Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  The epoch of Mags 3 to 4—between one thousand and ten thousand active souls—had been the age when the townlike thing had formed around Dodge and then transformed into what C-plus saw as a degenerate mess and El found so full of promise: the cottonlike Wad. By that point, SLUZA had got the scanning down to a science. It was as good as it was ever going to get. Future upgrades might make it faster or cheaper, but the quality of the data had reached its theoretical limit and was not going to improve.

  The souls generated from those scans were, in their appearance and their powers, much more uniform. They were the population of the “town.” They knew about Dodge—the sole Mag 0 process—and they interacted with some of the more social, but still weird, Mag 1 and 2 souls. It was just a given feature of their universe, however, that those souls belonged to a different order. They had later surprised everyone by undergoing a sort of phase change into the Wad. When this had fallen over, they had dispersed, and gone back to having regular humanoid bodies and—as far as anyone could tell—social lives.

  Those events coincided more or less with the boundary between Mags 3 and 4 and Mags 5 and 6, which was to say the era when the population had expanded from about ten thousand souls to more like one hundred thousand, on a growth curve that would pretty soon take it to a million. So it was maybe fortuitous that, after the Wad had dispersed, the population had spread out to occupy more of the Landform. In a Wad-like configuration, population density could be very high. But most customers, observing all of this in the LVU, didn’t fancy spending the afterlife in something like an insect colony. Heaven for them had grass, trees, fresh water, and sunsets. Projecting the numbers forward, the Landform was easily large enough to afford such comforts to 107 (ten million) souls—maybe even 108 (a hundred million) if they kept clustering together in cities, as seemed to be the trend along the banks of the big river in the east.

  Anyway, by that yardstick they were at about Mag 5 (hundreds of thousands of souls) when the paperwork was signed on the consortium that became known as SLUZA. Its engineers rolled up their sleeves and got to work on the big difficult issues that they were going to have to solve as the system grew from there to Mag 8, 9, and beyond. Eventually they’d have to get it up to at least Mag 10: ten billion souls, assuming that everyone alive on Earth in the middle of the twenty-first century wanted to be scanned and uploaded.

  Beyond that, it was unlikely to get much bigger. Partly that was for technical reasons: planet Earth could only support so much computational activity. Partly it was because population growth had plunged through zero and become decline.

  Making the management of all this much more difficult than it ought to have been was the extreme differentness of various souls. So, after a couple of years’ inconclusive wrangling and beard pulling, the people who ran SLUZA wreaked a vast simplification on the whole picture: they agreed to just ignore a couple of hundred processes that had been booted up in the early days when there had been no standards and everything had been in flux.

  At their peak, the Dodge and the Verna processes had controlled more computational resources—they had spent more money, had a higher burn rate, however you chose to phrase it—than any thousand ordinary souls put together. Actually the figure was much higher than that if you considered the Landform itself to be part of the Dodge process. But since it didn’t really seem that Dodge was personally looking after each cresting wave in the ocean and each tree in the forest, SLUZA’s high council of elders decided to bucket that kind of thing separately, as subprocesses that Dodge had spawned but should no longer be billed for. So those, as well as Verna’s myriad subprocesses, were covered in what eventually came to be known as the Buildings and Grounds budget, which was split between SLUZA’s membership according to a complex and ever-shifting formula.

  Which didn’t change the fact that Dodge and a number of the other old souls were just different in so many ways that merely cataloging the differences would be a lifelong task for a researcher. All bets were off when it came to those. And yet there were so few of them that devoting a lot of attention to them seemed like the wrong way to allocate resources. They had to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

  Now, admittedly this was simplified quite a bit by the fact that Dodge, incomparably the most powerful, had, for lack of a better term, died. You couldn’t point to a body, but he had surrendered all of his resources, and no further billable activity had since shown up on his account. Sophia for her part seemed to flit in and out of existence. It was hard to tell since she seemed to have tricky ways of cloaking her activities.

  Meanwhile the second-most resource-hungry Mag 0–2 process—the one associated with Verna—spawned two completely new processes of humanlike complexity, then dropped off the radar, reducing her level of activity to something not much out of line with a typical soul.

  Maybe Verna would ramp up again later. And maybe her “children” would spawn more children, et cetera, and those would one day pose an insupportable burden on the computing infrastructure of Meatspace. But none of them was posing a problem now. The Verna process had so many interactions with Buildings and Grounds—the shared account for simulation and maintenance of the Landform’s geography, meteorology, and biology—that it was pointless trying to tease them apart. So, from an accounting point of view, the best way to manage Verna was to keep an eye on B & G’s burn rate and watch for weird upticks. Which they did. And there were indeed weird upticks. But they came and went faster than humans could schedule meetings to talk about them and never created enough of a problem to demand a response.

  So, of the most resource-hungry processes, El and his crew had paid their own way, as it were, by showing up concurrently with new mana brought online just for that purpose by El’s support system in Meatspace. Dodge was no more. The Pantheon stayed to itself and did not have problematic interactions with the other souls. Verna had been merged into the enormous B & G account. She was like a brush fire smoldering out in the middle of nowhere.

  That left various Mag 0–2 processes, numbering on the order of a hundred, who by and large had spawned and grown in isolation and ended up in bodies that had odd shapes, sizes, and powers. Idiomorphs. They remained on the Landform proper, where they were, in principle, capable of being very problematic indeed if they called upon all of the powers that they had acquired in the wild and woolly first eons. But they almost never did. And as years, then a decade went by in Meatspace while decades, then centuries went by in Bitworld, a consensus emerged among the engineers of SLUZA and was ratified in ACTANSS conference proceedings, not as a formal constitution or rulebook but as a list of best practices. As far as the Mag 0–2 idiomorphs were concerned it comprised two principles:

  The Algernon Principle, a.k.a. the Prime Directive, was loosely inspired by the Hippocratic Oath (“First do no harm”) but more so by a tragic/cautionary science fiction story by Daniel Keyes called “Flowers for Algernon,” about a developmentally disabled man who is given an experimental drug that turns him, for a while, into a genius—but it wears off and we see, by reading his daily journal entries, the inexorable decay of his mind: a slow torturous intellectual death. No one wanted to inflict anything of that sort upon a soul that had, in the early days of Bitworld, acquired vast powers and a unique kind of intelligence. The mere fact that they were expensive did not justify inflicting Algernon-like cruelty on them. There weren’t that many idiomorphs, their combined resource usage was not actually a problem, and anyway it seemed that something about their very weirdness made them disinclined to interact much with “normal” souls of the eras of Mag 3 and beyond.

  Having said all that:

  The Fenris Principle, a.k.a. the Mad God Rule (which had never actually been invoked), envisioned a Mad God and laid down some rules of thumb for coping with same (Fenris was a giant wolf of Norse mythology who, it was prophesied, would return one day to fuck everything up, and such were the ground rules of that mythos that there was nothing the gods could do about it). The closest the
y’d ever come to a Mad God scenario had been Dodge destroying the hive, and El ejecting Dodge and the Pantheon. The classic Mad God hypothetical was: what if El tried to revoke the law of gravity? It would affect everything in Bitworld at once: not just B & G (rivers would stop running downhill, etc.) but every single soul at once (they would all see rocks, and themselves, floating, their perceptions and thinking would undergo radical shifts, they would talk to one another about it). In the space of a few seconds the resource usage would jump up by orders of magnitude. Cooling systems would overheat, circuit breakers trip; previously undetected bugs would make their presence felt. The whole system would likely go down. In theory it could be rebooted; in practice no one even wanted to contemplate what a cold restart would entail and whether it would work at all.

  So there was a general consensus that Mad Gods needed to be checked if their actions created such existential risks, and there were committees and task forces and draft policy papers that always consumed a few schedule slots and conference rooms at ACTANSS. But if you talked to one of the purportedly responsible parties after hours at the bar, he or she would freely admit that they knew as little of what would happen in such an eventuality as Cold War civil defense officials trying to plan for global thermonuclear war.

  Thus the problematic Mag 0–2 processes. When Enoch, as the eminence grise of people whose job it was to think about this stuff, proposed that everyone just give up on any hope of trying to fit those weird old souls into a systematic picture, most of them were hugely relieved and excited by the prospect of buckling down to work on a project that actually might have some hope of success, or at least discernible progress: namely, trying to make sense of the vastly more numerous recently uploaded souls and their relationship to “life and death,” or as Enoch had dubbed it, “death after death.” Those more recently booted-up souls had enough in common with one another that one could at least begin to think about them systematically. They all consumed about the same amount of resources. Their virtual bodies all had roughly the same shape and size and they all affected one another, and the inanimate things around them, through the same kinds of interactions.

  Which were, when you came down to it, close copies—reproductions—performances—of the bodies people had in Meatspace and the way those bodies related to one another and to the world.

  And you couldn’t have that without mortality—or at least morbidity. So amortality—both as a philosophical abstraction and as a feature pitched by service providers to their customers—was that your soul would always be rebooted if something went badly wrong. And it wouldn’t be a totally fresh start. It wasn’t as if the new memories accumulated during the afterlife that had just ended were erased. Efforts would be made to preserve some continuous thread of identity connecting the new life just being rebooted back to the one that had been cut short by the falling tree, or whatever.

  Besides amortality, other big topics addressed by the sages of SLUZA included morpho-teleology and phased embodiment.

  “Morpho” meant form, “teleology” meant something that was preordained, determined in advance, frequently used as a scare word by people who believed things ought to develop on their own, without constraints. In this case, the notion was that the industry had actually taken a wrong turn when it had started to heed the advice of the neurologists and gone over to full-body scanning. Because of course if you scanned nerves all the way down to the toes and simulated interactions of gut bacteria with the cells of the intestinal lining, why, the resultant processes in Bitworld wouldn’t feel complete until they had created digital toes and digital stomachs and everything in between. Digital life had the potential to be so much more than bio-life and yet the morpho-teleologists were going about it in a basically flawed way that ensured that the souls of Bitworld would remain trapped in a tiny, crowded, and not very interesting corner of the space of all possibilities. They could no longer become gods or angels.

  Phased embodiment was a proposed solution to both (a) morpho-teleology and (b) the reality that sustainable infrastructure couldn’t be built on Earth fast enough to immediately give every single dead person a full humanoid body and a nice plot of land in Bitworld. Simulating the clear stream running past your homestake, babbling merrily over rocks, not to mention the smoke coming out of your chimney, was expensive. It was doable at Mag 7 but couldn’t be ramped up fast enough to keep pace with the death rate. Dead people could still be scanned and the scans could, of course, be archived—maybe even booted up as new processes—but giving them fancy places to live, with high-grade qualia, was not physically possible, and might not be for a few decades—which, as the computing centers bogged down under all that load, could correspond to centuries in Bitworld.

  Or they could have just booted everything up at full resolution on the equipment they had. This would work, on an engineering level. But the Time Slip Ratio would slow to a crawl. Years might pass in Meatspace while the babbling-brook and swirling-chimney-smoke calculations were performed to simulate just a few seconds’ elapsed time in Bitworld. Which would make no difference at all to a soul in Bitworld, since their consciousness would be slowed down as well. And so they would experience the qualia of the brook, smoke, etc. in precisely the same way as if everything had been running a thousand times faster. But for spectators watching Bitworld from Meatspace using ever-fancier versions of the Landform Visualization Utility, it would be boring and frustrating, like trying to watch a movie over a slow connection that stopped every few seconds to buffer more data. This would create what amounted to a PR and marketing problem, since, in marketing-speak, spectation was the main driver of customer acquisition. And that was how SLUZA took in money—which was how it paid for more, faster equipment.

  According to people on El’s side of the pond, phased embodiment was the answer. Souls could be booted up immediately in a far more resource-efficient form that was similar in many ways to the Wad. The original Wad, developing on its own, had been very expensive, with a lot of wasted cycles. But El’s engineers had figured out a way to make similar systems that were far more efficient; for example, they could communicate directly instead of simulating the biological processes of speech and hearing. Having a simplified form, and communicating through data packets, might not have been how most customers envisioned themselves spending all of eternity, but it was better than being dead, and it would give them some time to exist in a kind of fluid, embryonic, less-than-fully-embodied limbo for a while, during which they could perhaps explore creative alternatives to the one-size-fits-all humanoid plan that the morpho-teleological elites were foisting on them. The human fetus, floating in amniotic fluid, wasn’t yet a fully realized human. But it wasn’t a bad existence.

  Keen was the interest of Maeve in morpho-teleology and the related topic of idiomorphs—souls, mostly from the Mag 0–2 era, that had nonhumanoid forms. It took Corvallis some time to understand just how keen, and by that time, their relationship was pretty much doomed, at least if you defined “relationship” as “anything even remotely like a traditional marriage.”

  She’d always been cagey. The one time in her young life she’d really bared her passion to the world’s scrutiny had been the founding of Sthetix, which hadn’t gone well and had driven her into a reclusive life in the canyonlands around Moab. After meeting Corvallis she had spent several years as an Internet hate speech lightning rod, which had been fascinating in a way—but it was an essentially passive role, a work of performance art the whole point of which was to obliterate her real identity and bury it a million miles deep under fake news. Any thinking person who paid attention to that spectacle would end up asking, “But who is this person really?” To the extent that the project had succeeded, it had only made her real identity that much more enigmatic.

  Under that cover, she had, with Corvallis, raised three children in weirdly normal urban-soccer-mom style. They had never made a decision that he’d work full-time and she wouldn’t; it had just developed along those lines. Under a p
seudonym, she had maintained, for three years, a blog called “Luxury Crossover SUV as Prosthesis” in which she reimagined the elite-mom lifestyle as a centaurlike existence in which one’s body, and hence identity, effectively merged with the vehicle in which one spent several hours a day stuck in traffic between various child-related errands, or spiraling up and down immense multilevel parking structures while absorbed in podcasts or engaged in Bluetooth-mediated telepathy with other such persons. She had pursued a thread originating in Greek mythology, according to which centaurs were in some cases benevolent nurturers linked to the healing arts. The blog was witty but a little too unsparing and scary-smart to attract a wide audience—she had maybe ten thousand followers at peak, but they had a tendency to age out as their kids got into their teens. Anyway, the era of the awesomely huge gleaming luxury crossover SUV was coming to an end. Like Tolkien’s elves fading away and going into the west, they were dissolving into the used market as many families were downsizing their fleets in favor of ride-sharing services, and then fully autonomous vehicles that were owned by no one and everyone. So by the time Maeve’s and Corvallis’s kids were in the nine to twelve range, she had stopped writing the blog and, intellectually/artistically, gone dark for a decade.

  And then suddenly the kids were out of the house, and Maeve, like a butterfly unfolding itself from a chrysalis, had begun to unfurl some of what she had quietly been making of herself in that darkness. And much of that was hard to make out even for Corvallis. It had got its start in her identity as an amputee and a user of artificial legs. But it would have been reductive and patronizing to say that was all there was to it. The amputee thing was only a thin crevice into which she had, decades ago, inserted the tip of an intellectual prybar. She’d been worrying away at it ever since, listening to podcasts, downloading dissertations, going to the occasional academic conference, and, at ACTANSS, always in the back of the room paying attention and filling notebooks with tiny neat writing. But she hadn’t really got purchase—she hadn’t found the leverage needed to work that prybar and break the thing wide open—until people at ACTANSS had begun talking about morpho-teleology, about whole-body scanning “all the way down to the toes.” Whereupon she had taken to waving her legs in the air and asking, “What about those of us who don’t have toes?”