Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

Her answers turned out to be yes—the Joneses wanted to bail out—and yes: there was an airstrip near them, belonging to a ranch adjoining the park. Half an hour later, the jet was on the ground there. The descent and landing seemed normal to him, but after the plane had come to a full stop, Frank and Lenny high-fived each other.

Traffic across the bridge was limited to one vehicle at a time because it had been structurally weakened by tens of thousands of bullet impacts. Driven by the inscrutable algorithmically generated memes that dominated their edit streams, locals would from time to time gather on the opposite bank to empty mag after mag of 5.56-millimeter rounds into the underpinnings of the local infrastructure. As Pete put it, “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. There’s no use for any of it. So they come here sometimes and ‘vote with bullets.’”

But becoming rich had changed what he believed, not by the more academic route of challenging his evidence and debating his logic, but by changing the sorts of things that he was predisposed to want to believe.