Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

And like herpes, those pictures had remained silent and dormant in his central nervous system until adulthood.

They knew that some people would see through the hoax and denounce it as such. Those skeptics couldn’t be silenced. But they could be drowned out. So,

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

In old movies sometimes you could see apparently sophisticated characters saying things like “I’m going online” or “I’m surfing the Internet,” which must have seemed cool at the time, but now it was a non sequitur, as if someone, in the middle of an otherwise normal conversation, suddenly announced, “I’m breathing air.”

I like this idea as a nonplussed reaction strategy : "how do you feel about this?" "I'm breathing air"

have spent much time among them,” said Adam, “and I regret to say that they do things that make no sense more often than they show wisdom. They are ruled by emotion and rumor. Even though we had nothing to do with the cutting down of the great tree, they will look at that”—he stretched out his arm to indicate the pile of boulders—“and note its likeness to Cairn, and they will say that all of us, even our twelve children, are of a shared kind, which is responsible for what has just occurred and for every other imperfection in the world besides. They will come for us and they will try to do to us what Cairn did to Messenger of El and what Feller and his crew just did to the great tree.” Until then Adam had not been known for wisdom and forethought, being more apt to find surprises in the events of each new day. But all came to pass as he had said. He and Eve went down to the riverfront and bent their strong backs to digging out souls trapped in structures that had fallen over, and passing buckets of water to ones that were burning. Many were grateful but others looked on them darkly and spoke to one another in confidence.

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.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Prim!” “Don’t be,” she said, “but do be patient.”