Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  When the answer came to him, it came from a surprising quarter. Corvallis attended a meeting at the headquarters of the Forthrast Family Foundation in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle. The meeting’s purpose was to go over some dry but necessary legal matters with people representing Elmo Shepherd’s nonprofit. After several years of intensive R & D, and the expenditure of nearly two billion dollars pooled by Forthrast-, Waterhouse-, and Shepherd-funded entities, they’d finally constructed an ion-beam scanning device capable of capturing the full connectome of a human brain, and the “back end” of hardware and software needed to process the data that would pour out of such a machine. Fifteen hundred patent applications had been filed: enough to keep a phalanx of patent attorneys and paralegals busy for years. Twelve different major universities and medical centers were involved. Brilliant young lawyers were building their entire careers around the attendant complexities. A few of them were in this meeting, presenting ready-to-sign documents on which they’d toiled for years. Corvallis, Zula, and others were there just to sign them.

  One of the people on Elmo Shepherd’s side of the table was pretty senior—surprisingly so given that all of the big decisions had already been made by this point. He met Corvallis’s eye from time to time, and checked his watch, and gazed out the window in a manner that seemed significant, and indeed when the meeting concluded he approached Corvallis and inquired in the most gentle and polite way whether he might have a moment of private time with him.

  His name was Sinjin Kerr. Depending on who was keeping score he was Elmo Shepherd’s first-, second-, or third-most important legal henchman. His role was generally that of Good Cop. In his appearance and grooming he was a straight-from-central-casting Harvard/Yale product with swept-back hair, rimless glasses, and an impeccable suit, protected for this occasion under an overcoat.

  They ended up strolling down to the lakefront and, seemingly on the spur of the moment, renting a little electric boat from a business that catered to the tourist trade. Business was light because spring was being a little slow to turn into summer. It was cool and the lenses of Sinjin’s glasses were already flecked with tiny droplets of rain.

  Sinjin sat down at the controls and piloted the boat out into the middle of the little lake. This had always been monitored by steep hills to the east and west but during the last couple of decades had been hemmed in along its southern reach by high-rise buildings occupied by tech companies. Some vestiges of old Seattle remained, including a seaplane terminal that helped make life good for tourists and for geeks who liked quick getaways to Vancouver or the San Juan Islands. Everyone who lived and worked within earshot had grown accustomed to the occasional sound of propellers coming up to speed as one of these planes made its takeoff run across the lake.

  The water was a bit choppy, as the wind had come up and brought with it a gentle but assiduous rain. They deployed the boat’s folding canvas cover, snapping it to the top edge of the windshield. Sinjin dropped the throttle to the minimum needed to maintain headway and pottered about, keeping an eye out for outgoing and incoming planes. As this seemingly pointless idyll went on, Corvallis got the impression that he was timing some of his utterances so that the most important words would be spoken just when a seaplane was droning overhead. Sometimes Sinjin would turn toward Corvallis, prop an elbow casually on the boat’s dashboard, and raise his hand to cover his mouth. Only later, in memory, did Corvallis understand that he had done so to hide his message from any lip readers who might be tracking them through telescopes.

  They’d been chatting about their respective families. Catching up with each other, as people did when they were maintaining these long-running, sporadic business relationships.

  “You might find it a curious thing, Corvallis, that your family is an inadvertent, and happy, by-product of something that Mr. Shepherd was involved with,” Sinjin mumbled through his fingers as a plane buzzed past them at full throttle.

  Corvallis was a while processing that news. There was only one way to make sense of it: El was behind the Moab hoax that had brought Maeve and Corvallis together.

  Sinjin seemed to derive a bit of light amusement from watching him think about it. “Your next question ought to be, why did I just tell you that?”

  “Not because you get a kick out of snitching on your client, I’m guessing.”

  Sinjin thought that was funny. “Indeed. Otherwise I’d have a very fun, very brief career. No, it’s my job to look out for Mr. Shepherd’s interests. I’m divulging this to you, and you only, because the time has come when his interests are best served by allowing you, Corvallis, to have a broader understanding of the context within which Mr. Shepherd and his foundations and companies have been operating.”

  “I’ve suspected from day one that El was responsible for Moab,” Corvallis said. “Up to a point it kind of made sense. The Internet—what Dodge used to call the Miasma—had just gone completely wrong. Down to the molecular level it was still a hippie grad student project. Like a geodesic dome that a bunch of flower children had assembled from scrap lumber on ground infested with termites and carpenter ants. So rotten that rot was the only thing that was holding it together. So I can totally see why El or anyone with a shred of crypto knowledge would want to just burn it down. To make it so that no one would ever trust it again. Moab was a pretty effective way of doing that, and ENSU came along right on its heels and dumped a 747-load of gasoline on that fire. But the other shoe never dropped.”

  “What do you suppose the other shoe ought to have been in this case?” Sinjin asked.

  Corvallis was about to answer, then stopped himself, sensing the absurdity of it.

  Sinjin let him work it out on his own for a bit, then, in a gentle tone that barely rose above the lapping of the waves on the boat’s hull, said, “Elmo Shepherd releases a statement a week after Moab in which he fesses up. Pulls back the veil. Maybe plays some behind-the-scenes video showing how the hoax was staged—a blooper reel of the actors, some ‘making of’ footage about burn makeup and CGI mushroom clouds. ‘All this was done on a one-million-dollar budget,’ he says, and gives a sermon about how if he can get you to believe Moab was nuked by spending a million bucks, just imagine what the Russians and the big Internet companies are doing to your mind every day with much larger budgets. Followed by a pitch for a cryptographically secure successor to the Internet.”

  “Yeah,” Corvallis said. “That’s pretty much what I had in mind in the way of an other shoe.”

  “That video was actually made,” Sinjin said.

  “No shit!?”

  “I kid you not. I was there, Corvallis. I vetted the script and sat off camera while he read it off the teleprompter. That whole video was in the can, ready to go, before the exploit was launched.”

  “But he changed his mind.”

  “By degrees.”

  “What?”

  “El changed his mind by degrees, over a period of weeks. He was holed up in Z-A to avoid any possible issues around extradition.”

  As Corvallis knew, Z-A was Zelrijk-Aalberg, a Flemish nano-state and tax haven where El had been spending most of his time the last few years.

  “So there was a degree of insulation from legal consequences—but even so he was disconcerted by how effective it had been. By the fact that people died.”

  “I can see how that would give you pause,” Corvallis said, a bit sarcastically.

  Sinjin raised his eyes studiously and declined to rise to the bait. “So the airing of the video was delayed, and delayed again, as he pondered his next move. ENSU happened and seemed to take the wind out of his sails. He wasn’t expecting that.”

  “It did a lot of his work for him,” Corvallis said, nodding. “Made the same point.”

  “Inasmuch as ENSU succeeded, it made Moab seem unnecessary. Cack-handed. Inasmuch as ENSU failed, it made him wonder whether there was any real future in his own visions for a secure Internet.”

  “When you say ENSU failed, you’re r
eferring to the fact that—”

  “That billions of people went on believing everything they saw on the Internet in spite of it.”

  “I can’t argue with that,” Corvallis said.

  “Then you must feel a little of what Elmo Shepherd felt,” Sinjin said.

  “Why fight it?”

  Sinjin nodded. “What’s the point? The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There’s no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool’s errand.”

  “Seems kind of bleak. There are things you could do in the way of education—”

  “Not if your primary focus is on preparing for the next world.”

  “You mean, what happens after death.”

  Sinjin nodded.

  “I’ve seen El on social media, suggesting that Moab actually was nuked. Like, openly pandering to the people who still believe that,” Corvallis said. “I don’t see how that helps. That’s crazy.”

  “Exactly!” Sinjin said, brightening. “This brings us back to the main thread of this conversation.”

  “Which is?” Corvallis asked, throwing up his hands in bewilderment.

  “El’s going crazy.”

  Corvallis turned to look Sinjin in the eye. Sinjin wasn’t joking.

  “Elmo Shepherd suffers—has always suffered—from an incurable genetic disorder. I’ll tell you the medical name later and you can Google it if you want to know the gory details. It runs in his family. He’s been aware of it since he was in college. One of its inevitable results is a degeneration of the brain that typically begins when the sufferer is in his forties or fifties. Mr. Shepherd is fifty-two.”

  “Okay,” Corvallis said, after a pause to consider this news. “I see what you mean about the main line of the conversation. Everything he’s done with Ephrata Life Sciences, the preservation and scanning of brains—it all relates to this.”

  “We are all mortal,” Sinjin said grandly, “and we differ only in the extent to which we ignore that fact. Mr. Shepherd was never granted the luxury of being able to ignore it and so he has prepared for it with greater forethought than most.”

  “How does Moab fit in?”

  “I wish I knew,” Sinjin sighed. “In addition to the things you and I talk about—the brain stuff—there is a vast scope of other activity. He compartmentalizes well, so I don’t always know of these projects until he chooses to make me aware of them. But in the last year or so I have become conscious of an acceleration.”

  “You mean, he’s getting sick faster, or kicking these projects up into high gear?”

  “Both. And since ‘getting sick’ here is a euphemism for going crazy, well, you can probably see that I have a quite interesting job. When one of his fascinating projects comes to light, as it does from time to time, I honestly can’t say whether Mr. Shepherd is pursuing some profound strategy or succumbing to his disease.” Sinjin paused for a few moments—a rare occasion in which it seemed he was groping for words. “You should understand that El thinks highly of you and of Zula Forthrast. In my judgment, he would not knowingly take actions that were in any way injurious to either of you.”

  “‘Knowingly’ being the key word in that sentence,” Corvallis said.

  “Indeed, Corvallis, just as the existence of your beautiful young family is an unpredictable side effect of one of my client’s more imaginative projects, there’s no telling what the future may hold as Mr. Shepherd’s disease progresses toward its inevitable conclusion and his affairs pass into the management not just of me, but of others he has decided to entrust with this or that task. Until he changes his mind, however, I’m your man when it comes to all things brain related.”

  “When does he want to do it?” Corvallis asked.

  Sinjin said nothing for a while. He pretended to pay attention to some important nearby boat traffic.

  “That’s his dilemma, isn’t it?” Corvallis went on. “On the one hand, he should wait until the technology is better proven. On the other, his brain is degenerating, and he knows it. What’s the point in perfectly preserving a brain that has gone to pieces?”

  “It’s a question we could all ask ourselves,” Sinjin said. “He just has to ask it every minute of every day.”

  Part 3

  12

  Seventeen years after Richard Forthrast’s death

  The ancestral home of the Forthrasts was situated in the northwestern quadrant of Iowa: a two-hundred-mile-wide quadrangle defined by Interstates 80 and 90 to the south and north, and 29 and 35 to the west and east. It was now being displayed in miniature, superimposed on a coffee table in an eating club at Princeton University, visible only to Sophia and to the friends she had shared it with: Phil, Julian, and Anne-Solenne. They could see it as long as they were wearing their glasses.

  They were planning a summer road trip. They had worked it out as far as Des Moines by following interstate highways. Now Sophia was proposing a diagonal transit to Sioux City on two-lane roads. The very idea of it had led first to blank stares, then to head scratching, and finally to outright concern among Sophia’s traveling companions. The conversation had stalled entirely, and the plan for their summer adventure had been at risk of collapse, until a solution had taken shape in the agile brain, and sprung from the perfectly sculpted lips, of Sophia’s boyfriend Phil: “Look. I’m just not going to tell my parents—or anyone—that we are temporarily going off grid.”

  This had led to a pause as they admired the audacity of it. Sophia decided on the spot not to dump Phil for at least another few weeks. Julian and Anne-Solenne, who had been draped over each other on a couch opposite, disentangled and put their brains in gear. “Well,” said Anne-Solenne, probing the idea for weaknesses, “you’d pretty much have to tell your editor—unless you’re truly shutting everything off. Going actually dark.”

  “Sure!” Phil agreed. “You know what I mean.”

  “We would all have to align, as far as that goes,” Julian pointed out, “since everyone is going to know we are traveling as a group. I think that my editor would be willing to tell a little white lie for—how long?”

  Sophia shrugged. “The roads are decent by the standards of Ameristan. Farmers need roads to move stuff around, so they don’t see them as a government plot—they don’t tear them up on principle, they don’t ANFO the bridges. There are not a lot of roadblocks. So, call it two days, with one night at the farmhouse—which is in a little pocket of blue.” She leaned forward so that she could reach the coffee table to which she’d anchored the virtual map. The four interstates aligned roughly with the table’s edges. To her and Phil, Des Moines was in the near right corner and Sioux City in the far left, next to Anne-Solenne’s knee. “We are crossing diagonally,” she said. “We say goodbye to Phil’s car in Des Moines—”

  Phil had pushed his glasses up on his forehead. So he could no longer see the map. He wasn’t paying attention to Sophia. He had got stuck on what Julian had last said. “That’s your editor’s job,” he pointed out. He spread the fingers of his left hand in just the faintest hint of a dismissive gesture, putting Sophia on hold.

  “Actually,” Julian said, “I kinda think her job is to do whatever my mom and dad—who pay her to edit for our whole family—want her to do.”

  Phil shook his head. “You might as well save some money and just subscribe to an edit stream if that’s how it is.”

  Julian was exasperated. “As long as Mom and Dad are paying for my hookup—”

  “See, this is why you have to get your own editor.”

  The two women exchanged a look, the meaning of which was that Sophia gave Anne-Solenne permission to yell at Sophia’s boyfriend. She did so: “Wake up! Not everyone can afford a cool hipster editor in New York.” She delivered this with the sweet/blunt blend that had caused Sophia to fall platonically in love with her during their freshman year. Together, Sophia and Anne-Solenne were token holders on t
hree different collective PURDAHs, which was a way of saying that their identities had become commingled in ways that could never be undone. Software written by one of those had led to Anne-Solenne’s summer internship in San Francisco. Getting her there was the nominal purpose of the road trip that they were now planning.

  “That’s not what I’m suggesting,” Phil said. “Manila, Calcutta, Lagos, all teeming with totally cool native-English-speaking eds who’ll cost less than what you spend on coffee.”

  “It’s a sore subject in my family,” Julian said. “There’s a whole subtree of cousins who went off the rails because they went in together on a bad editor who ended up mainlining Byelorussian propaganda into their feeds. We lost a whole branch of the family, basically. So my mom in particular is super sensitive about this.”

  This actually shut Phil up long enough for Sophia to lunge forward and put her thumb down on Des Moines. “Assume we solve the problem of getting our families not to lose their shit over the fact that we are venturing off-interstate for two whole days,” she said. “Like I said, we hop out of Phil’s car here, just take overnight bags, leave most of the luggage in it, and tell it to meet us in Sioux City.” For the benefit of those who did not know their Iowa geography, she pointed at same, and Anne-Solenne helpfully positioned her espresso cup on it, near where Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota came together. Phil pulled his glasses back down over his eyes so that he could see.

  “It’ll get there in just a few hours,” Sophia went on. “After that it can drive around Sioux City at random or hang out in a parking space until we catch up with it. Meanwhile we switch to a rental vehicle that is better suited for local conditions.”

  A pause as all imagined local conditions.

  “And—what I will euphemistically call local guides?”

  “I really don’t think that they are necessary. Not where we’re going. But the rental company won’t let us do a one-way without them.”