Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  In this he began to rely upon the help of those he had come to think of as wild souls: ones who had come to be in the Land in the same manner as those in Town, but who had been disinclined to lodge there and instead had ranged far, following rivers down toward the ocean or soaring on the high strong winds that blew above the mountains. Many of these came to rest within small things that Egdod had created, such as rocks, rivers, and trees. Others made forms for themselves that were of no great significance. A few though acquired forms that were remarkable in their size and complication, reflecting their affinities for the winds and the waves. When Egdod traveled to some distant coast and found the ocean crashing against it with greater perfection than at the time of his previous visit, he knew that some such soul had been at work bettering the movement of the waters.

  On more than one occasion Egdod was absent for the better part of a season. When he did come back, he would fly high over Town and look down on it. Striking to him, when he did, was its combination of regular patterns—the grid of streets, the rectangular houses, the square park in the middle—with the unplanned rambling character of one of those places in the Land where he had years ago seeded something and since allowed it to develop according to its own nature. And yet he knew that the shape of Town was correct just as it was. Each house belonged where he had put it. Each street came to an end just where it ought to.

  Town, seen from above, was alive with the stirrings of small souls. At a distance it looked like a place full of dry leaves scuttling about in a wind, but of course when he swooped lower he could see that these were not leaves but smaller forms. Some of those had wings but most did not. Those that did commonly lacked any great skill in flying, and over time the disused wings would shrink. He saw that they had been making alterations to their houses and to the swathes of grass separating one from the next. He had expected that they would do so, and yet he found it troubling in an indefinable way. He wanted them to learn the trick of shaping the world, just as he had learned to do, but he did not wish for them to acquire so much power that they could break the forms that he considered proper. Beating his wings, hovering above the park in the middle of Town, he saw the faces of the souls—all equipped with mouths now—turn upward to regard him. This he had expected and indeed hoped for, since he wished to show them a useful pattern that a soul ought to shape itself into. By and large he had done this through the intermediation of Ward. He could see that it had been working well, but there was nothing amiss in letting them look upon him directly from time to time.

  What he had not expected was that the souls of the Town, upon spying him, used their mouths to call out to one another, uttering his name as well as other words that he could not distinguish so easily. Too, they clumped together in twos, threes, and larger groups, the better to exchange words as they looked up and regarded Egdod hovering in the sky above them. He noticed that when they stood close together, the auras that swathed their heads would sometimes flow together, as creeks joined together to make larger streams. The auras would swirl about and circulate among several souls’ heads at once, as if they had combined into one.

  29

  MonsterCon 3 was what everyone at the Forthrast Family Foundation called the event, because its official name was too unwieldy. The terminology leaked out over the various mail and messaging systems that they used to coordinate it with the Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation, with El Shepherd’s network, and other interested parties, obliging Zula to send out a fatwa abolishing its use, scrubbing all Frankenstein imagery, and reminding everyone that it was supposed to be called the Third Annual Conference on Trends in Advanced Neural System Simulation. Or, if that was too much verbiage, ACTANSS 3. They still held it at the same resort in British Columbia where they had held the first one. This meant holding the head count down to fifty, with twenty-five support staff sleeping in RVs, and even tents, scattered around the property.

  “Discovered” and mapped by white people before the advent of brand management consultants and focus groups, the geography of the West Coast abounded in strange and terrifying place names. The very name “California” came from a phantasmal Spanish novel about rampant Amazon Negresses. The Desolation Sound region, about halfway up the landward coast of Vancouver Island, confronted map-browsing visitors with a variety of features that were by turns named after whatever the first English or Spanish explorers considered inspiring (Enlightenment virtues such as discovery), devotional (diverse saints and theological debating points), important to grovel to (members of royal families, heroes, the admiralty), or dangerous enough to call for heavy hints that future colonizers shouldn’t go there. In the latter category was Devastation Narrows, joining Surge Rocks to Whirlpool Bay, and running, no joke, between Scylla Point and Charybdis Head. This exceptional concentration of scare words was the result of factors both geographical and cultural. The overall Desolation Sound region, if you zoomed out far enough, was the elbow in the five-hundred-kilometer-long sleeve of water separating Vancouver Island from the mainland. From that elbow the Queen Charlotte Strait ran wide and mostly unobstructed to the Pacific Ocean to the west. To the south, the Strait of Georgia was a similar highway of deep water to the confluence of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound. Tides ebbed and flowed along all of these. In less complicated waters, the direction of the water’s movement could be guessed simply by checking a tide table and then glancing at the map to note the direction of the open Pacific. But the rise and fall of the world’s largest body of water could reach Desolation Sound as readily from the west as from the south. That, combined with the exceptional number of islands, the maze of glacier-cut channels between them, and the verticality of the shores, made for movements of water that were as rapid as they were chaotic. Whirlpools, weird standing waves, undertows, bore tides, and abrupt reversals in the direction of flow were the norm.

  In 1792, a longboat carrying a mixed English and Spanish crew had ventured into the apparently placid waters of what they took to be a blind inlet, only to find themselves in the grip of sudden and violent tidal surge that had overpowered their oarsmen and sent them on what amounted to a white-water rafting adventure down a chute between a craggy islet and a limb of rock protruding from a large island. They had sideswiped the former hard enough to stave in one side of the boat, which had begun shipping water and then gone under after getting caught in a whirlpool. The bodies—long since dead of hypothermia—and the wreckage had washed up on a driftwood-strewn shore some miles away, the home of a band of the sorts of people nowadays referred to, in Canada, as First Nations. To the officers of the European ship who had observed all of these goings-on through their spyglasses, they were Indians. And to the less adventurous white people who years later had read accounts of the tragedy while dragging their fingers along the course of the doomed boat on nautical charts, they were cannibals and slavers and such. More sensitive descriptions of those tribes and their cultural practices were now available, but the names on the maps had mostly stuck. The one exception was the stretch of beach where the corpses had washed up, which went down on the eighteenth-century charts as Cannibal Shore but was now called Ruination Reach.

  No business owner in their right mind would want to sink a lot of capital into a resort named after that. “Devastation” was only a little less discouraging, but “Desolation” had a ring to it that a clever marketing team could make hay with. So Desolation Lodge was the name of the resort that had been built on the island, just above Surge Rocks, and within view of Scylla Point (the hazard that had punched in the longboat’s side) and Charybdis Head. It was an old logging camp, abandoned sufficiently long ago that the trees on the surrounding slopes had grown back to proportions where most tourists assumed they were looking at virgin wilderness. There wasn’t much flat land, but concrete foundations had been poured on some of the rocks within spitting distance of the shore and conjoined by a network of timbers and girders to support acres of cedar-plank platforms where docks, walkways, ramps, a helipad, a seapl
ane port, and other facilities had been constructed to service the lodge proper.

  Arriving guests—whether they came by boat, plane, or chopper—were all funneled into a cozy red-cedar reception hall where they sat by a fire and enjoyed a complimentary beverage while filling out bland but bloodcurdling waivers and getting a stern talking-to from a rugged senior guide. The guide had been picked out for his impressive physical presence, his authoritative voice, and a certain thousand-meter-stare quality in his blue-eyed gaze suggesting he’d seen shit you wouldn’t believe. He had important things to say, yes, about grizzly bears and slick footing, but his talk began and ended with remarks about water safety. These were bolstered with statistics and festooned with anecdotes, but essentially what he wanted you to know was that if you went into that water out there you would die. Even ankle-deep, the tidal surge would kick your legs out from under you with the remorseless precision of a jujitsu champion. As your upper body contacted the water you would go into shock from the intensity of the cold. You would gasp for breath rather than taking this one last opportunity to cry out for help. Within seconds your hands would be useless. The muscles of your arms would shut down in less than a minute. Some would simply go under and never come up, others would struggle to fight the current for a minute or two before hypothermia rendered their limbs useless. The resort abounded in hot tubs and swimming pools. Visitors who insisted on going into actual seawater would be directed to a sheltered, supervised cove five minutes’ walk away. But no one should go anywhere near the main channel without a survival suit and a rescue team.

  Having driven that point home and made eye contact with each arriving visitor, the senior guide would then tack on a couple of footnotes about bears and excuse himself. A younger and more bubbly staff member would then prattle on about the spa and the indoor tennis courts while the ancient mariner would, one presumed, totter off to a dark corner of the bar to drink straight whiskey while gazing out over the chilly and violent waters of the strait and ponder death.

  The only visitor who managed to avoid this introductory session was El Shepherd. As always, he stayed home in Zelrijk-Aalberg and shipped a telepresence robot to the site. It arrived a day early, hoisted out of the hold of a supply boat along with the resort’s usual supply of beer, broccoli, and laundry detergent. It was in a fetal position with a shipping label stuck to its back, blazoned with the name METATRON. For, having found these devices useful, El had executed a roll-up, purchasing a few companies that had been competing in the telepresence space, merging them into one, and giving them a snappy new brand name.

  The staff wheeled the Metatron up to the main lodge on a dolly and set it down. It emitted a warning tone, suggested that everyone stand clear, and then stood up. It moved in generally humanoid fashion. But because it was, for the time being, just running an automated program, it was infinitely patient, pausing frequently to scan its surroundings and consider its next move. The first thirty seconds of its emergence were fascinating to people who’d never seen one of these things before, but after that most people began to lose interest as it became clear that this was going to be about as interesting as, say, staring through the window of a front-loading laundry machine while it washed a load of bedsheets. Its general program was to find its way around the resort, moving slowly enough that it couldn’t possibly hurt anyone while scanning its surroundings through visible and infrared cameras. Its pace was so deliberate that people instinctively veered around it as if it were a statue. But if you sat in one place and glanced up at it occasionally while reading a book or sipping a pint, you’d see it in a different place each time you looked. In the dark it turned on running lights so people wouldn’t bang into it. Thanks to these preparations, El didn’t have to joystick the Metatron around every corner, he just had to tell it “Follow that guy” or “Stay with this group” or “Go to the conference center” and it would do so.

  So neither El nor his Metatron ever heard the safety briefing, but maybe it didn’t matter since the robot could be replaced if it blundered into the water. This was only one of a family of related questions that the conference’s organizers had to ponder under the general heading of whether to count Elmo Shepherd as an attendee. The Metatron took up the same space in the hall as a human being. But it didn’t count against fire code limits. It didn’t need to eat, and it didn’t require a bed, or even a room; every evening, when the after-dinner speech concluded and most of the attendees went to bed, the Metatron turned its back on them, walked to a dark corner, found an electrical outlet on the wall, pulled an extension cord out of its belly, bent over, and plugged itself in to recharge. Then it just stood there until proceedings resumed in the morning.

  The question was largely academic, since El was going to attend whether or not they counted him. Assuming that it was really him controlling the robot, he came to all of the sessions, standing quietly in the back of the room. The Metatron had a built-in speaker, so he could have piped in his voice at any time, but he didn’t use it; on the rare occasions when he wanted to ask a question, he would send it in the form of a brief text. Sometimes, though, the robot could be seen standing in a quiet corner, apparently having a conversation with Sinjin Kerr, Enoch Root, or one of his other advisers.

  Sophia’s ACTANSS 3 talk was co-presented with her collaborator Dr. Matilda Napolitano, a mathematical physicist at the University of Bologna. Its title was “Virtual-Space Cartography from Manifold-Based Traffic Analysis.” They staged the presentation on the resort’s tennis court, which was protected from cold and wet by an inflatable dome. They did it just before dinner, as the light was dying outside, but they chose not to turn on the dome’s powerful illumination system, which would have competed with what they wanted to display. Resort staff had taken down the tennis net and scattered a few faint, indirect lights around the place so that the attendees wouldn’t bump into one another. As recently as ten years ago it would have seemed a bizarre setting for a technical presentation, but now everyone understood what it meant: Sophia and Matilda were going to be presenting some visuals, and they’d be using augmented reality to do it, and this would all be easier if people could stroll freely through whatever three-dimensional imagery was going to be projected into this space.

  The opening graphics were two-dimensional, however. Sophia caused them to appear on a virtual screen at one end of the tennis court, so that all of the attendees were at first facing in the same direction.

  She started with a map of Europe, the national borders curiously wrong until a caption came up identifying it as the Europe of 1941.

  “As a way of introducing this subject matter to people who, like me, are not mathematical physicists, I wanted to make an analogy to how the world looked to Allied codebreakers in the early part of the Second World War, before they had broken the German codes,” Sophia began.

  The map began to move, panning and zooming to focus on Great Britain. Cartoon installations began to pop up at various locations on the island: little icons, each consisting of a small building with an antenna on its roof, swiveling this way and that, but mostly pointed east and south toward Axis-controlled Europe.

  “They couldn’t read the actual content of the messages, but they could still copy them down. And through a technology called high-frequency direction finding, or huffduff, they could figure out where each transmission originated.”

  The animation on the screen now demonstrated huffduff. Across the English Channel in German-occupied France, a swastika icon popped up, and red circles began to radiate from it, like ripples on the surface of a pond. The red arcs crossed the channel and lit up two of the huffduff stations, from which dotted lines then reached out, tracing the enemy transmission back to its source. A bell chimed and a teletype sound loop began to play as data about the transmission was hammered out onto the screen.

  Sophia continued, “The technical details of how it all worked are sort of cool, and many here would find them interesting, but that’s another topic for another day. The po
int is that by running the huffduff network day in and day out, Allied intelligence was able to build up what we would today refer to as a database giving information about who talked to whom when. There was still no information about what they were actually saying—the messages themselves were indecipherable—but it was still possible to get a picture of how things were hooked up internally within the Axis chain of command, and which parts of the front were most active.”

  As she spoke, the map of Europe zoomed back and panned east, focusing more on the Eastern Front. Little swastikas popped up all over the place, talking to each other, and glowing lines came into existence on the ground, connecting Berlin with various occupied capitals and hot spots on the front. Suddenly a battle seemed to break out in the Ukraine; no actual fighting was depicted, but a huge amount of radio traffic erupted from closely spaced sites that were all situated along a meandering line across that region. In slow creeps and sudden leaps, the shape of the line changed, and one could sense that the Germans were winning the battle, cleaning up surrounded pockets of Red Army troops, consolidating their gains, moving their radio transmitters forward.