Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

Its landscape and its cast of characters were commingled with places he had been and people he had encountered during the decades since he had left it in the rearview mirror of his pickup truck. But the grid street pattern of that town, covering just a few square blocks, and easily mastered by a boy on a bicycle, was, decades later, the spatial lattice on which virtually all of his dreams were constructed. It was the graph paper on which his mind seemed to need to plot things.

Not as physical as skiing or welding, but much more physical than his job, which consisted of moving pixels around on screens in certain ways that were projected to be highly lucrative.

It was the personal data record associated with her account—the result of her having filled out a form, years ago, when she’d joined Lyke, and having clicked the “submit” button. Which, come to think of it, was a pretty strange bit of semantics.

He gave her his number, and she recited it back to him, using the quasi-military “niner” in place of “nine,” which he found unaccountably confidence inspiring.

They knew nothing of kerning.

Speech is aggression Every utterance has a winner and a loser Curiosity is feigned Lying is performative Stupidity is power

The third, or the seventy-fifth, or the millionth time it came and went, he had a vague awareness that it had happened before. Not that he had a memory of it—memory could get no purchase on noise—but that he now recognized in his own being a pattern of response: the dread as he grew certain it was coming; the terror, while it was at its peak, that it might never stop; some other part of him trying to push back against that terror by predicting it would go away; growing certainty that it was abating; relief that it had subsided combined with dread of its next onset. Those feelings followed one after the next in a patterned way.

Once his dread foe, it had become a thing he could draw upon when needed.

Not satisfied with giving it only one clever title, he had titled it “Amortality; or, Death after Death.”

(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.)

You could not have one without the other; Quest-goer-onners were not ordinary souls, and so Quest leaders had, as Prim now understood, to devote a great deal of attention to contending with all of that want of ordinariness.