Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  Much more interesting were the contents of the Enoch Root bucket, which was brimming over with discussion of a talk he had given earlier today on the subject of amortality. Not satisfied with giving it only one clever title, he had titled it “Amortality; or, Death after Death.”

  His recent work on this topic had come about in the wake of a weird interaction, some months ago, between the Dodge Process and another soul, which had seemingly led to the latter’s being completely annihilated. In the LVU they could watch replays of the event, albeit in grainy, herky-jerky style and with no sound. It took place in the “Town Square” and started with what looked like an altercation between a member of the Pantheon and a town dweller. The latter was armed with some manner of tool or weapon, which he used to strike the former and inflict damage. Dodge then showed up and did something very computationally expensive, at the end of which the assailant no longer existed.

  Of course, the system administrators had a backup copy of his data. Certain token holders had the privileges needed to reboot the terminated process. But first some questions needed to be answered, and, as one of those tohos, Sophia needed to pay attention to them.

  For they had never considered, when they had set it all up, that souls would die. Much less that they would commit murder.

  (That was not quite the right way to put it, since there were so many things they had not considered—such a vast scope of unintended consequences. But little point in fretting about that. This was how things got started now. You either paused to consult all of the stakeholders and think through all of the possible consequences—in which case you’d certainly end up doing nothing at all, since complex systems had consequences that were infinite and imponderable—or you just went for it and pressed the Enter key.)

  (Also because “soul” was so fraught with unwanted philosophical and religious baggage. But the reality was that when scanned brains were booted up as new processes, with the ability to draw upon computing resources and to interact with the other processes, they took on seemingly personlike attributes: they existed in one place, not all places; they moved about in a way that seemed physical; and they dealt with other processes in a way that seemed social. And you could try to dodge around the hard questions by sticking to neutral terminology like “process.” But they weren’t selling the service to their customers by offering to spawn processes. Every customer who paid into the plan while alive, and who had their remains scanned after their death, was doing so in the belief that the resulting process was in some sense a continuation of their existence in a sort of afterlife. No amount of dancing around could really dodge the fact that what was really being talked about here was the soul. And part of the deal—the expectation—was to keep it going indefinitely.)

  It was clear that there were processes that had been spawned in the system that had taken root, grown, thrived, done things, related to others of their kind, dug holes, chopped down trees, built houses, and spanned time, and then, for one reason or another (being murdered by Dodge was only one example), ceased. You never wanted to say “ceased to exist” because the data were always squirreled away somewhere. But the process itself stopped changing and surrendered its resources to the cloud. And that included the resources needed to maintain a virtual body.

  This raised a number of issues that in the flesh-and-blood world of Meatspace were categorized as “life and death” but in the business world fell under the heading of customer service. If a service provider had extracted money from a customer by promising them that they would live forever (perhaps not in so many words—but this was what most customers understood and assumed); waited for them to die; scanned their remains, and in so doing vaporized them; uploaded the scan to the cloud; brought it to a kind of life; given it qualia, experiences, a social life, memories, all of the other things that souls in Meatspace had; then allowed that to be extinguished for whatever reason, was the service provider then not guilty of letting its customers down? Friends and loved ones of the dead would notice that they were now dead again and make a stink about it and demand satisfaction. They might take their business and entrust their brains and souls to competitors who claimed they had eradicated the death bug from their systems.

  In the old world, death had led to endless philosophical ruminations and spawned religions, but in Bitworld it led to one-star ratings from furious bereaved and threats of class-action lawsuits.

  Comp sci Ph.D.s and, yes, philosophers and theologians had now gathered together at ACTANSS 5 to talk about the nature of the problem. Today Enoch Root had taken it upon himself to stake out a position on all of this. He was trying to get out ahead of people who were saying, “Fortunately there’s an easy solution to this—failed processes can simply be rebooted!” He wanted to bring to their attention certain complications that were perplexing, verging on disastrous. Given the reverence in which he was increasingly held, both in South Lake Union and Zelrijk-Aalberg, his was now the dominant, or at least the default, position—the one that all of the competing service providers might end up writing into their EULAs. It was big and complicated but it was summarized under the term “amortality.”

  “If a tree falls on a forester, does it hurt?” had been the opening line of his talk today. The answer was “Yes, because otherwise the system falls apart.”

  The Dodge Process, for whatever reason, had covered the Landform with trees. More recently arrived souls had begun chopping them down and using them for things such as shelter. Tree pieces were useless—you couldn’t make houses of them—unless they had physical properties such as weight, hardness, and stiffness. So far so good. But if a tree happened to fall on a person, it couldn’t suddenly turn into a pillow. Or rather it could—you could do anything with a computer program, after all—but what kind of a world was that, really? Our brains—be they flesh-and-blood Meatspace brains or their carefully husbanded digital simulations in Bitworld—weren’t hooked up to make sense of a universe where trees turned into pillows the moment they became dangerous. Once you made a special carve-out for falling trees, there was no end to it; very soon the whole universe stopped making sense, or “decohered.”

  There was only one way out of it, and that was amortality. Not immortality—because when a tree fell on a forester, that forester had to get hurt, and maybe to die. But “to die” here did not mean to be extirpated forever. The form—the body—in which the soul had been clothing itself up until the moment when the tree hit it, that had to take damage and the damage had to have real consequences. If it was severe enough, then it was best for the soul in question to abandon that body and get a new one.

  Simple enough in theory. There was—as always—a catch, which was that you couldn’t just boot up a fresh copy of the original scan from scratch. Or even of the virtual body at the moment the tree hit it. The techno-philosophical arguments were hyperarcane, but a straightforward analogy familiar to every consumer who had ever had to reboot an out-of-whack device was that these things were unfathomably complicated, with a million subsystems that had to be interconnected just so. If only one of those interconnections was wrong, the whole thing didn’t work. In theory, anything could be debugged and patched up, but in practice it was quicker and gave better results if you just shut the whole thing down and started again from a clean slate.

  And Enoch wasn’t pretending he had all of the answers to these questions. That wasn’t the point of his talk. The point was to ask them.

  A few people Sophia knew and liked were lounging around in the big hot tub out on the deck, so, after she had got her fill of amortality, she shut down the treadmill, pulled off her wearable, poked it into an external pocket of Daisy, and carried it out and set it on a nearby shelving unit used to store terry-cloth bathrobes. She peeled off her clothes and enjoyed a dip for fifteen minutes or so, turning down the offer of a hit on a cannabis pipe that was making the rounds. But the social scene was winding down, and she was tired, so she climbed out and grabbed one of the thick bathrobes from the shelves. Af
ter putting it on, she wrapped Daisy up in her workout clothes. She padded back along the resort’s web of footpaths, boardwalks, and covered walkways to the little cottage that had been assigned to her as her lodging. This comprised a small living/working/dining room with a kitchenette and a bedroom, both of which had views out over the waters of Desolation Sound through glass doors. Just outside was a flagstone terrace barely wide enough to accommodate a couple of deck chairs and a coffee table. The cottage had been sited close to the brink of the steep drop-off to the waterfront, so a waist-high glass barrier had been erected to prevent drunk or sleepy guests from plunging over it. An opening in that led to a wooden staircase that rambled down to the complex of docks and boardwalks about ten meters below. The most prominent feature down there was the resort’s helipad, a surprisingly tiny platform that projected out over the turbulent strait.

  Sophia wasn’t sure why she had been assigned this cottage. It was one of the resort’s finer accommodations. Most of the other attendees were in hotel rooms that were very nice, but hotel rooms nonetheless. As a rule her mother, and others directly connected with the foundation, made a point of staying in such, to avoid sending the wrong message. To Sophia—not the sort who habitually flew around in choppers—the helipad was strictly a nuisance; whenever one of those things was landing or taking off, all conversation was drowned out for a couple of minutes. But she could see how a certain kind of luxury traveler might revel in the ability to hop out of a chartered whirlybird and scamper up a few steps to a private cottage.

  On its back side, the place sported the sort of bathroom that such a traveler would demand. Sophia walked straight into it, tossed her workout clothes on the floor, hung Daisy on the door hook, and set her wearable on the counter while the shower was warming up. She shed the bathrobe and kicked it into the corner, then stepped into the shower and began to rinse the hot tub’s chlorine out of her hair. She soaped up and washed herself off.

  When she emerged from the shower she was conscious of a hissing noise that hadn’t been there when she had turned the water on. She felt light-headed, and braced herself against the bathroom counter for a few moments until she felt more certain of her balance. This was weird. The bathroom had a built-in steam generator with hard-to-understand controls. She guessed she might have inadvertently turned it on. Perhaps it had been hissing away the whole time, bringing the heat up to the point where she was getting dizzy. She looked at the control panel but couldn’t make sense of it. No steam seemed to be coming out. The hiss must have been from the plumbing, or one of the cottage’s other systems. Going to the door she noticed that the transparent plastic sleeve on Daisy was fogged over. She pulled it off the door hook and put it around her neck. Then she hauled the door open, letting in cooler air from the bedroom. She was still feeling short of breath and not altogether healthy. She felt a powerful urge to get out on the terrace and breathe some fresh cold air.

  The hiss became much more distinct. The room was dark, but she noticed an odd pattern of lights—colored LEDs—in the corner of the bedroom by the terrace doors. The light spilling over her shoulder from the bathroom showed an object at the foot of her bed that hadn’t been there when she’d come in a few minutes ago. It was a heavy industrial cart with fat tires. It carried a squat blue steel box with a control panel, currently dark, and thick loops of cable and hose. Standing behind that was a cylinder about her height, easily recognizable as one of the tanks used to contain industrial gases.

  This was a welding cart. The steel box was the welding machine itself. The cylinder was the supply of inert gas used to keep the red-hot metal from oxidizing. And it was the source of the hissing noise. For the regulator had been unscrewed from the valve on the top, which had been opened. Hissing out of it and filling the room was gas.

  Gas the entire point of which was that it did not include any oxygen.

  She wasn’t woozy and light-headed because of heat but because she wasn’t getting enough air. She was being asphyxiated.

  The welding cart was blocking her path to the terrace doors, so she headed for the cottage’s front door instead. But she drew up short when she saw that the way out had been blocked by several heavy items of furniture that had been dragged there and piled against it.

  She spun back toward the glass doors that led onto the terrace and saw again the pattern of light she had noticed earlier. This time it was moving. It moved like a human. It was the Metatron. Its nighttime running lights had come on automatically. It had been standing near the glass doors. Now it was moving toward her. Another one just like it was moving outside. No, that was just the reflection of the first one in the glass. Spatial basics like in and out, up and down, vertical and horizontal, normally so intuitive, had become unfathomably tricky. She felt pressure on her knees and realized that she was in fact kneeling. More pressure on her shoulder was probably because she was slumped against a wall. The Metatron was coming toward her. She drew in a breath of 75 percent CO2/25 percent argon (that’s what the label on the hissing cylinder said) and called out “Help” in a strangely low syrupy voice. But the hissing had been reinforced by a heavy thudding noise that drowned everything out. She thought maybe it was her heart pounding but then knew it for a helicopter.

  Something hard was around her wrist, like a manacle. It was the Metatron’s hand. It began walking toward the glass doors. Since it was still gripping Sophia’s wrist this meant it was now dragging her. She had gone almost completely flaccid and couldn’t see well, but as her free hand trailed along the carpet it felt something familiar, and reflexively closed over it: the thin nylon strap of Daisy. Daisy now began dragging along in her wake. She heard glass shattering.

  When she woke up it seemed much later. But it wasn’t. Her sense of time had gone out of whack. She was gulping in cold air—real air. Her legs hurt. She opened her eyes and looked up at the robot’s running lights above her against the foggy night sky as it dragged her. It was dragging her down the wooden staircase and her legs hurt because they’d been pulled through broken glass and scraped across stone and wood and were now banging down steps. The sound of the chopper was very close; they were almost to the helipad. Something was involved in the fingers of her free hand: the nylon strap of Daisy. She torqued her head around and saw, from near ground level, the aluminum feet of the Metatron, shod in black neoprene, hitting the pavement of the helipad in an even stride.

  She swung her free arm around in a big arc. Daisy followed at the end of its nylon strap and wrapped all the way around the Metatron’s ankles. Its measured tread was spoiled. It teetered for a few moments as immense computations tried to compensate for this unexpected turn of events. Then it simply fell over, banging its head on the skid of the chopper hard enough to nudge the whole aircraft sideways a bit. The rotor was spinning up almost to takeoff speed, carrying most of the helicopter’s weight, the skids barely touching the pad.

  Sophia got her feet under her and scrambled up as best as she could with the Metatron still clamping her wrist and the rotors’ downwash battering her. As she did, the fallen robot scraped toward her some distance and she understood that it didn’t actually weigh that much; it was very strong, but its mass was that of a child. It pulled back but couldn’t actually do much until it got its feet replanted. She knew it wanted to drag her into the helicopter’s side door.

  She moved away from the side door, which meant she was going toward the tail of the chopper. A warning voice in her head reminded her of the spinning tail rotor, which would chop her to bits if she contacted it.

  The Metatron had finally kicked free of Daisy’s strap. It clambered to its feet with the speed of an insect, surprising her. As soon as its feet were on the pavement it could tug on her arm with strength that was more than human. When she jerked, it jerked back ten times faster; it was like having one wrist embedded in the Washington Monument. But she understood that it didn’t weigh that much. Its only power came from its contact with the ground.

  She gave in, let it pull
her up against its hard body, and thrust her free hand between its legs. She hooked her arm under its pelvis, getting the crook of her elbow where the genitals would be on a human, and gathered her legs under her and stood up. Like mighty Heracles severing Antaeus from his contact with the ground. The force she’d been fighting vanished, throwing her off balance. She staggered back along the chopper’s flank. Sensing the hum of the tail rotor dangerously close, she turned away from the danger, inadvertently feeding the Metatron’s outstretched legs into the whirring blade.

  What occurred then was too fast and violent for any human senses to take in. It was like a shock cut in a movie; there was only before and after. She knew it was bad and that she had sustained injuries. The tail rotor was ruined, the helicopter out of trim. Its tail swung around, collected her and what was left of the Metatron, and knocked them off the edge of the helipad.

  The water below was as cold as advertised. She tried to raise her arms to swim, but the Metatron was still holding one of her wrists in a death grip. Her free hand came up. Daisy came up with it, the faded plastic petals floating in front of her face but gradually fading from view as she sank.