Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

It seemed to be some sort of well-meaning attempt by the brain to make sense of a loss of valid signals from ears that were no longer in perfect working order. Tending to confirm this idea was that it was at its worst when things were quiet; the environment wasn’t giving his auditory system any good data to lock on to.

“ruminatively melancholy”

Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire.

D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths

D’Aulaires’ Book of No...

“Fates” and “Furies.”

The sinners in the Christian version of hell could at least remember why they were burning in eternal fire, but these poor dumb Greeks could only suffer without knowing why; without, for that matter, even remembering what it was like to be alive and to not suffer. It wasn’t even really clear to Richard that a post-Lethe soul could even be considered the same being, for weren’t your memories a part of you?

The taste of the coffee was not wonderful, however, merely because the machine and the roasters had done such good jobs, but in the categorical sense that Dodge was awake, he was alive, he was actually physically tasting this stuff with his body in a way that sleeping-Dodge-in-a-dream could never have done. In that sense awake Dodge was as superior to sleeping Dodge as a living person was to a ghost. Dreaming-of-coffee Dodge was to drinking-coffee Dodge as one of the shades in Hades—likened, in d’Aulaire, to dry leaves whirling about in a cold autumn wind—was to a living, flesh-and-blood person.

Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos,

Norns—spinning the threads of life at the base of the world tree. Urd, Verdande, and Skuld.

Hand met Spiegelende Bol

Aura”—caused by a temporary disruption of blood flow to the visual cortex. It always started thus, with a tiny dazzled region that refused to go away. Over the next half hour it would get bigger, making it impossible for him to read. Then it would gradually migrate rightward and mess with his peripheral vision on that side for a little while before disappearing without a trace.

The blind spot then showed up as a region of vaguely defined yellow and black stripes,

Miasma—as

“Pompitus Bombasticus.”

Pompitus Bombasticus

Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana—in

well-known insight by a German philosopher named Kant, who had posited that the mind simply was not capable of thinking about anything at all without mapping it onto space and time.

“connectome”

the Kantian substrate of all mental activity relating to space and movement.

“quale.” The subjective experience of (for example) redness. Or of music, or of a tarte tatin. Neurologists and philosophers both wrote of qualia, tried to puzzle out what they were exactly, how you got them, whether they were intrinsic to consciousness.

Richard enjoyed qualia to a degree that bordered on the sexual. He had ruined more than one first date by reacting to a swallow of wine or a bite of steak in a manner that the woman across the table seemed to find a little creepy.

The black sheen of an old cast-iron griddle, its oily smell when heated. The pucker in the back of a man’s powder-blue dress shirt. The smell of a cedar plank fractured along a grain line. Sparks of sunlight reflecting from waves. The shape of the letter P. Finding your exact location on a map. Shortening your stride as you approached a curb. Moving around in a house—walls you can’t pass through, doors you can. Remaining upright. Balance. Standing on one foot. Bubbles on the bottom of a pan getting ready to boil. Having an appetite. Just having been hit on the nose. The opening strains of “Comfortably Numb.”

only thing that really mattered was the connectome—the pattern of connections among the neurons in the brain.

scientists have identified certain problems that are very difficult for computers to solve but easy for humans. If you can turn those problems into a fun game, then you can get lots of people on the Internet solving them for free.

financial downturn and pursuant imbroglio.

fast-forward to the mid-twentieth century and a black-and-white photo of the young Alan Turing, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, and Rudolf von Hacklheber on a bicycling expedition.

Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse had apparently made out of organ pipes and mercury-filled U-tubes.

gold plates with holes punched in them, like an early version of IBM punch cards, and they were meant to be used in a mechanical computer called the Logic Mill.

OG Epiphyte geeks figured out how to program the Logic Mill to speak TCP, and gave it its own IP address—you

obliteration of the town of Moab, Utah, by what was apparently a tactical nuclear weapon.

Crows were commendably intelligent, and forever busy, but you couldn’t tell them apart and their motives were inscrutable.

Miasma,

al fresco.

group of like-minded persons calling itself ENSU: the Ethical Network Sabotage Undertaking. The APE was his personal baby but others had been working on it too, cross-breeding his code with filter-evading, CAPTCHA-spoofing spambots built to flood Wikipedia with bogus edits and Amazon with fake product reviews.

obloquy

Zelrijk-Aalberg,

“What’s the point? The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There’s no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool’s errand.”

bent around into propaganda whose sole function was to make Tom afraid and angry.

according to their interpretation of Leviticus, the modern equivalent of stoning people is shooting them.”

We’re almost there. Within the blast radius of this.” She nodded toward the front of the superstore. “Blast radius? Could you unpack that mysterious statement please?” asked Anne-Solenne. “It’s only ten miles farther. Any retail base in the actual town will have been obliterated by this.

New Eschatology

Grandma Alice had liked to repeat an old joke that in a town like this, you didn’t need to use your turn signals because everyone knew where you were going.

the torrent of porn, propaganda, and death threats, 99.9 percent of which were algorithmically generated and never actually seen by human eyes—was

relegated to a combination of AIs and Third World eyeball farms, which was to say huge warehouses in hot places where people sat on benches or milled around gazing at stuff that the AIs had been unable to classify.

the informational equivalent of the wretches who clambered around mountainous garbage dumps in Delh...

them—any rag that they pulled out of the garbage pile—began working its way up the editorial hierarchy and, in rare cases, actually got looked at by the kinds of editors—or more likely their junior associates—who worked for people like Sophia. C...

important and high-judgment role played by her editor was to look at any data coming the other way—sound and imagery captured by her glasses, for example—and make sure it never found its way into the wrong hands.

At this moment, however, it was lighting up, letting them all know who had just pulled into town and giving them limited, temporary access to Sophia’s social media contrail. But all of that data was being exhibited with the color scheme, texture palette, typeface, UI conventions, and auditory cues—in sum, the art direction—of her personal brand.

Not from Around Here,