Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  But then he had remembered his childhood dream of flying, and resolved that this was not to be one of those abandoned dreams. Private eye and ninja might never come to pass. But no matter how difficult, even disappointing, the reality of flying might be compared to his childhood conception of it, in overcoming all of that he would show what he was made of.

  And that was just in this life. In the next one, perhaps it would enable him to achieve other goals. To right old wrongs and discharge old obligations.

  So he had fixed up Maeve’s rig. He had loved Maeve in spite of, and even because of, certain aspects of her personality—her basic approach to life—that were manifested in every detail of the flying system she had caused to be built at the circus school. It was whimsical, ad hoc, patched together, willfully perverse, down to the level of the choice of fasteners used to hold it together and the stitching on the harness. This was a sacred artifact, not something he could simply hand off to a minion, and so C-plus had spent a year taking it apart himself, the ostrich plumes and the beadwork, the macramé, the Zuni textiles and jury-rigged intravenous plumbing, and he had put all of that stuff behind glass in a kind of museum or shrine in the corner of the new space—an old hangar at Boeing Field, formerly used for maintenance of private jets, now empty most of the time since most of that work was being performed al fresco, or even while in flight, by purpose-built robots.

  All of the mechanical stuff he redid from scratch. The new harness was made just for him, with smart pads that would prevent him from getting bedsores even if he lived in it for weeks. The servos that made it zoom and veer about were beefier and yet more responsive. He added big fans that would blow wind over him when he dreamed of going into a steep power dive or soaring on a thermal.

  While the engineers worked on all that, he researched the hell out of the pharmaceutical side. A lot had been learned since Maeve had started in on this. Some of the drugs she’d used to soften up her brain now seemed dangerously wrong. Some were merely useless, others had become mainstays. He tried to take enough of the right ones to give the effects he wanted while not losing the parts of his brain he needed to do his job—running a significant part of ALISS.

  Not needed for ALISS were parts of his cerebellum involved in motor control and visual processing. This made it more and more awkward, as time passed and he got closer to death, to extricate himself from the device. He slept in it, dreaming of flight, hallucinating the afterlife. In the morning he opened his eyes to photons coming not from the sun, but from a rig that pretty convincingly simulated it.

  “Why are you doing this to yourself?” Zula asked him.

  She was far below, standing on a patch of grass—a mountain meadow that in reality was a green paint square on the hangar’s concrete floor. Her voice was raised over the roar of the fans, currently simulating a thermal. Corvallis banked in the updraft. Which was to say that he thought of trimming his wings in a certain way, and it happened: the thing on his head read his mind, the simulator calculated the effects of the movement and made it so, feeding control signals to the servos that tightened some cables while loosening others, to the fans that made the wind, to the infrared panels that simulated the warmth of sunlight, and to the audiovisual simulation running in his headgear. He wheeled to bring Zula into view, pulled up, dove, flared, perched on a branch (actually a steel pipe mounted above the green paint square). Now he was looking at her sidelong from just a few meters away. The fans shut down, creating a silence in which he could hear his engineers applauding and hooting at how neatly he’d executed the move.

  “You have huge fans in both senses of the term,” Zula observed.

  “That is actually an intentional part of how it all works—it’s why Maeve built hers in a circus school,” C-plus said. “It is supposed to be convincing on every level, right? Well, what does it mean for a thing to be convincing? Qualia are only part of it. I get those from the visuals, the movement, the air currents. But it turns out that we are wired for intersubjectivity. Our perception of reality is as much social as it is personal. Why are we disturbed by psychotics? Because they see and hear things we don’t, and that’s just wrong. Why do prisoners in solitary confinement go nuts? Because they don’t have others to confirm their perceptions. So when I bust a move in this rig and stick the landing, it’s not enough just to simulate it and show me; others have to see it, and react. Ratifying the qualia, cross-linking the history into a social matrix.”

  “Makes me wonder what it must have been like for my uncle, when he was first booted up, all alone, in a world with no qualia at all,” Zula remarked. “Was he in hell?”

  “I’ve often thought about the same thing. And did Sophia put him there?”

  “Knowingly? Intentionally? Of course not.”

  “Sure,” C-plus said. “But innocently? Inadvertently? I think so. All in the hopes that he wasn’t really dead.”

  “Well, if I hadn’t known you for seven decades, I’d say the drugs were going to your head—the wrong part of it, I mean,” Zula said. “As it is, it seems more and more like you’ve found what Dodge wanted for you when he put you in charge of Weird Stuff.”

  “Thanks. I am. The drugs are going to my head, though, and so I hope you won’t find it off-putting if I leave this thing on. The visual field stuff gets really problematic if I suddenly take it off.”

  “I don’t mind,” Zula said, “though I wish you’d look right at me.”

  “I actually am doing so,” C-plus assured her, “it’s just that—”

  “Crows have eyes in the sides of their heads,” she said.

  “Do I repeat myself?”

  “Yes. For my part, I’d come over and hug you, but—”

  “You might crush me. It’s a design failing of your exo,” C-plus said. “See, you repeat yourself too.” He couldn’t see it, because the visual simulator shopped it out of the image, but Zula was wearing an exoskeleton—the latest incarnation of Fronk—that handled most of her physical dealings with the material world, and did so in a way that kept the frail nonagenarian body inside it safe from most hazards. “Did you have a nice walk down here?” he asked.

  “I ran,” Zula corrected him.

  “Why the hurry?”

  “No hurry. I’m told I need more jarring impact. Helps the bones stay strong. Didn’t feel very jarring to me, frankly.” But they both knew that the exo had put all sorts of know-how into making the forces on her bones just enough to create beneficial microfractures without posing any real hazard.

  “Just coming to say hi to an old man on his deathbed, then?” C-plus asked. “Or does the afterlife need any intervention from me?”

  “The before-life, more like,” Zula said. “You have visitors. I’ll show them in.”

  “You’re not staying?”

  “I’m going for a brisk jog around Boeing Field. Thanks anyway.”

  Corvallis took to the air and went for a spin on some tempting thermals while the visitors were shown in.

  Enoch and Solly.

  He had known them now for forty years and resigned himself to the fact that their appearance did not change over time. He wheeled around them anyway, peering down on them from all angles.

  “Calling a meeting of the Societas Eruditorum?” C-plus asked.

  “You’re the only member left,” Enoch said. “You’re a one-person meeting.”

  “What about you guys?”

  “Oh, we’re not actually members per se,” Enoch said. “More like the advisory board.”

  “You’re not erudite?”

  “Nope,” said Solly, “just wise.”

  “Mm. What do I have to do to become wise?”

  “Die,” said Enoch, “and go to the next place.”

  “Seems like a stiff price to pay.”

  “We paid it,” Solly said.

  “You look alive to me.”

  “We paid it,” Solly insisted, “where we came from.”

  “So, to sum up, here I can only be erudite. To become wi
se I have to go on to Bitworld, and start a branch of the Societas Eruditorum there?”

  “Frankly, we have no idea,” said Enoch, who was beginning to sound slightly impatient. “But that seems the most plausible outcome based on our understanding of how we came to be here. Which is flawed. We are cracked vessels.”

  “All right. Since I’m the only member, I call the meeting to order,” C-plus announced. “Is there any new business?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” Enoch said. “Your last hack. Or at least I’m guessing it will be your last hack based on your bio readouts. Who knows, maybe you’ll surprise me.”

  “I haven’t written code in a quarter of a century. God, I miss it though.”

  “This is not a code-writing sort of gig, exactly,” Enoch said.

  “Well, that’s good. I don’t think human-written code exists anymore. It’s code written by code written by code—turtles all the way down.”

  “Not all the way,” Solly corrected him.

  Corvallis was flying pretty incompetently now, as old and disused parts of his brain were grinding into movement: rust rimes cracking, dust and cobwebs flying into the air. He couldn’t do that and, at the same time, with the same neurons, trim his virtual wings in simulated currents of air, so he came in for a crash-landing on his steel perch.

  Then he thought about what Solly had just said.

  “Well, sure!” he finally answered. “Cruft is forever. If you peel back the layers that have grown on top of other layers, and keep delving, and grep deep enough, you’re going to find base code that was written by some Linux geek in the 1980s or something. File system primitives. Memory allocation routines that were made to run on hacked single-core IBM PCs that had never heard of the Internet.”

  “Old incantations having the arcane force of magic,” Enoch said.

  “If you say so. I haven’t touched anything like that in decades. If it’s magic you’re after, I know some AIs—”

  “You overestimate the difficulty of what we have in mind,” Enoch said.

  “I’ll bite. Though I don’t have teeth. What do you have in mind?”

  “Copying a file.”

  “That’s it!?” he squawked. But he was already feeling a mild sense of unease, wondering whether he could even remember the Unix command line incantation for anything as simple as copying a file. Systems nowadays didn’t even have files in the old sense. They had abstractions that were so complicated they could almost pass the Turing test on their own, but still with a few old file-like characteristics for backward compatibility.

  To cover that unease, he blustered. Not a Corvallis behavior, but he had become part crow. “Why do we need to call a physical meeting for that?”

  “It’s an important file. Both here and . . . where you are going next.”

  “Is it huge? Complicated? Damaged and in need of repair?”

  “It is small as these things go, and perfectly intact,” Enoch demurred.

  “It’s a key,” Solly blurted out. “A cryptographic key. With an avatar.”

  “Should be simple enough, I’d think,” Corvallis said. “What does the avatar look like?”

  “A great big fucking key, that’s what it looks like,” Solly said. “Distinctive. One of a kind.”

  “Until I copy it.”

  “You know what I mean. Not something you want to leave lying around in the open. Hide it.”

  “Should I ask how you came into possession of this key?” Corvallis asked, beginning to get the drift.

  “No,” Enoch said.

  “Is it on servers belonging to . . . someone else?”

  “It was copied from servers like the ones you’re thinking of,” Enoch said, “and now needs to be copied once more if it is to pass fully into your control. We think you might be needing it.”

  “Oh, my god!” C-plus exclaimed. “Is this the One—”

  “Don’t even say it,” Enoch commanded.

  “How long has this copy been sitting on whatever bootleg server?”

  “Nine years,” Solly said.

  Which confirmed it. For nine years had now passed since the day when the high sysadmins of Zelrijk-Aalberg had announced that they had at last isolated the security leak that had been allowing the REAP to keep respawning and closed the loophole for good. And, as it were, thrown away the key.

  “I’m all ears,” said Corvallis Kawasaki.

  “You seem all feathers to me,” said Solly, “but whatever.”

  Part 10

  48

  Six dawns in a row, a new soul glimmered on a branch of the old tree, only to fade in the strong light of the day. Prim, looking out the window in the hour before dawn, could see it there. It looked like a star softened by drifting fog and mist. Even after the light of day had extinguished it she could, by moving about on the grass beneath, make herself see the faint distortion that the soul was creating in the air.

  On the seventh morning it seemed to discard all hopes and intentions of ever making light of its own, and darkened and solidified into the form of a black bird. This perched on the branch for some days, seeming dead except that it would shift its footing from time to time when strong winds came down from the mountains. When gusts ruffled its feathers it would open its wings just enough to learn a few things about how they worked, then fold them tight against its body and close its eyes for a while.

  Blossoms flourished on a few branches of the ancient tree that were still capable of bearing apples. By the time these had withered and blown away, the black bird was fully formed, and capable of flight—though not very good at it. Prim woke up one morning and looked out her window to find the branch vacant, the bird nowhere to be seen. She felt a pang of loss. But then the still air of dawn was fractured by a clattering of black feathers and a scraping of talons on the stone sill of her window. She leapt back. The bird perched on the window frame and gazed at her curiously. “I am Corvus,” it announced, “and I am not like other new souls who come into the Land, though I cannot remember why.”

  “Oh, of that, there is no doubt,” said Prim. For she had never heard tell of a new soul who had adopted a form and acquired the power of speech so readily. Indeed, had Corvus so manifested in other parts of the Land, he’d have been done away with by the superstitious folk who dwelled in such parts. That he had come into being in a tree in the garden of the Calladons was lucky, for the Calladons were queer folk. “My name is Prim,” she said. “My family is Calladon. This is Calla.”

  “What do those words mean? Prim? Calladon?”

  “Oh, they are not those kinds of words!” she answered. “You see, some words are very old, and their significance forgotten.”

  “So Calladons have been here for a long time.”

  She nodded. “We built this house on the back of a sleeping giant at the dawn of the Third Age, if that helps you.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  This Corvus seemed quite difficult to please. She shrugged. “That is our garden, and this my bedchamber. I have been watching you.”

  “I know,” said Corvus—not really making it clear how many of the assertions just made by Prim had been known to him. No matter. The bird looked her up and down. She was wearing a sleeping gown that fell all the way to the floor. “Are you a girl, or a woman?”

  “Girl,” Prim told him.

  “Of how many falls?”

  “It is not what matters,” she told him. “Calladons are queer folk. Girls become women, or boys become men, when some occasion requires it. Of late this part of the Land has been quiet and such occasions few.”

  “I require a small party of women and men to accompany me on a Quest and lend a hand in its culmination,” Corvus stated.

  “What manner of Quest?”

  Corvus seemed not to have considered this seemingly basic question. He pondered it for a few moments, then rearranged his wings in a birdy shrug. “Travel, searching, digging something up. I don’t know. Very important. Leave immediately.”

  “
May I have breakfast?” she asked.

  When Corvus seemed taken aback, she explained: “Others will be there, who might help. And in any case it would never do for one of my family to enter womanhood and embark on a Quest without at least saying a few words.”

  Corvus shrugged his wings and said he would wait in the tree. He hopped around to reverse his direction and took to the air with a lot more clattering and whacking than was typical of more experienced birds, and found his way, after some misadventures, back to his old perch. There he bided as various hints and clues emerged from the house: chimney smoke, sounds of dish-utensil collisions, opening and closing of doors and window shutters, and rising and falling murmurs of conversation. The house in some places was made of stones piled atop other stones, in others of wood. In some parts of it the weather was kept out by sheaves of grass cleverly bound together, in others by sheets of gray metal or splits of thin rock. It looked, in other words, as if bits had been added on to other bits over a long span of time without any very clear plan, extending this way and that to enclose little yards such as the one where the apple tree grew. No part of it was especially high or grand, with the possible exception of the one that seemed to be making the greatest amount of smoke and noise during the activity that Prim had denominated “breakfast.” This was a hall with a rectangular plan and a lofty peaked roof, with windows just under the eaves, high enough to admit light and air.

  After a while, people came out of it, following Prim, who had tied her hair back and put on more clothes. They were all of the same form. Most were taller than Prim, but a few were tiny and some even had to be carried around by larger ones. They passed through a sort of arch that communicated with the yard and formed up in an arc centered on Corvus.

  “Let’s go,” Corvus said, and spread his wings to take flight.

  “Just a moment, if you would,” said a man with hair growing out of his face and extending down onto his chest. “We Calladons are no strangers to Quests, and in fact if you were to fly into our Hall over yonder you would see pictures on the walls of our ancestors engaged in some, as recently as a hundred falls ago. So it cannot be said that you have come to the wrong place altogether. But before you make off with our Prim, we would like to know one or two things about just what it is you have in mind. Such as: which direction are you going?”