Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

In lieu of a purse, Sophia carried Daisy: a sort of disembodied pocket whose purpose was to atone for the sins of the women’s clothing industry. It was a flat wallet that she slung over her shoulder on a thin strap. It was big enough to carry ID, tampons, pens, a miniature multitool, a spare house key, and an improvised rosary of electronic fobs and dongles and mini-flashlights.

I had to highlight this to show to my wife and her friends.

Even if going there and getting it were within the powers of a solitary giant talking raven—which I do not believe to be the case—doing so would be beside the point since the Quest’s purpose, as preordained by the mysterious powers in the world from which I was sent, is not just to make everything perfect for one raven but rather to effect a transformation in your souls.

If ‘save the world’ is objectionable I can expand on it. Doing so wouldn’t help. Things are wrongly set up in the Land now, as anyone who has seen what we have lately seen would agree. Even if you can’t quite put your finger on it, I think you’d have to admit it’s not how a proper god would compose a world. It is not going to fix itself. That is probably why I came here from the other plane of existence. Things were set in motion there that it is my purpose to see through here.

Suppose that the other plane of existence is real, and that it was preexisting. Which is to say that the Land was born out of it, much as you were born out of Eve. It follows that in that other plane are powers or faculties of creation that somehow account for the whole story of the Land’s coming into being, and underlie every aspect of what we take to be real. Moreover that plane is populated by souls who know of us and our doings, and who from time to time may for reasons we cannot even speculate on choose to effect changes to the Land—but to do so without violating what makes the Land coherent. If you accept those premises, can you not accept that an object that once existed in the Land, having been crafted to a purpose by El, and used and then utterly destroyed by El, might be brought into existence again? Not by any craft of any soul who dwells here, but by one on the other plane of existence, wielding powers the nature of which we cannot begin to understand? The only way that I can explain the existence of this key is to suppose that all of those things are the case. And moreover that my purpose in crossing over from that plane into this one is to see that key being turned in the lock on the Fastness.”