Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  Which led to interesting questions about what actually happened when those brains were rebooted as processes. According to this model, such “brains” wouldn’t be able to make sense of anything—they couldn’t function, really—until and unless they had rebuilt the missing parts of the system from scratch.

  That much was imponderable and unknowable until they had better tools for making sense of the Process—which explained why Elmo Shepherd was pissed off about Sophia’s reluctance to share access. In the meantime, one thing they could make all sorts of progress on was improving the quality of the scans themselves. Between the scientists from the Waterhouse/Forthrast camp and those who worked for El, there was vociferous agreement that the word “brain” needed to be banned from learned discourse, or put in scare quotes. They had to move beyond the practice of chopping off the heads of the deceased and throwing away the rest. Henceforward every client would be scanned in toto, heads to toes, and efforts would be made to collect data about their microbiome and any other non-neurological phenomena that would be overlooked by an ion-beam scanning system that only cared about neurons.

  “I beg your pardon,” C-plus said. “You have clients. Some of them are no longer among the living. You have been subjecting their remains to the most advanced protocols available.”

  “As have you.”

  “Of course.”

  “People die,” El said. “Some of them want what Richard Forthrast wanted.”

  “How many?”

  El shrugged. “More than a thousand.”

  Corvallis didn’t quite believe it. “You mean, that many have signed up?”

  “No, I mean that we have actually scanned and archived that many.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “That is frankly a little hard for me to believe,” said El, “given that in South Lake Union you have done the same thing to—how many?”

  C-plus shrugged. “I haven’t checked recently. A couple of hundred?”

  “Three hundred and forty-seven,” El corrected him.

  “I simply didn’t know you had that many scan labs.”

  “The equipment is now capable of being mass-produced. We have about fifty of them. Many in China, India, where the program has taken hold to a degree not fully appreciated in the West. Two of them in that building right over there.” El nodded at an eight-hundred-year-old half-timbered house a stone’s throw away. “Others in cities where a lot of rich people live.”

  “You said ‘scanned and archived,’ but you didn’t say you had booted any up.”

  “We started booting them up a week ago,” El announced, “leading to the pattern of activity that Sophia noticed and that presumably accounts for you sitting here in my beer garden talking to me. We are well aware that you have been doing the same.”

  Corvallis nodded, perhaps a little hastily—trying too hard, perhaps, to show how transparent he was being? “I am here partly for that reason,” he said, “and partly to make you aware that, in accordance with our responsibilities, we have booted up the Ephrata Eleven and the Most Favored Nine.”

  “And Verna.”

  “Verna was the first, after Dodge.”

  “They will never be the same as the others,” El said. “They should have waited.”

  28

  He was dead and so he must previously have been not-dead. Of not being dead he had no direct knowledge, but he could guess that he had abided in a place with leaves, trees, snow, rivers, wind, and stars. He had existed in some physical form probably not far different from the one that he had pulled about himself here. He had shared that existence with others. Others who were likewise becoming dead and finding their way to this place. Drawn to it, perhaps, by the availability of coherent things like red leaves. Longing to experience something other than chaos but not knowing how to summon those experiences forth out of the noise.

  Why did they not then go away and suffer for eons as he had, and learn for themselves the knack of making whole and beautiful things out of chaos?

  Because they didn’t have to. In the early going, if he himself had been able to find some other dead person’s ready-made world and there abide, he’d have done so and accounted himself fortunate. But no such thing had been within his reach and so he’d had no choice but to suffer and learn.

  He wondered how many of the other dead people had found their way here to his place. In his new body he soared above the park, supported by the leaflike appendages growing out of his back. These were poorly formed for the crowded environment of the forest but well made for movement in empty space. He bettered them, making them less like leaves, giving them a new form that could fold against his back when they were not needed, yet still spread wide when he chose to take flight. Folding these, his wings, he descended to the ground and walked on his feet through the forest, inspecting each tree, standing above each little stream watching the flow of the water and hearing its sound.

  Out of the clashing waters he heard “Egdod” and remembered that this was his name.

  For the most part little had changed, but from time to time when passing near a tree or squatting by a stream he would sense a little tear in the world, feel a knot of near-chaos drifting about the place, and thus know that another dead person had found their way here. Some of them came and went like snowflakes, others seemed to take up residence in trees or streams, as if they longed for bodies but had not the wit or craft to fashion their own. They latched desperately on to forms that Egdod had made, be they never so unsuitable for beings-of-Egdod-type.

  At times flying with wings spread, at times walking upon the ground, he went up and down the street and ranged through the forest and roamed the park and learned the number of others who had come to his domain. He concluded that the number of souls was not many more than the number of the tiny appendages sprouting from the leaf-platforms that terminated his upper limbs. Almost as quickly as he felt the need for them, the notions came to his mind: fingers, hands, arms. Ten, and other numbers. There were between ten and twenty souls, all told, some scuttling about as dry leaves, others lodged in trees or streams. Their number was actually quite small compared to the amount of consternation that their arrival had caused him.

  More arrived. The number did not increase suddenly, but neither did it ever decrease. It would seem that the place they came from emitted more dead people all the time but had no way of reabsorbing them. Why this was so, and whether it made sense, there was no point in troubling his mind with. All that mattered for the time being was that their number was small and that they were so weak as to make little difference to him, at least now that he had drawn a thick skin about himself. He saw no harm then in leaving, for a time, the place that he had built, and where he had abided, since he had died. He strode up the street to the park at the top of the hill. His body talked to him in a new way that was neither seeing nor hearing; he could feel the ground beneath his feet now. And when he reached the park where the wind blew, and went to a grassy place where there was ample room to unfold his wings, he likewise felt the air beneath them. The winds that he had once brought into being to carry away the dead leaves now picked him up and lifted him toward the sky. He changed the wings’ relationship to the air so that he wheeled toward the forest and began to soar over it. The ground dropped away. He saw how the veins in the earth came together to make the river. The river ran downhill. He followed it. It flowed into a space that put him in mind of chaos, since he had not yet ventured into it and given it a form. But he had long since mastered the craft of drawing solid adamant out of chaos, as water froze into ice. It was a small matter, therefore, to bestow form on it now, making it a simple extension of the forest he had already made. The shape of it was different, the trees and the leaves all unique; the veining of the rivers had a similar-but-different pattern from those on the slopes below his park.

  Thus for a time he extended the Land and the forest vastly in whatsoever direction he chose to fly. It became monotonous, though, and the river draining it grew
so wide that when he lit on one of its banks he could not see to the other side. Summoning more vague memories of how things ought to be, he put an ocean at the river’s end. Because there was some indefinable wrongness in the forest’s going all the way to the water’s edge, he made between them a strip of bare adamant. The monotony of this displeased him and so he broke it up into various pieces called rocks. His first rocks were all of a common shape and size but he bettered them by making some tinier and more numerous than snowflakes, others bigger than the hill of the park but less often seen. Distributed along the boundary between the forest and the ocean, these made beaches and cliffs, which protected the trees from the onslaught of the waves with which he thought it best to populate the surface of the sea. He soared and wheeled above the largest of all the rocks, which, just to amuse himself, he had made so large that the street and the park and much of the forest could have rested comfortably on its top. From its apex he beheld the way his waves crashed against it.

  In the water’s movements he saw manifold imperfections. The waves and the manner of their beating against the rock begged for improvement. He spent some days bettering this, until when they clashed against the rock they hurled spray into the air. When he swooped low he could feel spray pelting the skin he had made to separate himself from things-that-were-not-Egdod, and the waves’ roar enveloped him almost as fully as the hiss of chaos had once done eons ago. The spray was made of tiny, hurtling balls of water that were all but invisible against the sky. He knew that this was wrong and that each ball of water ought to catch the light of the sun and reflect it, making the spray glitter brightly. More than that, each ball ought to be supplying a reflection of the world around it—including Egdod. Until they did so, the water was very far from being rightly formed and needed further betterment.

  He knew that making it so would consume at least as many years as he had already devoted to the making of the street, the park, and the forest. Earlier, he might gladly have perched atop a large rock and spent years on the patient improvement of the waves’ shape and surge, but now the awareness that souls were arriving made him loath to spend more time than he needed to here. He beat his wings against the spray and lifted himself up above the great rock and took a last look down into the spray, a mere fog, not yet shining or reflecting as it ought to. Then he soared up the coast.

  He could see this idea of the mirrored ball almost as if it were hanging in space before him—as if he were supporting such an object on the tips of his fingers and gazing into it.

  Supposing that he could now summon up a mirrored ball—or a mirrored anything—and gaze into it, what would he see? What did he look like? The question had never occurred to him when he had lived alone. A tree could not look back at him. The souls who had recently begun flocking to his abode probably lacked the power to see anything clearly. In time, though, they might acquire such powers, just as Egdod had, and then they would gaze on him, just as they gazed on trees and rocks, and they would see something. What would it look like, what impression would it make upon them?

  He could not very well know the answer until he knew what he looked like to himself, and so he formed a resolve to fashion a mirror one day, and gaze into it. But it was of little importance now and so he put it out of his mind. He flew above the world that he was creating.

  Another fully formed thought came into his head: this was what he did. It was fitting and proper that he make the world out of chaos and better what he had made and make room in it for newly arriving souls, for he—not the dead Egdod flying above the forest, but the living Egdod who had once held leaves in his hand and looked at mirrored balls—had done it before. He was good at it. And the other souls that he had noticed in his domain were, perhaps, not invading it so much as seeking his protection.

  The place where the Land gave way to the ocean was an enjoyable change from where he had abided until then. He beat his wings in a slow rhythm and made his way along that coast, circling back frequently to inspect and improve features that had caught his attention, but generally keeping the Land to his left side and the water to his right. Some stretches of the coast he carpeted with uncountable numbers of tiny rocks called sand, others he buttressed with big rocks. In some places he made the forest roll straight to the edge and then drop sheer into the water below, which were called cliffs. In others he made cliffs topped not with trees but with broad expanses of grass. So intoxicated did he become with coast building that he did not much concern himself with what lay inland of it.

  After a time he sensed a kind of wrongness in his fashioning of so much coast without paying due attention to the lands it circumscribed. While continuing to fly above the place where the ocean beat against the shore, he thereafter made it his practice to bend his course ever to one direction, though with excursions to and fro when it suited him. In his mind he was seeing a figure closed in on itself, like a droplet of water suspended in flight. The Land was to become a bounded thing, as his body was now bounded by his skin. Along the way its boundary—the coast—would vary one way and then the other, sometimes in broad figures and other times in quick turnings out or in.

  His flight was a long one, but in time he wheeled around a newly formed headland to see, in the distance, the large rock that he had fashioned at the place where his river ran down from his park. He flew to it and circled round it a few times to satisfy himself that it was as he had left it. And it was, for adamant did not alter its form unless he caused it to do so. The Land had been fully circumscribed and was enclosed. Satisfied of this, he turned his course inland and began tracing the river back to where he had started. Because of its many branchings this might have been a difficult task, were it not for the fact that the way he had followed from the park to the ocean was a carpet of red forest. To its left and to its right was bare adamant, veined with rivers but bare of trees or any other living stuff.

  He might easily have brought more trees into being and covered the bare places with red beauty, but his sojourn along the coast had awakened in him a taste for variety, and he was beginning to see wrongness in all of the trees’ being of the same kind. More perfect would have been a world in which trees of diverse kinds grew on the hills and in the valleys. On an impulse he flew up one rocky vale that carried a tributary of unusual size. Such a great stream, he reckoned, must spring from a correspondingly great place. He followed it uphill for a time until he came to a place of immense rocks protruding from the ground, which he knew to be mountains. On their slopes he made new sorts of trees that were forever green, a darker green than that of the trees in the park. As he flew low over this new forest to inspect it, a new sensation came to him: this forest had a fragrance that spoke to him, somehow, of such forests in the place he had abided before he had died. He breathed it in deep, and knew that his face, still unseen, had affordances for drawing in the wind and smelling what it was made of.

  After a few turns around those mountains he followed the great tributary back down to the main channel of the river and doubled back along the course that would lead him up through the red forest to the top of his hill. This too had a fragrance now, less strong than that of the dark green forests in the mountains, but nonetheless pleasing.

  He alit in the park to find all little different from how it had been when he had departed, save that many more leaves had fallen to the ground, and some had become dry and begun to scuttle about in the wind. In many of these he sensed the inchoate tangles of rude perception that he identified as souls. Walking up and down the street, strolling in the park, and ranging through the forest in the next few days he counted perhaps ten times ten of them. Their presence no longer troubled him as it had at first. Yet he felt that the time had arrived for him to make some place into which they could not go, so that, when he so chose, he could be alone as he had been used to during the first eons since he had died.

  In the beginning the park had been flat. Later he had changed the shape of it and made it into a hill. Now he changed its shape again, causing t
he adamant that lay beneath the grass to grow up out of it in places, forming walls. Just as he had earlier bounded the whole Land with a coast to separate it from the ocean, he now bounded the top of the hill with a wall. But whereas the coast’s beauty had derived from its roughness, he sensed that a proper wall should be smooth and straight. He made it thus, pushing it back in some places and drawing it out in others, until the walls had acquired a pleasing uniformity. On the side that looked toward the street he created an aperture. As he had come to expect, the name of it came to him presently: gate. And in the opposite wall, the one that looked toward the forest, he created a smaller gate.

  A considerable stretch of park still lay between the small gate and the forest. He bounded this too, not with walls but with hedges of trees whose nature he altered so that they put forth many branches dense with small leaves that never turned red or fell, so that in all seasons a wall of green would enclose this area. Its name was Garden. He spent many days there brooding over the forms of trees and smaller plants. His long flight around the coast had made it known to him that many rivers emptied into the ocean besides just the first one, and that each river had many branches, and that each branch led up into places that were now bare but that, in a proper Land, needed to be bettered with trees and plants of many kinds. He had already achieved this in the case of the high mountains that he had girdled with fragrant evergreens, but much more remained to be done. He had it in mind that he would use the Garden to bring forth many different kinds of trees, all together in one small place where he could observe their changes through the seasons and better them. When they were ready he would then propagate many more of their kinds in all of the bare places.