Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  The VEIL was more likely to be worn by persons in the Venn diagram intersection of “young,” “geeky,” and “countercultural.” It was no surprise to find people like that on Capitol Hill. Zula was pretty sure that these three young ladies were on their way to the prep school a few blocks away. Over the coming half an hour, as she made her way down the hill into the South Lake Union district, the ambient culture would shift; it would still be geeky as hell, but the average age would trend upward, and people’s countercultural instincts would be muted or absent. Up here, though, wearing a VEIL was no more remarkable than having a stud in your nose. The building’s security system noticed VEILed passersby and marked them as mildly interesting—hence the yellow signal in Zula’s glasses—but it wasn’t quite the same thing as wearing a black ski mask.

  “Epiphanic Identity” had not been thrown in just to make the acronym work. The words had particular meanings.

  “Epiphany” was a deep, crazy, metaphysical/religious term. The last two syllables came from a Greek word meaning “to show” or “to appear.” The prefix was what made it interesting. “Epi-” meant “upon” or “on top of” or “in addition to” and thus suggested that epiphany was not just appearance in a naked, bald sense but something a little more indirect, more layered. In the Bible when you saw an epiphany you weren’t seeing God directly but some kind of avatar or manifestation thereof.

  “Identity” had been forever changed by the Internet; formerly it had meant “who you really are” but now it meant “any one of a number of persistent faces that you can present to the digital universe.”

  The VEIL had been engineered as a double-edged weapon. Yes, it jammed the facial-recognition algorithms that would enable any camera, anywhere, to know your true name. But the pattern of lights that a VEIL projected on the user’s face wasn’t mere noise. It was a signal designed to convey data to any computer vision system smart enough to read it. The protocol had been published by ENSU and was formidable in its sophistication, but the upshot was that a VEIL could, if the user so chose, project the equivalent of a barcode: a number linking the user to a PURDAH.

  It was all completely optional and unnecessary, which was part of the point; most people didn’t know or care about any of this and simply did things openly under their own names. But it was easy, and free, and recommended, that when you were starting out in life you establish at least one PURDAH, so that you could begin compiling a record of things that you had done. You could link it to your actual legal name and face if you wanted, or not. And either way you could punch it into your VEIL system so that as you walked down the street, computer vision systems, even though they couldn’t recognize your actual face, could look up your PURDAH and from there see any activity blockchained to it.

  All three of the laughing, coffee-toting, VEIL-wearing schoolgirls had done this as a matter of course. It was probably a free-and-mandatory service offered by their prep school. The security cameras on the front of Zula’s condo building had looked them up. For that matter, Zula’s glasses had outward-looking cameras that could have done the same thing, had she shown any interest. She didn’t bother. But the odds were that their PURDAH records were all carefully gardened and censored by some combination of their parents and their school. Their names and faces would be concealed. But there was probably enough public data to suggest that they were exactly what they looked like: ordinary schoolgirls, VEILed and in PURDAH, not because they wanted to hide any malign intentions, but just to keep the creeps at bay, and to make sure that when they turned in their SATs and their AP exams, they’d be judged fairly.

  18

  Zula turned downhill and began walking briskly. This was her main form of exercise. Where she worked—the headquarters of the Forthrast Family Foundation—there was an employee gym. And where she lived, there was a gym for the use of residents and their guests. As she walked down Capitol Hill and into South Lake Union, she passed a windowless pink building with a tiny sign on the door that according to rumor was a boutique gym, so exclusive that you had to apply for membership and pass strenuous tests. Another gym, a few blocks farther along, occupied the entire ground floor of a skyscraper; several dozen elliptical trainers were lined up facing the window, occupied by early-rising, heavy-breathing nerds watching movies or doing work in head-mounted displays. She passed a steampunk gym where historically aware nerds with waxed mustaches worked out with Indian clubs of polished mahogany sourced from ecologically sustainable plantations. A glassed-in crag of artificial stone where harnessed nerds groped at CAD/CAMmed handholds with chalky fingers. A revamped warehouse where robed nerds fought solemn duels with simulated light sabers. A striped tent where upside-down nerds swung by their knees from a flying trapeze. An open-air obstacle course where parkour ninjas vaulted fences and ran vertically up concrete walls. A park where squads of nerds dropped and did push-ups under the faux-stern glare of a pretend drill sergeant. A thumping boîte where female nerds practiced their pole dancing. Cementing these establishments together like mortar between bricks was an equally far-fetched assortment of dining and drinking establishments where those who had just worked off a lot of calories and tuned up their bodies could further enhance their health by drinking smoothies made of pulverized botanical curiosities, or balance the scales by consuming things that were decidedly not good for them.

  Zula had actually tried many of those cool new forms of exercise, and was likely to try more, for social reasons if nothing else. Csongor played in a hockey league that appeared to supply 90 percent of his needs in the way of both exercise and companionship. Zula too had gardened her social life by signing up for new exercise programs with female friends. But she had never stuck with any of them. Her only consistent form of exercise was walking to and from work, which she did alone, almost every day.

  Walking this gantlet of physical fitness options often got her musing. These clean, affluent, well-informed techies certainly knew how to enjoy having bodies. At work they lived in their heads. Their free time was spent in the pleasures of exertion, of a hot shower after, of eating and drinking, and of going home to have sex, or at least a good night’s sleep, on firm mattresses covered in clean high-quality linens. There was nothing exactly wrong with it. But Zula had spent her early years in a refugee camp where sources of physical pleasure, or even comfort, had been few and far between. And somewhat later in her life she had spent a few weeks traveling against her will in the company of jihadists who had either come from, or made a choice to migrate to, some of the most hard-bitten places in the world. She abhorred everything about them. Yet she couldn’t help seeing all of this through their eyes. Jihadists, who were obsessed with a particular kind of religion, would see the gyms and the restaurants as temples to a false god, where people went to distract themselves from the reality that they were all sooner or later going to get sick and die. After which, if you believed what they believed, you’d meet your maker and be duly punished for having spent so much of your life reveling in pleasure.

  None of which was particularly original—every sentient person had to fulfill a certain minimum quota of ruminating about this stuff—but in Zula’s case it was all turned around and upside down because of what had happened with Uncle Richard seventeen years ago. This had become her career.

  It had taken her several of those years simply to understand and accept that her identity—the holograph that she was writing every day of her life—had been altered by it. Not so much the death itself as the ensuing legal and financial complications. The dispute over Dodge’s will meant nothing as far as its practical effect on her life was concerned; either way, she was rich, and her offspring would never want for anything material. But in monetary terms the difference was quite large. And, when they got that big, sums of money took on wills of their own. Which maybe explained why the document at the root of the matter was called a “will.”

  The family’s share of the money had long since been wired to Iowa and ceased to be any of Zula’s concern, except
for those increasingly rare occasions when she would be called on to give a deposition or sign an affidavit connected with the semiautonomous subbranch of the legal profession supported by the ecosystem of lawsuits that had been spawned by a few ill-chosen words. The balance of Richard’s fortune—most of it, actually—had gone to the Forthrast Family Foundation. Zula had been its president and director from day one, and it was increasingly obvious that she would never have any other job. She paid herself a reasonable salary—nothing that would raise the eyebrows of the foundation’s board—and she devoted her career to seeing to it that her uncle’s fortune was applied toward the causes he would have favored. His money had attracted more donations, mostly from old friends of his who wanted to get in on a good thing.

  During the first decade, the problem had been finding responsible ways to spend the money faster than it accumulated. This was like shoveling your driveway during a blizzard. When foundation money needed to be parked, she had at first put it in simple index funds. This reassured her she wasn’t missing out on any market moves, without her paying a lot for fancy advisers. Slowly she’d begun moving money into financial bots running algorithms too complicated for any human to understand. These had performed better than the humans. In one case, a single bot had made so much money over a span of several consecutive years that it had more than doubled the foundation’s endowment. As a result, the proportion of the foundation’s money controlled by inscrutable artificial intelligences had become disproportionate to what was parked in old-fashioned funds and stocks.

  Uncle Richard hadn’t exactly knocked himself out providing specifics as to what the foundation should be spending the money on. She’d had leeway that had daunted her. She’d spent more than she should have getting expert advice, then fired the experts. Running the foundation would have been easy had its sole purpose been, say, to preserve a rare species of tree snail. Instead the will’s language had pointed her in the general direction of supporting research that was somehow beneficial to mankind but somehow related to game technology. Which could mean just about anything.

  The foundation’s headquarters was constructed on a pier that projected a short distance from the southern shore of Lake Union. This was the only remarkable thing about it; other than that, the building was as generic as it could be. During the early days, she had entertained proposals from world-famous architects who saw the job as an opportunity to make a statement. They’d expressed it in more high-flown language, but what it boiled down to was that they wanted to build something really cool. Zula’s sympathies had been with them, but she’d gone with boring instead. For, as a new and inexperienced director who could justly be accused of having got the job through nepotism, she needed to send the message that she wasn’t just screwing around with her uncle’s money. The other billionaires, the self-made men whom no one would question, they could put their money into building outlandish structures. But Zula had built something that was just another Class A office building that would appreciate in value along with all the other buildings like it and that could be liquidated on the market as easily as a pork belly. The upper two floors had been reserved for the Forthrast Family Foundation and the lower four had been leased to other organizations.

  She relaxed her pace as she drew near. The building’s network recognized her from a block away and caused a little status indicator to appear in the corner of her vision. The doors opened for her automatically and she walked into the lobby. This building too had a roving security guard; he’d seen her coming and wandered over to the entrance so that he could greet her with a nod and a smile. The building knew that she had arrived and that she’d be wanting an elevator to the sixth floor, but let her know that regrettably there would be a wait of between thirty and sixty seconds; this was the busiest time of day for the lifts. She considered taking the stairs but decided against it since her knee was talking to her. She waited before the elevator banks along with some of the regulars she saw every day, and a few visitors, there for meetings or job interviews. Those were discernible because they had to engage in old-school navigation schemes like reading the building directory and physically pressing elevator buttons.

  One of them, a grizzled, red-bearded guy with a somewhat shaggy academic vibe, gave her side-eye as he did so. He was likely en route to ONE, the Organization for New Eschatology, which occupied the second floor. Very likely he had business with Zula’s one surviving uncle, Jake Forthrast. It wasn’t the first time Zula had seen this guy. As he reached out to press the elevator button, his hand shot loose from the ragged sleeve of his hoodie to reveal a Band-Aid on the back of the wrist. When his hand returned to his side, she noticed a matching Band-Aid on the inner wrist. Other than that, his hands seemed normal. But Zula realized, from this detail, that this must be the guy, Enoch what’s-his-name, who had recently been crucified in Nebraska while running some kind of errand for Jake. She considered saying hello to him and introducing herself but wasn’t sure how to strike up a chat with someone who had just been through that. For his part, he clearly knew who she was, and gave her a polite nod. But it seemed he did not wish to intrude on her privacy.

  Jake had personally ended up with the same amount of money as all of John and Alice’s descendants put together. Jake’s family was smaller and simpler—he had three sons who were almost a generation younger than the children of John and Alice, and no grandchildren as yet. Unlike Alice, he had decided to retain control of his share of the money personally, rather than divvying it up among his descendants. He was a survivalist living in a cabin in the north woods and hadn’t a clue what to do with all of that money. For the most part he had just followed Zula’s lead, investing in the same portfolio of stocks, funds, and financial bots as the foundation. To the extent he’d spent any of it, he had done so on helping Zula clean up the peculiar state of affairs that had arisen concerning what should be done with Richard’s brain.

  The Organization for New Eschatology was an outgrowth of that. Occupying the Venn diagram intersection of everything that the Internet hated, it had drawn a nearly infinite amount of derision. Some of that had been deserved; it had taken Jake a couple of years and a few million dollars in misspent funds before he had really got the hang of running a nonprofit.

  In essence, it had forced Jake to grow up and get his shit together—not just financially, but philosophically as well. As Zula and Alice had both feared, Jake had, at first, plowed some of the money into some of the wackier causes that he had got into the habit of believing in, and built his family’s life around, in Idaho. But becoming rich had changed what he believed, not by the more academic route of challenging his evidence and debating his logic, but by changing the sorts of things that he was predisposed to want to believe.

  In addition to spawning ONE, the disposition of Richard’s brain had yoked the Forthrast Family Foundation together with the even larger Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation and kept them all in a perennially awkward relationship with El Shepherd’s network of companies and nonprofits. Their activities all went directly to the matter of mortality, consciousness, and what it meant to be a human. To have a soul. ONE had become the think-tank branch of the Forthrast/Waterhouse/Shepherd brain science complex.

  Sometimes tech advanced by gradually creeping up on things. Other times it did so by saltation: suddenly leaping forward. She had heard an argument that those two couldn’t really be teased apart, because in the case of an exponential creep-up, like Moore’s Law, the bend in the curve could look like a jump if you took your eye off the ball at the wrong time.

  In any case, when she walked her daily gantlet of gyms and restaurants, she began to feel that the tech industry, which prided itself on having disrupted so many other things, was now creeping up on the moment when it would attempt to disrupt death. For if you had conquered every other foe and made an infinite amount of money along the way, and found yourself savoring a bite of some exquisite sushi or a dram of thirty-year-old single-malt, why should you not ask yourself what i
n principle was standing in the way of your being able to enjoy such things forever? And if you didn’t believe—as most of these people didn’t—that there was some higher reward awaiting you on the other side of that bourne from which no traveler returns, then why not choose to remain on this side of it for as long as technology would allow?

  Zula, left to her own devices, would never have thought to approach death head-on, as if it were just another Old Economy bogeyman on a Silicon Valley whiteboard, waiting to be disrupted. But the train wreck that had begun at the moment Dodge’s heart had stopped beating had obliged her to make it a significant part of her life’s work. Not so much as a researcher in her own right (she was a geologist) but as a den mother for those who were.

  19

  In the architects’ rendering of the reception area of the Forthrast Family Foundation’s sixth-floor suite, blazered and skirted guests had lounged around its coffee table, sipping lattes and checking their phones under the alert but hospitable eye of a receptionist stationed behind a stylish curving desk as they waited for their hosts to show up and keycard them in.

  The reality, this day and every day since they’d moved in, was that this was wasted space. They’d never got around to hiring a receptionist, so no one had ever sat behind the stylish desk. Its office chair had long since been poached, leaving more room for boxes of office supplies that tended to pile up there. Guests didn’t sit around the coffee table waiting to be buzzed in; their hosts knew where they were, and vice versa. The door leading back into the offices was propped open. Stationed next to it, plugged into a wall outlet, were charging docks for two different brands of telepresence robots: wheeled contraptions sporting flat-panel monitors thrust into the air at about the altitude of a person’s head, capable of purring around the office under the control of persons who weren’t physically present but who had the right passwords, and the right software installed on their systems. Even these had been gathering dust. The foundation had invested in them a few years ago, and Jake had frequently used them to “attend” meetings from his home in Idaho, but they had been superseded by virtual equivalents, or better robots that could walk up and down stairs on two legs. So walking through the reception area, which the architects had tried so hard to make nice, now had the feel of entering through the loading dock and the mail room.