Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  It puzzled and troubled him for a long while until he came suddenly to understand that there was another like him. Or rather, like what he had once been.

  He was not alone.

  Others could exist—did exist—who independently could experience what he had experienced in times long past. One of them had found its way here.

  This—the idea that others of his kind could exist and could share his world—had never once entered his thinking during the whole time since he had become conscious, and it led to long brooding up in the park. Like other revelations that had come to his mind over the eons, it was at once completely astonishing and strangely familiar. Of course there would be others. Just as the first leaf that he had brought forth out of the chaos had, in time, proved to be only one of many—many that were like it, but different—and just as the same had proved true of trees and snowflakes, how could it not be the case that he himself was only one instance of a thing—a pattern of which others could exist? Perhaps others as numberless as the leaves or the snowflakes.

  He understood all of this but he did not like it. It displeased him that when he came down out of the park to look at this perfect leaf, his experience of it was interfered with, marred, by the crudeness with which the other saw it. He wanted to eject this wretched thing, to make it go away. But the mere thought of doing so led his thinking down strange paths. To liken himself to one leaf or one snowflake was to raise troubling matters—more disturbing than anything he had experienced since he had lain paralyzed while the chaos had washed over him for eons. For many years now, leaves had come into existence, only to fall, dry up, and blow away when their time was at an end. Likewise snowflakes had covered the ground only to melt, merge, and rush away through the declivities in the forest. One snowflake softened and merged with another, and multitudes of them became rills high in the crown of the park. Rills merged with each other at the branchings to form creeks, creeks became streams, streams became a river. It all went away so that the next season could follow in its time. He had never troubled himself with the question of where the leaves blew away to and what became of them, nor of where the river flowed. Such concerns were idle and in no way affected him. But if he were now to conceive of himself as only one leaf on a tree, or tree in a forest, and if he were to admit of the possibility of others like him coming along to abide in the same place, then he must, in order to make the thought whole and perfect and sound as it ought to be, consider whether he and others of his kind were destined to fall and be carried away on a wind, or melt and merge with others and rush away to parts unknown.

  Such thoughts led to no firm conclusion, but, over long days and nights of brooding, he came to understand that he ought to form about himself a shape and to clothe that shape in a boundary such that on one side of it was him and on the other side was not-him. Somewhat as the trees were covered in bark. He began to make this so, but with no fixed idea at first as to what its form ought to be. He could adopt the form of a tree, but sensed that this was not correct. Trees were what he looked at, not what he was.

  One night he was gazing up at the stars. Some time ago these had, partly of their own accord and partly through his idle musings, adopted forms that were not like those of trees but whose nature he could not quite understand. It came to him then that they were a kind of message. In their shapes were suggestions as to how he might pattern his own form. He tried various shapes: one long and sinuous, one squat with several legs, and one that stood upright, with a head at the top where the looking and the hearing took place, and appendages below that which could be put to various uses. This one he sensed was correct. He worked with it through all of the days that the leaves were falling. He saw now that this shape had always been implicit in the way that he had moved about and experienced things. What was a street but a place where he could walk? For that, legs were needed. His long habit of gazing at fallen leaves suggested that he was looking at things from a place that was above the ground but below the height of the branches from which the leaves fell. This, he now understood, matched up well with having a head perched some modest distance above his legs. Leaves could be snatched out of the air and held up for inspection by separate limbs, mounted just below the head. At the ends of those limbs were platforms for supporting leaves. Sprouting from the edges of those platforms were smaller, finer appendages, suitable for poking at snowflakes. He could make them curl inward just as the projecting armlets of a leaf did as it dried out. But unlike a dry leaf these did not shrivel and die once so curled, but could be restraightened at will.

  The winds of autumn came and made the dry leaves whirl about. He sensed it would be a good thing to have the power of such movement and so he altered his form, adding another pair of appendages, somewhat leaflike in their shape. These had the power of catching the wind and gave him the freedom to rise up off the ground and join the leaves in their whirling and their careering through the air. As he did so, he sensed that others were around him, whirling about just like the dry leaves did, caught up helplessly in the dry cold wind, unable to master their own movements as he was able to do.

  He understood then why the whirling of the dry leaves had held such fascination for him since the first time he had beheld it: this was what others of his kind did when they lacked the power to do otherwise.

  When they had only just come to this place.

  When they had only just died.

  He was dead.

  27

  To mathematicians, Zelrijk-Aalberg might have been famous because of the fractal crack in the tavern floor, but to lawyers it was interesting because of its legal status and sovereignty. To make an extremely long story short, Z-A was different from the surrounding principalities because of certain peculiarities in how its ownership had changed hands at a few pivotal moments during the last thousand or so years. It had ended up being one of those places like Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man that was neither one thing or the other. It had never formally and explicitly become part of either the Netherlands or Belgium. This had been more of an oversight than a political statement. It hadn’t made its way onto a treaty because the scribes had run out of vellum and decided to just leave it off. No one had noticed or cared until quite recently. During a conversation with Enoch Root, who apparently had some kind of old family link to the place and knew all of the details, El Shepherd had somehow become aware of its special status, and put a building full of medievalists and lawyers to work sorting out the details. He’d purchased all of the property inside the boundary and consolidated his position to the point where he’d felt comfortable minting his own currency (digital only) and issuing passports.

  Ten years ago, he’d been sitting in a corner booth in that tavern, on the Zelrijk-Aalberg side of the crack, when Belgian police, acting in coordination with Interpol, had come to arrest him on suspicion of having masterminded the Moab hoax.

  Standing shoulder to shoulder along the whole length of the crack had been members of the Zelrijk-Aalberg security forces: American mercenaries armed with assault rifles. Behind them the bar had been crammed solid with lawyers, friends of El, and media. They had all looked on, in what was described as a festive atmosphere, as Sinjin Kerr, the lord chancellor of Zelrijk-Aalberg, had reminded the Belgian cops that they had no authority on this side of the crack and that, if need be, force would be employed to preserve the integrity of the border.

  The Belgians had backed down. Both they and the Dutch authorities had made it clear that if El stepped over the crack he would be subject to arrest.

  Since that day, El had not left his cricket-oval-sized country. Another man might have monetized it to death, building skyscrapers on it and lining its fractal border with shops selling firecrackers, cannabis, and swag, but El had made very few changes. It was still the same homely assortment of half-timbered structures and vegetable gardens. He’d cut back on the security force, so now the border was patrolled by a rotating squad of half a dozen middle-aged guys who kept their weapons, if they even
had any, discreetly concealed. Behind the wattle-and-daub walls, every room of every structure was occupied by his staff. There were rumors of tunnels. But nowadays his staff consisted mostly of the medical professionals who looked after him, and the lawyers and accountants who kept his affairs sorted. The legal situation was stalemated. The statute of limitations had long since expired on most of the criminal charges that could be leveled against him relating to Moab. He’d sent signals that he would spend every penny he had defending himself in court. And everyone understood that by the time he could be tried, convicted, and sentenced, he’d be dead, or so mentally disabled that any sentence would be commuted on humanitarian grounds. He stayed home and he used telepresence robots to “travel” around the world, and he disabled their faces so that no one could “see” him. He’d become a sort of Man in the Iron Mask.

  A little less than a year after the conference in the San Juan Islands, Corvallis Kawasaki—who was in Amsterdam on other business—rented a car and had it drive him down to the border. Zelrijk-Aalberg had changed very little, but the Dutch and Belgian hamlets that surrounded it had developed into boom towns where El’s employees lived, shopped, dined, and raised their families. The car dropped him off on a Belgian street in front of the famous tavern. Corvallis went in, bought a Belgian beer at the bar, and found his way into the back section. The crack in the floor was obvious. He stepped across it. Loitering in a nearby booth, nursing a club soda, was a man with a bulge in his blazer and a wearable on his face, presumably checking Corvallis’s identity. He let Corvallis pass without incident. The tavern had a rear exit leading to a little beer garden, which was where he found El, sitting at a table, sheltered from a light mist by a big canvas umbrella.

  He hadn’t changed as much as Corvallis was expecting. He twitched his eyes toward a chair but made no move to get up or shake hands. Corvallis took a seat, sipped his beer, and looked at Elmo Shepherd for the first time in many years. He seemed fit. His face had got bigger and fleshier in the way that happened to everyone as they aged. About it was a peculiar rigidity. The tiny muscles that were responsible for expression must have been connected to the brain directly, or so Corvallis mused. He was no student of anatomy but it seemed unlikely that the spinal cord would be involved in eyebrow twitches, blinking, and such. Even people with very high spinal cord injuries could talk, and control wheelchairs with their mouths. The nerves must come directly out of the skull through little holes, or something. Anyway, something must have been messing with those connections in El’s case, because his face simply didn’t move in the way that faces normally did. And because humans were hardwired to be extremely perceptive and sensitive to facial expressions, this was very obvious to Corvallis—much more obvious than other forms of neurological breakdown might have been. He’d done a little bit of research into El’s disease and was pretty certain that this wasn’t caused by the disease proper, but by medications that El was taking to clamp down on its symptoms.

  “Rumors of my insanity are greatly exaggerated,” El began. “Some of the new drugs coming out of my foundation are remarkably successful in slowing down the progression of symptoms. Without them I’d have died in a pretty unpleasant fashion a year ago.”

  “Good.” Corvallis nodded. This was a lot of small talk by Elmo Shepherd standards, but it was to a purpose: to let the visitor know what he was dealing with, to calibrate the conversation.

  “If it weren’t for the obvious drawbacks, I would recommend that everyone go crazy at least once in their lifetime,” El said. “It’s the most fascinating thing I’ve ever done. Going about it mindfully requires diligent effort. A kind of spiritual practice. I’m pretty sure that a lot of the old mystics—hermits and prophets who were enshrined by primitive cultures as having possessed some special connection to the divine—were in fact suffering from diagnosable mental illnesses but struggling to succumb to them mindfully. If they’d had access to modern diagnostic manuals they’d have been able to say, ‘Ah, it says right here here that I am a paranoid schizophrenic,’ but lacking such documentation, they had to self-observe. When certain processes in the mind run out of control, or, at the other end of the spectrum, cease to function at the level needed to preserve a kind of psychiatric homeostasis, the effects are observable to an introspective patient. If you’re a stylite monk, you’re pretty much screwed and you just have to think your way around it. But nowadays, therapeutic options suggest themselves—titrating levels of various psychoactive medications in an interactive manner, talking across the blood-brain barrier, or direct stimulation of certain ganglia using techniques that can reach into the brain and target interesting regions. We have equipment here that can do that. I can stick my head in a magnet and ping a misbehaving neuron. I was doing it ten minutes ago and I’ll be doing it ten minutes after you leave.”

  “How long do you have?” Corvallis asked.

  “To live? Or to talk to you?” Before Corvallis could answer, he continued, “Probably three years to live. Twenty minutes to talk to you.”

  “I wanted to touch base with you about a couple of things.”

  “Yes, I assumed there was a motivation for your visit, C.”

  “I talk to Sophia. As you must know, she’s a research fellow now. Nominally pursuing a Ph.D. But looking after the Process is more than a full-time job.”

  “Delegating tasks to others is what people traditionally do when their workload exceeds their available time,” El pointed out. “I’ve made my opinions clear on this, C. Perhaps I am being ignored because it’s assumed I am out of my mind.”

  “You’re not being ignored by me, or others at our board meetings. You are being ignored by Sophia. But she’s not ignoring you because she thinks you’re crazy. She’s ignoring you because she’s stubborn.”

  “I don’t understand what she has to be stubborn about, in this case. The Process is a unique and unprecedented phenomenon. It is a gold mine of data about the functioning of the human mind. She is its only token holder. She should open it up, let others have access.”

  “It’s a family affair,” Corvallis said, “a personal affair. Dodge died suddenly when she was a little girl.”

  “I know the story.”

  “She misses him. Wants to connect with what she lost.”

  “And does she really believe that the Process is the reincarnation of Richard Forthrast?”

  “Is that what you believe, El?”

  “I don’t know what to believe, since she is the sole toho, and she won’t share the data.”

  “You know her position—and our position—on this. There’s not that much to share. Tracking the activities of the Process is akin to the problem that faced the Allies, during the Second World War, before they broke the Enigma code. Messages can be intercepted and copied, but they can’t be decrypted, so we don’t actually know what they mean. The most we can do is traffic analysis. It’s not useless, but—”

  “But it’s not the Vulcan mind meld. I saw that talk. I agree with it.”

  “To this very point,” Corvallis said, “Sophia mentioned to me recently that she had observed new traffic that was unfamiliar. To make a long story short, she thinks that you are uploading other scanned connectomes and that you are booting them up on the same systems.”

  “Systems I built and paid for,” El said. “Sophia claimed all of Hole in the Wall’s processing power during the first year. The project would have withered on the vine at that point, if I hadn’t—”

  “If you hadn’t built more of them. Yes.”

  “Hole in the Wall was handcrafted. I made it mass-producible. By this time next year, we will be opening new facilities at the rate of one per week.”

  “Leading to the question, why?”

  “It sounds as though Sophia already has a theory,” El said. Corvallis guessed that if his facial muscles were working, he might have had a sly expression right about now. Maybe he’d have winked.

  “You’ve made no secret of the fact that you’ve been scanning o
ther brains.”

  “I’m surprised at you, C-plus. Using such an outmoded figure of speech. ‘Brains’? Really?”

  Corvallis decided to construe this as an attempt at humor. El couldn’t wink. There was no twinkle in that eye.

  He was alluding to a hot topic from the conference: the mind-body problem.

  Or at least it had seemed like a hot topic to some there who had never taken an introductory philosophy course. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century neurologists who had thought about, and done empirical research on, how the brain actually worked had tended toward the conclusion that there was no mind-body problem. The whole notion was devoid of meaning. The mind couldn’t be separated from the body. The whole nervous system, all the way down to the toes, had to be studied and understood as a whole—and you couldn’t even stop there, since the functions of that system were modulated by chemicals produced in places like the gut and transmitted through the blood. The bacteria living in your tummy—which weren’t even part of you, being completely distinct biological organisms—were effectively a part of your brain. According to these neurologists, the whole notion of scanning brains taken from severed heads had been—for lack of a better term—wrongheaded to begin with.