Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

palimpsest of slut shaming in which they found undue fascination and furtive amusement—exhibiting social, verging on moral, retardation

Sometimes there was no gap between joke and real.

Forthrast boys had gone to play cowboys and Indians with live ammunition.

It was completely surrounded by Ameristan but it was populated by people like Pete who had a college degree, asked questions, and seemed to be plugged into sane and responsible edit streams.

“People like that,” he said, cocking his head in the direction of the Leviticans’ cross, “claim to believe certain things. But obviously if you spend ten seconds looking for logic holes or inconsistencies, it all falls apart. Now, they don’t care.”

“They don’t care that their belief system is tota...

“Explains a lot!” Julian said. “They can go a surprisingly long time without bumping up against reality,” Pete said, “but at the end of the day when a pregnant mother needs a C-section or you can’t get your Wi-Fi to work, or a thousand other examples I could give, why, then you do actually need someone nearby who can help you with that.”

you have doctors and dentists in this town?” Phil asked. “No, they all moved away years ago, but we have practitioners who can help patients get urgent care over webcam, get telerobotic surgery, and that sort of thing. Both men and women, since the Leviticans won’t let male physicians examine female patients.

Some percentage of their child...

have an intellectual or artistic ...

kids need a place to go. Ames and Iowa City are far away. So they find their way into town, move into abandon...

building that cross, they’ll quote Leviticus at you concerning gay people. But a lot of them have a child or a nephew or a cousin who’s gay and who is hanging o...

“It’s not just that it’s unspoken. It’s that it can’t be spoken of.”

Gomer Bolstrood mattress

chatelaine—had

Eritrea.

straight out of a Nixon administration Sears, Roebuck catalog.

where Uncle Richard had taken his last piss before walking out the door in 1972 to head for Canada to avoid the draft.

these were daisies as reinterpreted and geometrically abstracted by one of those acid-dropping hippie artists

the weird was strong in that place,”

“The Organization for New Eschatology.”

the whole point of a conspiracy theory is to offer a kind of false coherence.”

what I saw didn’t even rise to that standard—didn’t even know about it. It was—well, just plain weird. Algorithmically

generated mishmas...

They use eye tracking,

you don’t even have to click.

assuming, that is, that there’s a human anywhere ...

“Their fathers believed that the people in the cities actually gave a shit about them enough to want to come and take their guns and other property. So they put money they didn’t really have into stockpiling trillions of rounds and hunkered down waiting for the elites to come confiscate their stuff.

The commerce seemed to be one-way; nothing was being produced in Ameristan that was desired outside of it.

Midwestern farmers had slowly, over generations, beggared themselves by producing commodities.

But chemistry was chemistry. Ethanol was ethanol, high-fructose corn syrup was high-fructose corn syrup, and so on. So economic competition here was a war of all against all, and the only winners were people in cities who wanted to buy that stuff for as little money as possible.

you were setting up a real military, here’s what you wouldn’t do: you wouldn’t issue every single guy his own collection of fifty-seven different small arms and an infinite quantity of ammunition and nothing else.”

Lamentation of Christ, a study in perspective and foreshortening by an Italian Renaissance painter.

My name is Enoch.

“Oh, it could be almost any book,” Enoch said dismissively.

The Boys’ First Book of Radio and Electronics by Alfred Morgan,”

“Where next?” Enoch asked

“I don’t suppose I could talk you into making a little southerly detour?” Enoch asked. “To Moab.”

Phil asked Enoch point-blank: “What are you? Not just some regular Joe, apparently.”

Enoch noticed that and raised his eyebrows in an amused way. “It’s perfectly all right!” he assured her. “One so rarely gets a direct question.”

Enoch said, “but the upshot is that the best I can really manage is to try to help sort things out as best I can on this plane. Oh, I’ll have a grande flat white, whole milk please—I like to live dangerously.”

“It’s easy to forget,” Sophia remarked, “that there are millions of people who really don’t believe that Moab still exists. But when you’re here, you see the REMEMBER MOAB stickers all over the place.”

“Well, this is super-useful feedback!” Janine said. “And I am so glad you took the trouble to bring it to my notice.” “I knew you’d feel that way,” Sophia said.

Enoch, hands bundled in ice packs to hold down the swelling, was seated in the middle of the backseat for the simple reason that he could not operate the car’s door handles or seat belts and so required help from flankers.

“Oh, I don’t think that missionary-style activity would work very well on those people,” Enoch returned.

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.”

“Bronze Age shepherds may have been just one step above cavemen, but at least they were reality based.”

“And that goes on being more or less true for quite a while. Now, theater, and later movies, eventually get us into the realm of shared hallucinations. But those are neatly boxed in both space and time, and there’s a bit of ceremony to them. You buy the ticket, you enter the theater, you sit down, the lights dim, everyone in the place shares the same hallucination at the...

“Yes. It’s really only since wireless networks got fast enough to stream pictures to portable devices that everything changed,” Enoch said, “and enabled each individual person to live twenty-four/seven in their own personalized hallucination stream. And if you are still tied to reality by family or by some kind of regularizing influence in your day-to-day life, like having a job, then you’ve got a fighting chance. But those people—” Since it was awkward to gesture using ice-packed mitts, he pointed out the side window with his chin. “My goodness. Religion as such—as it has existed and flourished for thousands of years—doesn’t stand a chance.”

each person out there”—Enoch did the thing with his chin again—“is getting their own personalized stream of algorithmically generated alternate reality that is locked in a feedback loop with their pulse, blink rate, and so on. You’re not going to get very far trying to get one of those people to tear his attention away from that so that you can relate a story about some guy two thousand years ago feeding a large number of people with a few loaves and fishes.”