Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  Working in space was difficult for humans but easy for robots. So robots too had to be built, maintained, powered, and cooled. When stacked up against mana production, fleets of rockets, swarms of orbital power stations, and armies of robots, the energy budget needed to keep Meatspace’s dwindling human population fed, clothed, housed, and entertained was looking more and more like a mere round-off error.

  All of that was sorted. The consortium had been running smoothly for a long time now. Long enough to hire consultants who pointed out that SLUZA was a terrible name and talked them into using ALISS in all customer-facing communications. C-plus kept tabs on ALISS with his counterparts in Zelrijk-Aalberg, and when weird problems came up—which was increasingly rarely—they could usually wait to be ironed out at the next ACTANSS.

  Or so Zula had always told herself until the Metatron stated its business: “We have evidence that the Process once known as Dodge’s Brain has been rebooted.”

  Zula looked at Corvallis, who shook his head no.

  “It has been rebooted,” insisted the Metatron, as if it were savvy enough to read the look that had just passed between the two humans, “and moreover it has interfered directly in work being undertaken at great expense by El.”

  “How could you even know that?” C-plus asked, and something in his manner suggested he wasn’t asking it for the first time. “And are we to understand that you are in some sense holding us responsible?”

  Zula fished spectacles out of her bag and put them on. It had been a while since she had checked the balance in Dodge’s account, so it took a few moments to find her way around the interface, but then she pulled it up and saw it still frozen at zero. “There is no activity,” she insisted.

  “Which is how he eluded us,” answered the Metatron, “by drawing upon resources in some manner we have not been able to trace. But there is no question that a new—or very old—agent is active in the system whose knowledge, agenda, and character are holographically indistinguishable from those of Dodge. We have only become aware of this recently, but he could have been hiding in plain sight, marshaling resources, for years.”

  “So what?” Zula asked. “Assuming that is even true?” But she hoped that it was.

  “And again, how can you even know such things?” Corvallis added.

  The Metatron seemed to ponder it for a little while before answering, “We have been developing modalities of communication between living and dead that are much more effective than any known to you.”

  So then it was their turn to be silent for a bit and get their heads around that. Somehow long pauses were easier when talking to a faceless robot, whose posture and movement betrayed no trace of impatience, or any of the other volatile transient emotional states that impelled normal conversation.

  “You’re holding séances?” Zula asked. “You have a Ouija board?”

  The Metatron was not amused. “In the years before his death, El perceived the need for such improved channels and funded research programs aimed at tunneling through the barrier of Radical Semantic Disconnect. He laid in place infrastructure for such communication to be further developed and exploited following his death. While imperfect, these modalities function well enough for us to understand that the recent activities of the aforementioned Process have created serious disruption to activities being undertaken by El that are of considerable importance not only to him but to you as well.”

  This last part was kind of a mysterious assertion that the robot seemed in no temper to elaborate upon.

  “Can you say more about the nature of these activities and of how they’ve been disrupted?” Corvallis asked. He threw Zula a look.

  The two of them had been dealing with each other for so long that she could guess what he was thinking and where he was going with the question.

  Currently, time in Bitworld was running somewhat slower than in Meatspace. A few months earlier in Bitworld time, something had happened on the grounds of the palatial structure that Dodge had built and that El had occupied. A gap had been made in a wall. Two processes—anomalous ones—had gone out through it and not returned.

  In Meatspace, this had happened right around the time of Maeve’s death. Being enormously distracted, neither Zula nor Corvallis had paid much attention. The weeks since had been taken up with mourning and memorials.

  But if she was now reading Corvallis right—and she was pretty good at reading him—he was wondering whether the departure of the two anomalous processes from El’s domain was related to whatever it was the Metatron had come here to gripe about.

  “A direct, planned intervention by the renascent process identified with Richard Forthrast,” said the Metatron, “literally in El’s backyard, tampering with a developmental program that has been in the works for decades.”

  “Give us a minute, please,” C-plus said, and put both hands on the armrests of his chair to push himself up. Zula followed suit. But the Metatron was quicker. “Of course,” it said, and stood up and walked out of the room.

  Corvallis turned to look at her.

  “Those two weird ones,” Zula said. “In the Garden, or whatever you think of it as.”

  “I think of it as the R & D lab where Verna made new self-replicating processes, a long time ago,” Corvallis said. “Starting with birds and bees. The two processes we’re talking about now were much more ambitious. It took her forever to make them. Dodge was somehow involved.”

  “Can we track them?”

  “That’s all we can do.”

  “Who’s paying for them?”

  “I think it’s coming out of Buildings and Grounds, right?” Meaning the budget ALISS used to pay for simulating the Landform, its birds and bees and winds and waters. It was split between Zelrijk-Aalberg and South Lake Union according to a formula that, when all was said and done, was pretty simple.

  “I’ll have to go back and review it,” Corvallis said. “But yes, the general spirit of the deal was that self-replicators were part of Buildings and Grounds. Maybe that’s why El’s people are pissed off.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “The two processes in question—the ones that wandered out of El’s backyard a few weeks ago—are comparable in sophistication to humans. I mean, to scanned human simulations. Assuming they are capable of self-replication, they could make more like themselves . . .”

  “And so on and so forth, exponentially,” Zula said with a nod. It was beginning to make sense now. In the physical world where she and Corvallis lived, there were only so many humans. Actuarial tables predicted how long they would live. This made it possible to plan further expansion and maintenance of ALISS. The money side of things was likewise predictable. Most people nowadays bought into financial packages—complicated insurance policies, in effect—ensuring that they’d be scanned and simulated after death, in exchange for regular premiums that they were obligated to pay as long as they lived, followed by balloon payments that would come out of their estates when they died. People who lacked the means to pay for such policies could buy into the system in other ways, for example by serving in the workforce of security guards, maintenance staff, and construction workers. In any case, it was all predictable based on known population statistics and other data, and so it could be financialized and properly bolted down. Buildings and Grounds was a fairly predictable part of this scheme. Yes, birds and bees could self-replicate, but they weren’t that expensive to simulate.

  Self-replicating entities of human complexity could be an altogether different matter. None of the dead had the ability to create new life and so this had not been an issue until now.

  “This has been nagging at me for a long time, actually,” C-plus admitted. “I check in on those two every so often. Like a good uncle. Take a look at their burn rates.”

  “And?”

  “For a long time it was a totally monotonous sawtooth waveform. Like we saw in the early days of Dodge’s Brain.”

  She’d spent enough time with geeks to get it. Sh
e thought of sawtooth waves as Sisyphus waves. Which reminded her of the D’Aulaires’ book of Greek myths, which reminded her of Sophia, which made her sad. “So these two processes would ramp up to a certain level and then collapse to zero.”

  “Over and over. I stopped paying attention.” But Zula could tell by the gestures he was making, the movements of his eyes, that he was paying attention now. He was using his spectacles to visualize the latest burn-rate stats. She let him have a moment to take it in. The memory pang had made her nose run. She pulled a tissue from her bag.

  “Yup,” C-plus concluded, “six weeks ago they both burst through the ceiling. Became much more resource hungry. They’ve been growing ever since. They moved out of the Garden, down to the Spawn Point, and then west. And—”

  “What!? What!?” Zula demanded. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I think I have,” Corvallis said. “Maeve’s with them. She can fly.”

  They invited the Metatron to rejoin them, now uncertain as to how much it—and its remote operators—knew. Could it track their elevated respiration and heart rate? Had it overheard them through the wall? When C-plus had checked the stats on the runaway processes, and cross-correlated them with Maeve’s, had he left a bread crumb trail in the network that El’s minions were now following?

  Had the entire point of the Metatron’s visit been to elicit just such behaviors?

  “Why are you here? What do you want?” Zula asked it, before Corvallis could make things more complicated than they already were.

  “As a representative of El’s interests,” said the Metatron, “I am here to make our position clearly known.”

  “And what is that position?” C-plus asked. “We would appreciate it if you just stated it outright.”

  “That the recent activities of the REAP are—”

  “Excuse me, the what?”

  “Renascent Egdod-Associated Process.”

  “Okay, go ahead.”

  “That those activities, though conducted on a very small scale, have had very large consequences. That they were overtly hostile and invasive, with potentially ruinous consequences. That they were, in a word, of a warlike nature.”

  “War? Did you really just use the word ‘war’ in a sentence? Are you sure your programming is okay?” Zula demanded.

  “My programming is fine and my choice of wording is carefully considered and is sanctioned by a higher power.”

  “A higher power. What a choice of words!” Zula scoffed.

  “Are you El Shepherd?” Corvallis asked.

  Zula got a prickly feeling of the numinous. Talking to the dead wasn’t done. The dead didn’t want to talk to us. They didn’t care.

  Or so they’d always assumed. The dead were amnesiacs; they drank of the waters of Lethe when they crossed over and, beneath the dark poplars, forgot their former lives. That was what bereaved people like Zula told themselves to soften the hurt they felt when dead people like Sophia didn’t phone home. But there was always this suspicion that it might not be that clear-cut.

  Corvallis was insistent: “Am I in fact talking to El at this moment?”

  “No,” said the Metatron. “But the quality of the communications between this world and the one where El lives is high enough that you may think of me as his representative. His ambassador.”

  “His avatar,” Zula said. “His angel.”

  “Now who is using funny words?” the Metatron asked.

  “What is it you seek here?” Corvallis asked. “There must be more to your mission than just freaking us out. I mean, if you were just fishing—wondering how we’d react to this news about the Renascent Egdod-Associated Process—you have your answer. We were surprised. That’s your answer.”

  “Surprised, and skeptical as hell,” Zula added.

  “Now that you know as much, do you just get up and leave?” Corvallis went on.

  “There are questions raised by this that set up a constitutional crisis for ALISS and that cannot wait until the next ACTANSS to be resolved,” said the Metatron.

  “Go on,” said Corvallis.

  “Oh, you can see it perfectly well,” said the Metatron, now showing some very human emotions. “All of the big issues are triggered by this. I will tick them off, just so we have an agenda. We have self-replicating processes now, capable in theory of exponential growth. Are those to be paid for from Buildings and Grounds? We are unwilling to pay the lion’s share—or any share, for that matter—of the costs that could spring from unlimited reproduction of such processes. We have made a good-faith effort to nip that problem in the bud, which has been sabotaged by the REAP—almost undoubtedly with the connivance of Sophia. Sophia, though dead, is a token holder with special powers—thanks to unprecedented steps that you took when you booted her process.”

  “Oh my god, we’re back to that again!?” Zula exclaimed.

  “Meanwhile we face a shortage of the mana required for full embodiment of our customers. Priority should be given to them—not to this new breed of self-replicators.”

  “For fuck’s sake, there’s only two of those and they aren’t replicating yet!” Corvallis said. “It’s a purely theoretical problem at this point.”

  “Your late wife accompanies them. We find this remarkable.”

  “Have some decency!” Zula said. “She’s only been dead three weeks.”

  But Corvallis took it better than Zula did. In the silence that followed, he stared out the window over the lake, seemingly unruffled. “It’s never been clear to me how you guys actually feel about phased embodiment,” he remarked. He was talking about their stopgap scheme for booting up new souls in a resource-efficient style. “When it suits your purposes, you complain about not having enough mana to launch every single new process at full fidelity. But I was there when the Wad was running, and I saw El’s fascination with it. You guys have never been comfortable with how the Landform came out—how Dodge made it in the image of the world he came from. How its souls pattern their forms and their lives after ours. You guys are aiming at something different. Heaven 2.0. That much is obvious to me. But I have no idea what you imagine it’s going to be like.”

  “Your speculations about our motives and our dreams are fascinating in a way,” remarked the Metatron, “but wide of the mark and not relevant to the matter at hand.”

  “The ‘constitutional crisis’?” Zula said.

  “Even the processes we have now are placing insupportable burdens on the Landform,” said the Metatron. “They are making mistakes that we have already made in Meatspace. They need direction.”

  “We need to tell them what to do,” Zula said. Not agreeing. Just trying to translate what the Metatron was saying.

  “Exactly.”

  Part 9

  45

  During the months that they had ranged over the sea of grass, dwelled on the hill, and explored the valley of the wolves, Adam and Eve had from time to time noticed small knots of aura nestled in deep grass or lodged in the forks of trees. They were typically no larger than a fist and could be difficult to see when looked on directly. In the corner of one’s eye they could be detected, and their presence confirmed by the gentle thrill that they raised in the flesh when the hand was brought near them. But they could not really be touched, or clearly discerned, being more the absence than the presence of form. Some grew stronger than others and emitted a faint light of their own that could be seen on dark nights as dim soft gleamings. These came and went, and on moonless nights, when observed from the top of the hill, they seemed to drift westward toward the wooded river valley as if drawn toward the red glow in the night sky beyond.

  Mab had explained to them that these were new souls but lately come into the world, which were still in need of solid forms. Those that came into the world at the Hive surrounding El’s palace were predisposed to fashion themselves into cells and conjoin themselves to those that had got there before. But others, such as Mab herself, began their lives as solitary motes and might
drift about the Land for some while before adopting forms. It was the natural way of such nascent souls to be drawn toward the habitations of others who had dwelled longer in the Land, and this was why Adam and Eve could observe the westward drift on dark nights: these new souls had sensed that a city existed to the west.

  During the night that they had spent high up in the tree, they had seen no such wandering souls because their vision had been dazzled by the light of the fire they had kindled below to ward off wild beasts. But earlier today, as they had hiked up out of the valley and over the ranges of hills between it and the city, they had many times glimpsed bubbles of aura or sensed them in their toes as they’d happened to plant a foot near one. After Adam and Eve had spied the tower of white stone that topped the ridge above the city, they’d had eyes only for that—and, when it had come into view below them, the city itself with its innumerable roofs, smoking chimneys, and open fires. But as evening had drawn on, Eve had looked back behind them, checking for wolves, and had seen that they were being followed, not by beasts, but by scores of new souls drifting and bumbling along in their wake.

  The tower on the hill had evidently been made by piling one stone block atop another until the desired height had been reached. The closer they came to it, the less it truly resembled the Palace, and yet it could not be questioned that those who had piled up the blocks had sought to imitate the stupendous Pinnacle of El. The structure was several times the height of Adam or Eve—comparable to the height of the great nut tree that stood atop their hill. Its lower portion was simple in design, being just a tapering cone with a spiral ramp twining around it, but above a certain point it became square and vertical, with columns and arches modeled after those of the Palace. Three levels of these, narrowing as they went up, were topped by a small flat roof upon which a fire burned. Adam and Eve by now knew enough of fires to understand that they must be fed, and indeed they could see other souls, of a shape similar to their own, ascending the spiral ramp bent under bundles of wood that they had collected from the forest.