Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

The engineer—a new hire named Corvallis Kawasaki—had footnoted his own remarks by mentioning that the mirrored-ball problem reached at least as far back as the German genius and polymath G. W. Leibniz, who had written of it as a way of thinking about monads. At this point in the meeting, the more well-established engineers had shouted him down and Dodge had made a mental note to yank the boy out of whatever branch of the org chart he’d landed in and employ him in Weird Stuff, which was Dodge’s personal department.

Of crows, people tended to predicate the same traits that they did of Asians when they had forgotten politically correct habits of speech, or never acquired them in the first place. Crows were commendably intelligent, and forever busy, but you couldn’t tell them apart and their motives were inscrutable.

Corvallis clicked on the little video camera icon next to Jason’s name. After a minute or so of user interface fuckery, he found himself looking at a moving image of Jason, who was sitting in his girlfriend’s bed, propped up on a lot of pillows.

What he had just experienced was more like the subtle click of a really well-engineered piece of machinery being snapped together.

Bob nodded. “From here it’s about a half-hour drive to the river landing. I understand that the family wishes to be taken back to Moab? That will be another hour.” Corvallis checked his watch and was startled to find it wasn’t even noon yet. They could be in Moab by midafternoon. Assuming they’d be allowed in. “What do you know about roadblocks and so on?” “I am confident,” Bob said, “that I can find my way into Moab.”

Corvallis was straining to remember some advice Zula had given him a couple of years ago after a date had gone bad. “You’ve asked a number of questions relating to clothing,” he pointed out. “Is that an interest of yours?”

Light poured in from windows high in the walls, so she felt no need to turn the lights on. “Watch your step,” she admonished him, which he found curiously touching given that he had legs and feet.

Once they had landed and cleared customs, they dropped into family mode, which from a fundamentalist nerd standpoint meant a way of being that caused vast amounts of time to disappear while people pursued activities that ruled out getting any sort of productive work done.

Phil and Julian were in the backseat gazing at the outskirts of the city, which looked exactly like any other place.

It was a reference to one of their teachers at Princeton who had gone so far as to print up a wallet card for people to keep in front of them during conversations like this one. One side of the card was solid red, with no words or images, and was meant to be displayed outward as a nonverbal signal that you disagreed and that you weren’t going to be drawn into a fake argument. The other side, facing the user, was a list of little reminders as to what was really going on: Speech is aggression Every utterance has a winner and a loser Curiosity is feigned Lying is performative Stupidity is power

A windowless steel door, painted Parks Department green, bore testimony to generations of bored teens’ fruitless efforts to kick their way in—or, failing that, to attest to who sucked.

The victim’s feet were at about the altitude of her face and she forced herself to look at them, expecting the worst, but they hadn’t been nailed, they were just dangling. The men slammed a ladder against the vertical and then raised it up from beneath until the victim could get his feet on it. He then stood up and took a deep breath and let out a great sigh of relief. “Initiate Nail Removal Immediately,” he said. “Sorry. Old joke.”

“If you’re going to try to get people to change the way they think, you have to offer some kind of value proposition, and that’s hard with these people.” “Why these people in particular?” “Well, you know, let’s say, for example, you’re trying to sell a tribe of Bronze Age shepherds on monotheism . . . you begin with, ‘Okay, chaps, there’s lots of different gods, but if you go all in with this one particular god, you’re signing on to a winning squad, you’re going to defeat the other tribes and control more grazing land.’ Which works, because they have an orderly sheep-based economy in which the rules of the game are clear and everyone can agree on basic ideas such as ‘If our animals eat more grass we have a better time of it.’ But those people, the people across the river, are in a very unsettled state and nothing really makes sense to them, and so trying to get them to buy into a coherent worldview of any sort is a mug’s game.” Julian translated: “Bronze Age shepherds may have been just one step above cavemen, but at least they were reality based.” “Very much so,” Enoch agreed.

“Well, this is fascinating data, if it’s for real,” Zula said. “I thank you for showing it to us, El. What conclusions do you draw?” “To begin with, it is clearly a hierarchical structure.” “You’ve certainly made it appear that way by arranging it in a hierarchy,” Zula said dryly.

“What exactly would it be like to live forever in a realm where physical constraints don’t apply? Where there is no evil, no pain, no want? Being an angel, living on a cloud, strumming a harp twenty-four/seven/forever—that could get old. Old enough that it might become indistinguishable from being in hell.”

Rather a lot of arguing and discussion ensued, very little of which seemed to require the presence or participation of Corvus—who, in any case, had already told these people everything he knew.