Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  She headed for her office, which was in the corner overlooking the lake. En route, she passed by the smaller of their two conference rooms. Sitting in a ragged semicircle with their backs to her were some half a dozen people who she guessed were young, based on their clothing, posture, and body types. Addressing them was Marcus Hobbs, a foundation executive who among other things looked after the summer intern program. Formerly this had been informal and ad hoc to a degree that, as Marcus had pointed out, actually put the foundation at some risk of lawsuits, or at least bad publicity. He’d tidied things up and instituted regular procedures for publicizing it, collecting and evaluating applications, screening applicants, and keeping track of metrics. So, the half-dozen kids sitting in that room were not just a random assortment of nephews, neighbors, and friends of friends, but the survivors of a selection process that had commenced the day after last year’s crop of interns had gone back to school.

  Without even checking her calendar, Zula knew that most of today was blocked out for interviews with these candidates. Since the foundation had already made its choices and gone to the expense of bringing these people to Seattle, the interviews were largely symbolic. But that did not mean that they were unimportant.

  The third of those interviews—the last thing on her calendar before lunch—turned out to be with her daughter. This was a surprise.

  Sophia was wearing a hoodie and jeans, which explained why Zula hadn’t recognized her from behind while walking past the conference room. Sophia had turned on her glasses’ VEIL functionality. Conceivably, Marcus might have recognized her when she had arrived at the Foundation earlier that morning, but Marcus and Sophia had probably never been in the same room together and there was no particular reason why he would have known her.

  Zula had reviewed this anonymous candidate’s application more than once over the last several months, and given it a final once-over before she had walked into her office, but it didn’t have a name associated with it. Only a PURDAH. Which wasn’t unusual. Marcus had, in fact, made it almost mandatory. Concealing names, genders, and the like behind a PURDAH was a way to reduce the possibility that candidates would benefit from positive, or suffer from negative, discrimination. So Zula had noted a few points of similarity between this applicant and her daughter, but was nonetheless surprised when Sophia walked into her office, pulled the hood back from her head, took off her glasses, and sat down.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hi, baby.”

  After that, neither said anything for a minute. Sophia looked out the window at the view over the Olympics and gave Zula time to sort it out in her head. Then she asked: “Did you know? Or at least suspect?”

  “No,” Zula said. Raising her voice a notch, she added, “I guess I sort of imagined that if you wanted to work here over the summer, you’d just tell me and we would work something out.”

  “Are you mad that I did it this way?”

  “No.” Zula considered it for a few moments, and her voice settled down: “I see your point, I guess. If you and I had just quote-unquote worked something out—”

  “I wouldn’t be a real intern. Anything I did would be kind of suspect,” Sophia said. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I was thinking.” She brightened. “I’m really pleased I made it through the selection process.”

  “Almost.”

  “Huh?”

  “There’s still this. The final interview.”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, I couldn’t figure out how to make it through this without revealing I was the boss’s daughter.”

  “Welcome home, by the way.” Zula wasn’t certain whether “welcome home” or “welcome back” was the right phrase for someone who had been living on the other side of the country for three years, but she wasn’t above dropping a hint. She stood up and smiled. Sophia did likewise. They came together and embraced and held each other for a little while. After a few moments Zula opened her eyes and happened to catch sight of Marcus Hobbs, out in the hallway, clearly visible through the glass door of her office. He was stopped in midstride, gobsmacked and a little dismayed by the sight of the boss engaging in a public display of affection with an intern candidate who had only just crossed the threshold of her office. Zula winked at him and indicated with a wave of the hand that he should approach.

  Oblivious to all of this, Sophia relaxed her arms and took half a step back. “I passed through Iowa on the way,” she said. “Visited the farm. Mended fences with the rellies.”

  “I look forward to hearing about it,” Zula said. “First you have some explaining to do.” She nodded at the door as Marcus walked in.

  “Mr. Hobbs! Hello again,” Sophia said, snapping into a polite businesslike manner in a way that made Zula feel that, while raising her, she must have done something right.

  “Sophia? Is that how you still prefer to be addressed?” Marcus asked.

  “Yes, that is my actual name,” Sophia said. It was common for people using PURDAH to link them to nicknames. “Mom and Dad picked it out. I’m happy to use it here.”

  Marcus looked at Zula. “So I have the pleasure of addressing your daughter.”

  “Nice to meet you for reals,” Sophia said, and extended her hand. Marcus shook it, sizing her up in a new light.

  “You wanted to work here over the summer,” Marcus guessed, “but you didn’t want to be seen as having got the job through family connections, so you did everything anonymously.”

  “Yeah. Worked great until this lady blew my cover,” Sophia said, nodding at her mother.

  “Well, I can tell you in all honesty that I am completely surprised.”

  Zula laughed. “I saw that much in your face, Marcus.”

  “So, just in case there are any lingering doubts, Sophia got the job fair and square, and I’m happy to say as much if anyone raises any questions.” Marcus was talking in that diction peculiar to lawyers. He was, in other words, doing his job. Zula had come to depend on him. She had first met him on the day after Dodge had been stricken. He was the junior associate who had shown up in Alice’s hotel suite, acting as Stan Peterson’s wingman. After his stint at Argenbright Vail, he had begun putting his legal powers to use in the service of nonprofit organizations, and ended up here.

  “Noted,” Zula said.

  “Well played,” Marcus said, nodding at Sophia.

  “If you have a minute to spare,” Zula said, “this young intern and I were just about to have a discussion of how she intends to use her time here at the foundation.”

  “Of course. If I wouldn’t be intruding on family matters, that is,” Marcus said, edging toward an available chair.

  “Marcus, it’s the Forthrast Family Foundation,” Zula reminded him.

  Marcus laughed. They all sat down.

  “Interns have a lot of leeway here,” Zula said. “Marcus pointed out to me a long time ago that anyone who makes it through our application process is, by definition, overqualified and underpaid. No one’s under any illusions as to why Ivy League students do internships. It’s all about résumé building. We could have our interns fetch coffee for us, but that wouldn’t serve their needs and would amount to taking jobs away from people in the community who could use that sort of work.”

  “Point being,” Marcus added, “that we choose the best people we can find first, and get them in the door. Choosing a summer project tends to take care of itself.”

  Sophia had been smiling and nodding through this, looking every inch the bright young intern.

  “So,” Zula said, “this is the part where you’re supposed to tell us what you want to spend the summer working on.”

  “Since you planned everything else out so carefully, I’m guessing you have a proposal,” Marcus said.

  Sophia nodded. “I would like to work with You Know What.” After a pause for that to sink in, she added, “Or, depending on how you think about these things, You Know Who.”

  “You want the password to DB,” Zula said.

  20

 
DB was Dodge’s Brain. Corvallis Kawasaki had coined the term; in nerd-speak it was also a pun on a common abbreviation of “database.”

  It was not a single unitary thing. It was a sprawling web of directories in which was contained every scrap of information that had emerged from the epic project to satisfy the requirements in the disposition of remains that Richard Forthrast had signed long before his death.

  The actual data started with the completely raw and unprocessed output of the ion-beam scanning device that had cremated Richard’s frozen brain one axon at a time. This alone occupied more storage space than would have been affordable back when Richard had signed his will. In that form, it was essentially unusable. If you thought of Richard’s brain as a document being run through a scanner, the raw data was a list of voltages emerging from the scanner’s optics. In order to turn that into a meaningful picture, it had to be sifted through and processed on a vast scale. Merely crunching the numbers to produce something resembling a connectome—a wiring diagram of how the neurons were interlinked—had made it necessary for the Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation to construct one of the largest data centers in the world. This was a reasonably natural extension of what they were good at anyway as a result of running a huge electronic banking system. It had been crunching on DB for years.

  Which wasn’t to suggest that the connectome was, in any sense, absolutely known. Twenty different people had written twenty different Ph.D. dissertations on how the raw data could be processed and interpreted; each of their algorithms generated different results. Meta-analyses had then been conducted, comparing and contrasting the outputs generated by those competing algorithms. So DB didn’t contain a single settled and agreed-on connectome but dozens of possible versions of it, each stored in its own incompatible data format and each encoding a different set of assumptions as to how the brain actually worked.

  What DB wasn’t was a functioning simulation of Dodge’s actual brain. Various efforts had been made to take the contents of the database, feed them into a system designed to emulate the functions of human neurons, and hit the “on” switch. But for the most part DB was an inert repository of data. A noun, not a verb. The digital equivalent of freezing Richard Forthrast’s body while waiting for some future technology to come along capable of reanimating it.

  “When Uncle Richard signed the disposition of remains, they were stuck in a cryopreservation mind-set,” Sophia said. “The document reflects that.”

  “I’ll bite,” Marcus said. “Who’s ‘they’? And can you say more about the mind-set?”

  “‘They’ is the Eutropians. The cabal of nerds who decided, back in the 1990s, that they wanted to live forever. Who talked Uncle Richard into copy-pasting that boilerplate language into his disposition of remains. And remember that the original language didn’t even consider the idea of digital scanning. It was straight analog: chill his body down fast, freeze him, store him in the cryofacility in Ephrata. For them, actually being able to reanimate a frozen body and bring it back to life was like building a starship that could cross the galaxy in ten minutes: a thing that they could think of in the abstract. But actually doing it was just inconceivably, ridiculously far in the future. And so Uncle Richard’s will doesn’t contain anything about that. It just says ‘freeze me’ with the implication being ‘someone will sort out the consequences a thousand or ten thousand years down the road when they actually know how to do this.’ The actual reanimation procedure is never laid out. It’s assumed that the mentality of people who might control such a technology is so advanced compared to our caveman understanding that it’d be pointless to try to anticipate what that process would look like and to give specific instructions as to under what conditions it ought to be attempted.

  “But that’s all analog,” she continued. “It’s all about that one piece of frozen meat. You only get one chance to reanimate it. Best to wait until you’re sure it’ll work. Instead now we’ve got an opportunity to do this digitally. And that opportunity has come along within living memory of Uncle Richard himself.” Sophia’s voice got a little husky at this point, as she was clearly remembering her vague little-kid memories of sitting on Dodge’s lap. She cleared her throat. “So I want to work on that. And I don’t claim that I’m going to come up with the answer to it all during one summer’s worth of work, but to me it feels like exploring it is a worthwhile project, and being a member of the family—someone who knew him when I was a little girl—gives me a kind of standing that nobody else has.”

  Zula’s eyes were shining, out of some combination of maternal pride in her daughter and grief for her uncle. “Sophia,” she said, “I have to ask you something. When you went off to college, your major was undeclared. But you were pretty sure it was going to be comparative religion or classics or something in that vein. That’s mostly what you studied in your freshman year. But after that you turned pretty decisively in the direction of cognitive science, neurology, computer science.”

  Sophia was nodding, slightly impatient. “Those are just more technical ways of getting at the same questions.”

  “I understand that, honey. But I have to know, just for my own curiosity: how long have you been thinking about this? The conversation we’re having right now, in my office: is it something you’ve been planning for years?”

  Sophia shook her head. “Months, maybe. I mean, sure, my interest in neuroscience was piqued by all the exposure I had while I was growing up to dinner-table conversations about what you and C-plus and the others were up to concerning DB. But, the idea of actually digging into that thing and running some code? That wasn’t even on the table, technically speaking, until Hole in the Wall came online.”

  “I kind of know what that is,” Marcus said. “The latest and greatest processor farm. But you’re going to have to help me out a little.”

  “It’s at a place about a hundred miles from here called Hole in the Wall Coulee—an inlet on the Columbia River. Coincidentally, just a little downstream of Ephrata. They built it on the site of an old aluminum plant. So it’s got cheap juice and cold water.”

  “Data centers are all over that part of the state,” Marcus pointed out. “Have been for decades. What makes Hole in the Wall a game-changer for DB?”

  “It’s the first one exclusively built around quantum computers.”

  “And you think that quantum computers are better at simulating brain processes?” The skepticism in Marcus’s voice was gentle but unmistakable.

  “I’m agnostic on that. But I know—and there’s ample peer-reviewed research to prove—that they are better at carrying out the mathematical operations that are needed to carry out secure, distributed computation.”

  “Distributed . . . in the cloud,” Zula murmured.

  It was enough to elicit a little sigh from her daughter.

  This was a generational thing. Zula was old enough to have lived through the transition from most computation’s being local, contained within her desktop or her laptop, to its being distributed across remote servers that might be anywhere in the world. “In the cloud” had been the buzzword for it when it was a new idea, but merely to use the term nowadays was to date yourself.

  “And by ‘secure’ you mean—”

  “It means that the processes—millions of separate executables running on god knows how many different real or virtual machines—don’t have to trust each other. They don’t have to know each other. When they have to communicate, they do it—” Sophia closed her eyes momentarily, maybe to conceal an eye-roll. “They do it the way all communication happens nowadays, which is through distributed-ledger-type stuff.”

  “Blockchain?” Zula asked.

  Actively suppressing another eye-roll, Sophia answered, “Way, way more efficient algorithms that do what blockchain was supposed to do twenty years ago. But still requiring a lot of fast computation.”

  “So, if we think of it”—and here Zula held out a hand as if to deflect any objections—“if we imagine, just for the sake
of argument, that we have one process, what we used to call a computer program, that does one thing only, which is to simulate the workings of one single neuron in a brain. That’s all it does.”

  Sophia nodded and made a wheeling gesture with her hand, encouraging her mother to keep rolling—perhaps a little faster.

  “And it’s running on a chip in a farm in Ephrata. Pretty much doing its own thing. But real neurons in the brain are connected to other neurons—that’s kind of the whole point. It’s why we spent a billion dollars scanning Uncle Richard’s connectome.”

  “Right,” Sophia said. “So, somewhere else—maybe on a different thread running on the same chip, maybe on a different chip in the same farm, maybe on another farm altogether on a barge off the coast of California or whatever, there are other processes, all clones, all busy simulating the workings of other neurons. Neurons that are connected to that first one. And every so often, a message needs to be passed from one of those processes to another.”

  “A neuron fires or something,” said Marcus, getting into the spirit of the thing.

  Sophia paused for a second, perhaps stifling an urge to swap out what Marcus had just said for something a little more technically precise.

  “Or whatever,” Marcus added. “Axons. Synapses. Dendrites.”