintained a second home. This did double duty as the headquarters of the Moab Project, a nonprofit organization funded by Corvallis and others—mostly people who had made a lot of money in social media—to sift through hoax-related data and think important thoughts about it.

  The Moab Project investigated and documented the operational details of the hoax in forensic detail, right up to the point where each separate trail of evidence dead-ended in perfect cryptographic anonymity.

  The total budget for the hoax was estimated to have been less than one million dollars. The networks had actually paid out more than that for the privilege of airing fake footage supplied by the hoaxers. Those payments, made in Bitcoin, had gone to anonymous overseas accounts presumably controlled by the hoaxers. Between that and short-selling various affected stocks on Wall Street, it appeared that they had paid for the exploit many times over.

  Which was a mere detail when set against the thirty-one deaths and the direct economic losses, which were way into the tens of billions. Lawsuits filed against social media companies—including Lyke—depressed their valuations, distracted their executives, and took years to resolve.

  The culprit was at first assumed to be an arm of Russian or Chinese intelligence. But the further th
e investigation went, the less likely this seemed. Some of the fake footage had originated from a Chinese computer graphics firm, but this proved nothing. The scripts and other written material, such as fake blogs and social media postings, seemed to have been written by native English speakers.

  More people than just Corvallis began to suspect Elmo Shepherd of being the mastermind. He was a major shareholder, or a member of the board of directors, of more than one company that would profit from what came next. He was libertarian minded, a Bitcoin advocate. And he was from Utah, with a lot of local practical knowledge of conditions on the ground there. And so one school of thought said that he must have done it.

  The opposing school of thought said simply “nah.” Simply “nah.” It was too ridiculous—too far-fetched. The connection to El’s home state was a mere coincidence, or a deliberate scheme to cast suspicion on him.

  Corvallis and Maeve visited Moab less and less frequently as raising Vern made a stay-at-home life seem like the best thing in the world. Two years later they had a daughter named Catherine, and a year after that they adopted Eduardo from Guatemala. Maeve chose not to work full-time. A nanny and a housekeeper, and the many less visible privileges of wealth, gave her enough free time to think about and to lay the groundwork for the VEIL Project, which she hoped would one day finish what she and Verna had started with Sthetix. The Moab hoax receded into the past with swiftness that seemed extraordinary when, years later, Corvallis would, from time to time, be reminded of it somehow, and have cause to review the events in his memory. He, along with many others in the tech world, had arrived at the conclusion that the answer to the riddle must be known by the NSA and other such top secret agencies that had the wherewithal to penetrate the cryptographic screen in which the hoax had been so meticulously shrouded. One day the answer would leak out as some disgruntled employee went rogue or some document was declassified.