Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  “Revenue model?” Julian asked sharply.

  “Sacrifices, tithes, donations to 501(c)(3)s.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “But each person out there”—Enoch did the thing with his chin again—“is getting their own personalized stream of algorithmically generated alternate reality that is locked in a feedback loop with their pulse, blink rate, and so on. You’re not going to get very far trying to get one of those people to tear his attention away from that so that you can relate a story about some guy two thousand years ago feeding a large number of people with a few loaves and fishes.”

  “But they crucify people!” Phil protested.

  “You don’t have to remind me,” Enoch said, greatly amused.

  “That’s a Bible thing.”

  “That’s the cream of the crop who are doing that,” Enoch said. “The one percent. That’s Joseph and a few dozen of his handpicked elite. People you could actually have a conversation with. The other ninety-nine percent don’t know anything about Leviticus and they don’t understand or care about the theology—the repudiation of the doctrine of the New Covenant and the idea of Tactical Jesus. They just know that you had better do what Joseph says, or else. And Joseph for his part gets to claim with a straight face, to anyone who cares, that his approach to law and order has a kind of divine authority.”

  “So who are you in all this? Why’s Jake paying you to risk your life?” Anne-Solenne asked.

  “Yeah, I didn’t catch your last name,” Julian added.

  “Oh, don’t bother Googling. Root is my last name. But it’s a nightmare on Google because it’s an old name that has been in the family forever and so you’ll be pulling up stuff that goes back centuries.”

  “Count of Zelrijk-Aalberg,” Julian muttered, having already ignored Enoch’s admonition not to bother.

  “Yes, there is an old family connection to that place.”

  “One of your ancestors . . .”

  “Was a mathematician. Yes,” Enoch said, getting clipped and impatient as Julian continued sifting through old dead Enoch Root hits.

  “Julian!” Sophia barked, and caught Anne-Solenne’s eye.

  “Yeah, Julian! Snap out of it. Rude, boring.”

  “Okay, okay . . .”

  “I have had some dealings, back in the day, with the Waterhouses and the Shaftoes, and more recently with Elmo Shepherd,” Enoch explained, “and through Elmo I met Jake Forthrast, who imagined that I might be of use, or at least of interest, to his spiritual research. So I am an adviser to ONE and I interpret my responsibilities broadly and some would say creatively.”

  “Some would say a little dangerously!” Sophia put in.

  Enoch considered this as if it were a novel idea and gave just a hint of a shrug.

  “Oh, cool! Fractals,” Julian muttered.

  “Julian! Fuck’s sake,” said Anne-Solenne.

  “Math major?” Enoch asked him.

  “CS and math,” Julian returned.

  “I’ll bite,” said Sophia. “What is the connection to fractals?”

  “One of Enoch’s ancestors was, like, the great-great-granddad of fractal geometry,” Julian reported. “In 1791—”

  “Oh, god, please don’t read the Wikipedia entry,” Enoch said, showing more emotion than when he had been literally crucified.

  “I have an edit overlay that filters out most of the garbage,” said Julian, mildly offended that Enoch had taken him for the kind of person who would actually take Wikipedia at face value.

  “But, Julian, I am sitting right next to you and so you don’t have to consult an online source.”

  “True that,” Julian admitted, and finally shoved his glasses up on his forehead just before Anne-Solenne, flailing at him from the front seat, could claw them off.

  “So, this place Zelrijk-Aalberg straddles the border of Belgium and the Netherlands but has never quite belonged to either of them,” Enoch reported. “It makes Andorra look like Siberia. Its total size is barely large enough to play a regulation game of cricket—supposing that all of its territory could be collected into a continuous oval. But it can’t. The length of its borders is enormous compared to its area. Someone described its map as a doily that had been attacked by moths. It encompasses eleven separate enclaves that are not part of Zelrijk-Aalberg. Four of those are Belgian and seven Dutch. One of the Belgian enclaves contains a Dutch subenclave, and one of the Dutch enclaves contains no fewer than four subenclaves, of which one is Belgian and the remaining three are all parts of Zelrijk-Aalberg proper. The largest of those contains a Belgian sub-subenclave consisting of a single root cellar measuring one by two meters.”

  “Do they sell a lot of fireworks there?” Phil says. “This is jogging a memory of when I was driving around Flanders with my family and we came across this incredibly illegal-looking fireworks stand in the middle of a town.”

  “Most of its revenue, until recently, came from selling fireworks that were illegal in the neighboring countries,” Enoch agreed. “What Julian here is referring to, with the fractals, is a thing that happened when a former count of Zelrijk-Aalberg paid a visit to the property to engage in the ancient custom of beating the bounds.”

  “‘Beating the bounds’?” Phil asked.

  “Oh, this I’ve heard of,” said Anne-Solenne. “They do it in London, and other old places with complicated boundaries. Once a year, an entourage of bigwigs walks the circuit of the property line and beats it with sticks.”

  “Since Roman times,” Enoch said, “the boundary of Zelrijk-Aalberg has been litigated over in documents that, were they all stored in one location, would more than occupy all of the available space in the country. Many of those made references to landmarks such as trees that had died centuries ago, creeks that had changed their courses over time, or buildings that had not existed since the days of Charlemagne. Lacking modern conveniences such as GPS, the locals had fallen into the habit of using available landmarks to define the boundary. Every so often the count of Zelrijk-Aalberg would walk that boundary and beat said landmarks with a stick as an aid to memory, just as Anne-Solenne says. On one such occasion, this count—who happened to be mathematically inclined—was making his way across a tavern that straddled the boundary. The tavern had a tile floor with a long crack running across it. It had become an accepted fact that the crack constituted part of the boundary. The tavern actually dates to the 1170s and the crack is mentioned in a legal document, handwritten on vellum in the Year of Our Lord 1219. So, the count was sidestepping along this crack, whacking it with his ceremonial stick while his lawyers and servants looked on, when he got to noticing that it rambled this way and that, as cracks are wont to do, and that if one bent down and stared at a small portion of it through one’s lorgnette, one could see smaller ramblings superimposed on the larger ones, and so on and so forth. As a sort of practical joke he instructed a surveyor to calculate the precise length of this part of the boundary, taking into account all of its turnings this way and that. In less time than it took for the count to drink a tankard of beer, the surveyor had produced an answer. The count disputed the figure, threatened to strike the surveyor with his boundary-beating stick, and commanded him to measure it again, this time on his hands and knees using a ruler. In the meanwhile the count consumed another beer. The surveyor turned in a revised figure that was somewhat larger. The count renewed his threat and ordered him to repeat it a third time using a magnifying glass and a set of fine calipers.”

  “So, that’s fractals in a nutshell right there,” Julian said. “The point being that the length of the crack—”

  “—and hence of Zelrijk-Aalberg’s border—” Enoch added.

  “—doesn’t actually have any one fixed value that can be known. The result of the measurement will depend on the resolution of the measuring device used.”

  “This particular ancestor of mine didn’t actually live in Z-A, or visit it that often. He had an estate in Germany that was a thousand times as large. After all
of this happened he went back there and wrote a paper about it, which was forgotten until the 1960s, when it came to light in the course of a dispute about who had first invented certain concepts from fractal geometry.”

  With that it seemed as though the four Princetonians had arrived at the collective determination that Enoch was cool. Much older than them, to be certain, and with little in common, but definitely one of the gang for the next day and a half.

  Any number of further questions could, of course, be asked of this man: where he had come from, how he had spent his career, and so on. And indeed some such questions did get asked as the sun swung slowly round into the west, coming hard into the windshield, and took its sweet time skidding toward the flat horizon before unceremoniously plunging behind a line of black thunderheads. Enoch’s answers tended to be vague, brief, and self-deprecating. He had a knack for segueing into some other topic that was invariably more interesting than whatever had just been asked of him. Consequently you could ask him questions all day long. But at the end of that day, you’d have spent three minutes getting answers and many hours talking about other things—and you’d prefer it that way.

  The car was perfectly capable of driving through the night as its occupants slumbered, but it was cramped, and so they pulled off the interstate into a little oasis and hustled into the lobby of a chain motel just as wild fat drops of rain were beginning to smack down, exploding like water balloons, driven on sage-scented winds. The place had been built to serve as a truck stop back when trucks burned liquid fuel and were piloted by humans. Now it had adapted by turning into an automated facility for people traveling as they were. The rooms themselves hadn’t changed in a quarter of a century, but the interface for checking in and paying for them had been ripped out and replaced by much newer and more gleaming systems. So it all looked good on the way in but was appallingly gloomy once you actually got into the room. It was, in fact, the sort of room you could only tolerate when your eyes were closed.

  Sophia wasn’t going to close her eyes for a while, partly because she wasn’t that tired, but also partly because she was afraid of what she would see in the nightmares she assumed must be coming. She walked back down the long corridor to the front of the building, where there was a common area serving in lieu of lobby, restaurant, and bar. And in lieu of human staff there were vending machines. Enoch Root was there; he had already availed himself of a hot dog and a Heineken. “I had my eyes on the Szechuan noodle bowl,” he remarked, “but couldn’t work out how to manage the chopsticks.”

  Sophia got the noodle bowl and a bottle of flavored seltzer and sat across the table from him. He had got rid of the ice packs, so his fingers were now all peeking out from tunnels of bandaging that in turn peeked out from the sleeves of a black hoodie. He had the hood up, maybe to shield his head from an air-conditioning system that was still on full blast even though a prairie thunderstorm was frosting the windowsills with BBs of white ice. This gave him a monkish aspect and, combined with the weird purple-green light of the storm and the frequent flashes of lightning, made the lobby seem like one of those roadside inns where Dungeons and Dragons campaigns invariably kicked off.

  “Enough about me,” Enoch said, though they hadn’t talked about him at all. “What is your plan? I get that most of you have internships lined up on the West Coast?”

  “Yes, and I am one of those,” Sophia said. “I get off in Seattle. The others will go south to the Bay Area.”

  “Seattle. Your hometown?” he asked, just for the sake of politeness, since he already knew this.

  “Yes.”

  “Your parents are looking forward to seeing you, I’m sure.”

  “They don’t know I’m coming.”

  “Then they are in for a delightful surprise.”

  “I hope so. I’ve been sort of pulling the wool over my mom’s eyes.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  “Well, my first choice for an internship was the Forthrast Family Foundation. But I didn’t want to be seen as having obtained the position because of the family connection. So I applied anonymously.”

  “Using a PURDAH.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But that must be a routine procedure for an organization as enlightened as the FFF.”

  “Oh, certainly. I just didn’t mention anything to my mom.”

  “How remarkable,” Enoch said, “that of all the interests a brilliant young lady such as you might pursue, you landed on one that is best pursued at the Forthrast Family Foundation.”

  “Your tone of voice, Enoch, suggests you don’t really see it as a coincidence.” Sophia laughed.

  “My tone is only meant to convey curiosity.”

  “Well, of course, it’s not a coincidence,” she admitted. “How much do you remember, Enoch, from when you were four years old?”

  He smiled. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Well, that’s all I have of my uncle Dodge. Richard Forthrast. Those kinds of ill-formed memories. Just a few images. Moments.”

  “You are speaking,” Enoch said, “of the man whose brain was the first to be scanned using a fully modern procedure.” Which of course Sophia knew perfectly well. So the same words could have come across as mansplaining. But Enoch managed to deliver them in a mild tone and with respectful, inquiring glances as Sophia, making it clear that he was in fact working with her to move the conversation forward. “A procedure that was carried out by the FFF and that yielded a database—”

  “The DB. Dodge’s Brain.”

  “—that has been the cynosure of brain researchers ever since. You are one of those, I take it.”

  “A brain researcher? Not exactly. I guess I’m coming at it more from the digital than the analog-slash-biological side.”

  Enoch nodded. “You want to go into Dodge’s Brain with computational tools and—do what?”

  “Well, it’s already mid-June. Two months from now I’ll be staring at a blank screen, getting ready to write up my findings. Supposing there are any.”

  “Not a lot of time to delve deep.”

  “Frankly, a waste of time if that’s all I’m going to do,” Sophia admitted.

  “No more so than most summer internships,” Enoch confided in her.

  “What I’m really aiming to do is to tee up a senior thesis project.”

  “Ah.”

  “And if I can show progress on that, a year from now, when I graduate, then hopefully it segues into grad school or a job.”

  “You’re igniting a career.”

  “Gotta start somewhere.”

  They were interrupted by a brilliant lightning flash and a slow rolling thunderclap that took forever to settle down. Enoch seemed to take it as a cue to shift gears. “Suppose all of that comes to pass, Sophia, and you get that job and embark on that career. Twenty years from now, how will you know if you have succeeded?”

  It was not a question she had ever asked herself and so it wrong-footed her. First because she lacked an answer and second because of slow-building embarrassment. She should have thought about this. She’d never done so.

  “It’s okay,” Enoch assured her after her silence had grown awkward. “Few people actually make decisions on that basis. I was curious in a more general way about the big questions. Where it’s all going.”

  “Brain research, you mean?”

  “Oh, that’s been going on since at least Tom Willis. I am referring to the branch of it that seems to aspire to becoming a consumer product.”

  “Bringing brains back to life in the cloud,” Sophia guessed.

  Enoch nodded and turned his head to gaze out the window into the storm. “I’m a go-between. On the one side is Elmo Shepherd, who believes fully that brains can be simulated—and that once the simulation is switched on, you’ll reboot in exactly the same state as when you last lost consciousness. Like waking up from a nap. On the other side is Jake, who believes in the existence of an ineffable spirit that cannot be re-created in computer code.”

 
; “What do you believe, Enoch?”

  “Jake’s opinion is based on a theology I do not agree with. But like a lot of theologies it can do duty as a cracked mirror or a smudged lens through which we might be able to glimpse things that are informative. I don’t know about an ineffable spirit, but I do have a suspicion that there are aspects of who we are that will not come back when our brains are scanned and simulated by the likes of Elmo. It’s not clear to me that memory will work, for example, when its physical referents are gone. It’s not clear that the brain will know what to do with itself in the absence of a body. Particularly, a body with sensory organs feeding it a coherent picture of the world.”

  “The picture has to add up,” Sophia said, just thinking aloud. “It has to be a coherent and consistent rendering of the world.”

  “Of a world, at any rate,” Enoch said.

  The storm passed over at some point during the night and they awoke to a clear sunny morning, much cooler than yesterday. After a vending-machine breakfast and robot-brewed coffee, they got back into the fully charged car and headed west. It would be all interstates, all day long, until they got to the turnoff for Moab. Compared to the traffic they’d seen yesterday on the road to Sioux City, this had fewer and fewer vehicles of the Ameristani type the farther west they went. The western plains had been tough to live on even in the cooler, rainier heyday of white settlement and were now well on their way to becoming a desert. They simply couldn’t support that many humans, and the flat land and sluggish rivers held no appeal for recreationalists or builders of vacation homes. It was drive-over country. Wind turbines were gradually supplanted by photovoltaic farms as the day went on and the Rocky Mountains began to crumple the horizon. During the morning, as they hummed across the plain at the car’s maximum speed, the four Princetonians “worked,” which meant that they lost themselves in a stew of academics, internship prep, and whatever their editors threw at them in the way of news, social media, and entertainment. Sophia “drove” and Enoch rode shotgun. For, since he lacked glasses and had nothing to do besides stare out the windshield, it seemed polite to let him have that seat. They had a sophisticated and cosmopolitan lunch in downtown Denver followed by a couple of hours’ traversal of the Rockies: a mosaic of expensive recreation opportunities, speckled with little high-density communities where the servant class dwelled in prefab homes. Then back down into the rough-and-tumble desert of the Intermountain West, no less hostile than what lay east of the Rockies, but far more rewarding to look at.