Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  “Can you give me a plot of the integral of this?” Solly asked. “The balance in the account versus time?”

  “Sure.” Sophia typed in a command, fixed an error, did a bit of tidying up, and produced a new plot. This one was a ramp, starting at a high value back in February and declining to a lower one today. Sometimes it declined steeply, other times it leveled off, following a pattern that tallied with the burn-rate graph.

  “That’s all I needed to see,” Solly said. “In four months, you have burned through about three-quarters of the funds you were given by your Mysterious Benefactor as a Christmas—or Hanukkah—present.” He glanced toward Enoch. “You have a week remaining before you absolutely need to turn your thesis in. If you keep the simulation running as is, you’ll finish out that week with a lot of unspent money in the account. But you won’t see anything new during that week.”

  “Agreed. It’s stuck.”

  “So, my recommendation is that you turn on the self-modification capability,” Solly said.

  That silenced Sophia for a few moments. She hadn’t seen it coming. It was the kind of thing Enoch might have suggested. Not Solly.

  “Look, I’m dying to,” Sophia admitted, after she’d got her equilibrium back. “But it’s kind of—I don’t know—nonscientific, right? I don’t understand this yet. Now I’m going to go ahead and make it infinitely more complicated.”

  “Science begins with gathering data,” Solly said. “All scientists wish that the data were better. Don’t let that stop you.”

  “I don’t want to come off as presumptuous.”

  “As an undergraduate in your last week,” Solly said, “this is the last time in your life you’ll be able to get away with being presumptuous. I recommend you make the most of it.”

  Those guys are up to something. The awareness came to her slowly over the next few days, not as a flash of insight or a flood of waters but like groundwater rising below the foundation of a home. There were various hints and traces that, taken alone, might have been ignored or explained away. But the one detail that clinched it had been the look on C-plus’s face, and the tone of his voice, at the very moment that Sophia had walked through the door into Solly’s office. Had C-plus actually been there in Princeton, it might have been different. He might have heard her footsteps approaching, might have seen the door beginning to move. Fast as thought, the muscles of his face would have adjusted. But the latency of the network had given her a head start. Solly’s connection was as good as tech could make it. But tech couldn’t do anything about the speed of light. It took time for the image of Sophia’s entering the room to make its way to wherever C-plus was and for his reaction to make its way back, and during that interval, as she stood in the doorway looking at the big screen, she was like a ghost. Not the Ghost of Christmas Past. More the other way round. It was she who was in the present, seeing C-plus and Enoch as they had been in the past: the moment before she entered. And what she saw there, at thrice life size on the big high-resolution display, was Corvallis Kawasaki looking a way she had never seen him before. He looked like a little kid. The expression “kid in a candy store” didn’t quite capture it.

  She had heard, secondhand from her mother, an anecdote about how John and Dodge had, at the ages of something like ten and eight, figured out how to pick the lock on the bomb shelter that their father had built beneath the backyard of the house in Iowa during the darkest and scariest time of the Cold War, and how they had gone in there with flashlights and discovered things that fascinated and terrified them: guns and ammunition and K-rations, yes, but also trophies of war that their father had looted from the corpses of Nazis, pictures he had taken while liberating concentration camps, stashes of European pornography, phials of morphine, ancient bottles of Bordeaux and cognac, correspondence from ladies who were not his wife. Dodge and John had very carefully backed out of that bomb shelter and closed the door and locked it and never divulged to their father that they had gone in, and after the patriarch had passed away they had destroyed most of what was down there.

  The look on the face of Corvallis Kawasaki during the moment that it took for the bits to reach him, for him to react to Sophia’s being in the room, and for new bits to come back and refresh the screen, was very much like what she imagined John and Dodge had looked like as they shone their flashlights around their father’s bomb shelter. Partly it was a childish unguardedness that she’d only seen on his face at Dodge’s funeral and at his and Maeve’s wedding at the moment she had come up the aisle. But added to that was fascination. She could tell—something ineffable about the postures and expressions of Solly, Enoch, and C-plus told her—that they had been on the call for a while. That they had scheduled it for well before the start time that they had divulged to her. And that much she was able to confirm later simply by looking at Solly’s calendar, which she and other students had access to. They’d been on for a whole hour before Sophia had been told to show up. And they’d been talking about stuff that had put C-plus into a very unusual frame of mind indeed, and they’d been talking about it in Latin.

  At another time in her life she would not have been able to get it out of her mind. She’d have gone into Nancy Drew mode. As it was, she had a senior project to finish and a presentation to make. So she reluctantly filed it away as a matter she would have to ask C-plus about the next time they were together.

  And so a week later Sophia presented, addressing Solly and two other faculty members. This time, C-plus and Enoch were absent. For the purpose of this presentation was to get the university to sign off, and those two didn’t work for the university.

  They met in an old room, lined with wood paneling and bookshelves. Above the head of the table was a stretch of wall that showed signs of having been used for many different purposes over the centuries. A portrait of a great man must have hung there for at least a hundred years. Then a pull-down screen had been installed in the ceiling for slide shows and overhead projectors. That had been supplanted by at least two generations of flat-panel monitors and multiple rewiring jobs. They’d probably got the cabling perfect just in time for everything to go wireless. Within the last few years they’d finally carted the last monitor off to the junkyard and sealed the useless cables up inside the walls. Now it was just an expanse of wood paneling, featureless except for the fine subtle patterning of the grain. Everyone present had wearables of one kind or another that would project shared hallucinations onto that surface. Since most of the presentation consisted of Sophia’s talking, they didn’t actually use that capability until the very end, when a shift in posture and tone of voice sent the message that it was all over and that Sophia had cleared the hurdle. From here on out it was just chitchat—intelligent people expressing curiosity about this or that.

  One of them voiced interest in seeing the data plots. Sophia brought them up on the virtual screen, just as she had a week earlier in Solly’s office. The burn-rate plot mostly looked the same, up to the point a few days ago when Sophia had turned on the ability of the connectome to self-modify. The results were immediate and obvious: burn rate shot up. The repetitive sawtooth wave pattern vanished and was replaced by something more chaotic. But with just enough structure to draw the viewer’s attention and beguile them into thinking that there was some structure to it.

  “Let me just refresh the data so they’re fully up-to-date,” Sophia muttered, and invoked a menu item. A message flashed up informing them that it was downloading information from Hole in the Wall and that there might be a little delay.

  Then the graph refreshed itself automatically. But it had gone all wonky.

  One of the examiners chuckled—not unkindly. It was the timeless fate of all demos to go awry at moments like this, and everyone in the room knew it.

  “What the . . . ?” Sophia exclaimed. “How’d that down spike get in there?” For the burn-rate graph looked basically the same, except that at the very end of it, the plot suddenly shot straight down to a huge negative number, then jus
t as quickly jumped up and resumed the former sawtooth pattern. “Just a bad data point maybe. An outlier.”

  “Do me a favor, Sophia, and check the balance in the account,” Solly said.

  “It’s gonna be damn near zero,” Sophia said. “I was expecting to exhaust the funds this morning, but I’ve been too distracted to check.”

  She turned her attention to the Hole in the Wall account status window and navigated to the “Balance and Billing” screen. Featured prominently was a large number.

  “That’s wrong,” she said. “It’s way too large.”

  “Check ‘recent activity,’” Solly suggested.

  She did so. A little spreadsheet came up. The most recent entry had been made three hours ago.

  Someone had made a deposit into the account. A very large deposit. Ten times as much as had been placed in the account back in February.

  “It looks like your anonymous benefactor approves of your work,” Solly said.

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “Let it live,” Solly said.

  23

  What came next could not, of course, be described without using words. But that was deceptive in a way since he no longer had words. Nor did he have memories, or coherent thoughts, or any other way to describe or think about the qualia he was experiencing. And those qualia were of miserably low quality. To the extent he was seeing, he was seeing incoherent patterns of fluctuating light. For people of a certain age, the closest descriptor for this was “static”: the sheets, waves, and bands of noise that had covered the screens of malfunctioning television sets. Static, in a sense, wasn’t real. It was simply what you got out of a system when it was unable to lock on to any strong signal—“Strong” meaning actually conveying useful, or at least understandable, information. Modern computer screens were smart enough to just shut down, or put up an error message, when the signal was lost. Old analog sets had no choice but to display something. The electron beam was forever scanning, a mindless beacon, and if you fed it nothing else it would produce a visual map of whatever was contingently banging around in its circuitry: some garbled mix of electrical noise from Mom’s vacuum cleaner, Dad’s shaver, solar flares, stray transmissions caroming off the ionosphere, and whatever happened when little feedback loops on the circuit board got out of hand.

  Likewise, to the extent he was hearing anything, it was just an inchoate hiss.

  It was as if one of his visual migraines had expanded to take over his entire visual cortex and, at the same time, his tinnitus had run completely out of control as a result of being in a perfectly silent room. These qualia, in other words, weren’t real but the phantoms conjured up by his neural circuits in the absence of any input whatsoever.

  That’s the story he would have told himself had his thinking, understanding, storytelling brain been up and running, and if he’d had the capacity to remember things like vacuum cleaners, the ionosphere, and migraines. But in fact, all of those systems were down. This was the state he was in: just barely enough mental functioning to have an experience of these terrible, low-grade qualia, but no capacity whatever to step back and think about them.

  He had been thus for no time at all, or for an infinite amount of time. There was, in his state, no difference between those. Ten minutes, ten years, ten centuries: all of those were equally wrong, since they all presupposed some way of telling time. The only thing that could give time meaning was change, and nothing was changing. These qualia were all internal to him. There was nothing outside of him whose changes he could observe and mark. Just the visual and auditory static that came and went with such randomness that he could read no pattern in it.

  He came to dread its coming and to feel relief when it subsided.

  The third, or the seventy-fifth, or the millionth time it came and went, he had a vague awareness that it had happened before. Not that he had a memory of it—memory could get no purchase on noise—but that he now recognized in his own being a pattern of response: the dread as he grew certain it was coming; the terror, while it was at its peak, that it might never stop; some other part of him trying to push back against that terror by predicting it would go away; growing certainty that it was abating; relief that it had subsided combined with dread of its next onset. Those feelings followed one after the next in a patterned way.

  He came to know the pattern.

  The fact that he could recognize it suggested that it must have happened before, even though he lacked the power to recall specific instances of it. For all he knew it was just the same thing over and over again, and he was caught in a cycle, an infinite loop.

  Eons passed.

  Infinite loop. Cycle. Those were ideas, not qualia or feelings. Where did ideas come from, and how could he have them? For that matter, how could he have ideas about ideas?

  Those were not thoughts that came to him all at once, at a particular moment that he could define or remember. Rather they were built up over time as his thought-ways began to follow creases, grooves, canyons. Deepening them, reinforcing them with each trip along the same path.

  Not that he had any concept of creases or grooves. He could not remember such things—or anything. He could not picture them in his mind’s eye, since he had no mind’s eye and no memory of what it was to see. All he had, beyond the qualia of the moment, was a growing certainty that his mind was going down ways it had gone before, perhaps thousands or millions of times. He came to know what was going to happen next: where his thought-ways were leading. He knew that there was time, that he had existed in the past, that he would exist in the future, and that there was, in the turnings that his mind took, a sort of consistency that made him something. Something that persisted and that had set and predictable ways.

  He became conscious.

  24

  In the waves of what he would have called static, had he known any words or had any memories to liken things to, he was noticing that some bits were different from others. Comparatively speaking, this was a fascinating new development. Thinking about it didn’t get him anywhere; it was just a reality to which he was being passively subjected. He could not lean forward to examine it more closely. He could not move around to look at it from different angles. All he could do was wait, like one trapped in sleep paralysis, for the next surge and then attend to it and try to confirm this growing idea that not all parts of it were the same, that there were patterns, or at least variations that his attention could lock on to.

  His emotions shifted. For a long time (or so it seemed now that he was experiencing something like time) he had feared the onset of the static and longed for it to subside. It had caused him something like pain. His growing ability to see variation within it was changing this. When the hissing, sparkling wave subsided, he was eager for it to return and anxious that it might not.

  Then a thing happened with a quickness that was extraordinary compared to all that had gone before, which was that his thoughts of creases and grooves and worn paths in his mind’s turnings came together with certain of the motes-that-were-somehow-different to form a thing that he could hold steady in his regard, and experience and study for a while before it fell apart under the too-great pressure of his mind’s desperate grasp and broke down into the flickering motes from which it had self-assembled. But the next time the wave returned he could cast about for it again, and sometimes find or at least glimpse it. Or perhaps he was reconstructing it anew each time. If so he must coax it into being with the infinite patience he had built during the eons before.

  It didn’t matter. He saw it a few, then many times. The thing had properties. Lacking words or even the idea of words, he could behold those properties but not keep them in his mind when the thing was not there before him. It was as if the thought-ways that he had, over minutes or centuries or eons, identified as creases or grooves had taken on a form that he could behold. It was the first and only thing with a form; all else was static. When he beheld different parts of it, or moved his regard from one part to an
adjoining part, he perceived turnings and features that were expressions of the creases and grooves that his mind had worn into itself, sometimes branching in one direction, sometimes another. That it had parts distributed in such-and-such a way—a stem here, serrated edges there, veins branching this way and that—hit him hard as, at once, a vast revelation, and at the same time so old and obvious that it was second nature.

  The thing wasn’t always the same—the branchings changed from one reconstruction of it to the next—but it was always the same kind of thing. One day (or year, or century) he was beholding this thing for the hundredth (or thousandth or millionth) time and he knew somehow what it was. And some time after that, the roar and hiss began to call to him strangely. In the same way as he had learned to see something in the waves of flickering static, he began to connect moments in the noise and to string them together into patterns he could recognize. The way they were organized one-after-the-other was of a different nature from the way the static-motes coalesced one-beside-the-next into a thing that he could behold, but once he learned the knack of it he was able to repeat this trick of stringing them together. The strung signals could be recognized as a thing no less sensible than the thing he had been looking at.

  It was a leaf.

  These ways of gathering static-motes into patterns that he could hold in his regard, and stringing fragments of noise into sequences that he could recognize, spread first slowly and then with too-great speed for him to encompass. If he’d had access to a larger pool of memories he might have likened it to flame spreading across a pool of gasoline, or a crack propagating through a block of stone.