Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

machine was processing he retrieved it. He took it and his coffee to the low table

Fates and laid it down in a base layer on which their various descendants had

Waterhouse Brain Sciences Institute.

Thank you!

“Is this the Waterhouse from the weird cyber bank?” Alice asked. “That Waterhouse?” She was referring to one of the local tech philanthropists, an entrepreneur who had been involved in an early cryptocurrency venture that had somehow managed to grow into a serious financial institution.

Oh thank you a million times over!

“Our law firm has done some work for the Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation—the primary funder of WABSI, the Waterhouse Brain Sciences Institute,”

I could cry

Epiphyte,

I love you

Pascal and Leibniz, and on the money side to an old banking dynasty called the Hacklhebers, and politically to—could that really be Peter the Great? Somehow that had come together in an institution called the Leibniz-Archiv, in Hanover, which frankly hadn’t done a heck of a lot for a few hundred years.

Love love love love you

Alan Turing, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, and Rudolf von Hacklheber on a bicycling expedition.

with unique exhibits such as a computer that Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse had apparently made out of organ pipes and mercury-filled U-tubes.

Randy Waterhouse—one of the founders of the Weird Cyber Bank—had plowed some of his windfall into actually building a working replica. This had taken more than a decade because, to make a long story short, the eighteenth-century design made very little sense on a mechanical engineering level and required a lot of humans to move things around. And yet they had made it work using the actual, original plates from the Leibniz-Archiv.

Crazytown was repelled by facts and knowledge, as oil fled from water, but was fascinated by the absence of hard facts, since it provided vacant space in which to construct elaborate edifices of speculation.

“It came to my attention that you were being abused on the Internet,” Pluto said, “and so I am here to destroy it.” “Destroy what?” Corvallis inquired. “The Internet,” Pluto said. “Or what Dodge referred to as the Miasma. Does your jet have Wi-Fi?”

Cancer Land

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

About an hour out of Des Moines, they did pass by a tiny sign—Sharpie on plywood—bearing what might have been the burning-cross logo of the Levitican Church.

And that was how the giant Flaming Cross of the Leviticans sneaked up on her, though the people working on it would probably have felt that she sneaked up on them. It wasn’t actually flaming. It wasn’t even capable of flaming yet, because it wasn’t finished. Its general size and shape were not terribly far off from that of a wind turbine. It was sited on the top of what passed for a hill around here—not to catch the wind, but to be seen from a distance as it burned in the night. Anyway, by the time she accepted that she was actually seeing it, the thing was less than a mile away. She could see a clutter of pickup trucks parked around its base and some pop-up canopies sheltering tables where workers could take water breaks. A row of portable toilets stood sentry next to an office trailer. On an impulse,

“If we don’t, they’ll have to stone us to death,” Sophia explained. “And according to their interpretation of Leviticus, the modern equivalent of stoning people is shooting them.” “Oh, I get it,” Phil said. “Because bullets are like little rocks.” “Exactly. And a gun is just a modern labor-saving device that makes it easier to throw the little rocks really fast. Basically, to them, every reference to stoning in the Bible is a sort of dog-whistle reference to guns.”

“And

our clothing is immodest or something?” Julian asked. “Not at all.” Sophia reached out as if to grab Julian by the scruff of the neck. Instead of which, she flipped the collar of his T-shirt inside out so that she could read the tag. “Mostly cotton but with some spandex. To make it stretchy I guess. If you wore this up there, they would have to stone—i.e., shoot—you.”

Ye shal kepe mine ordinances. Thou shalt not let thy cattel gendre with others of divers kindes. Thou shalt not sowe thy field with mingled sede neither shal a garment of divers things, as of linen and wollen come upon thee. —Leviticus 19:19

“Ted has normal-people teeth because he is old and grew up before this part of the world got Facebooked. After that, the people with education fled to places like Ames, Des Moines, Iowa City. Which includes dentists. A few mainline churches used to run charity dental clinics where you could get a bad tooth pulled, or whatever, but those are being chased away by these people.” Not wanting to be obvious, she glanced over at the gigantic cross. She took a sip of iced tea and grimaced.

“So-called Christianity, as it existed up until recently, is based on a big lie,” Ted explained. “The most successful conspiracy of all time. And it was all summed up in the symbolism of the cross. Every cross you see on a mainstream church, or worn as jewelry, or on a rosary or what have you, is another repetition of that lie.” “And what is that lie exactly?” Phil asked. He already knew. But he and the others all wanted to hear a living human actually say it, just as spectacle. “That Jesus was crucified.” There. He’d said it. No one could speak. Ted took their silence as a request for more in the same vein. “That the Son of God, the most powerful incarnate being in the history of the universe, allowed Himself to be scourged and humiliated and taken out in the most disgraceful way you can imagine.” “‘Taken out’ means ‘murdered’?” Anne-Solenne asked. It was a rhetorical question that Ted answered with the tiniest hint of a nod. “The church that was built on the lie of the Crucifixion,” Ted continued, “had two basic tenets. One was the lovey-dovey Jesus who went around being nice to people—basically, just the kind of behavior you would expect from the kind of beta who would allow himself to be spat on, to be nailed to a piece of wood. The second was this notion that the Old Testament no longer counted for anything, that the laws laid down in Leviticus were part of an old covenant that could simply be ignored after, and because, he was nailed up on that cross. We have exposed...

“And was crucified,” Sophia prompted him. Ted nodded. “And . . . resurrected?” Anne-Solenne asked. “They needed some way to explain the fact that He was still alive, so they invented all that resurrection stuff.” “So where’d Jesus go after that? What did He do?” “Fought the Romans. Went back and forth between this world and heaven. He has the power to do that.” “Where is He now?” “We don’t know! Maybe here. He has been in eclipse for two thousand years. The conspiracy of the church was powerful. They staged a fake Reformation to get people to believe that reform was possible. All a show. Orchestrated from the Vatican.”

“So, Martin Luther was running a false-flag operation for the Pope,” Phil said. “In that case—” But he broke off as he felt Sophia ...

He looked down at her. Having caught his eye, she panned her gaze across the entire scene, asking him to take it all in. Reminding him that this wasn’t Princeton. This was Ameristan. Facebooked to the molecular level. “Professor Long,” she muttered, “the Red Card.” 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...

“I am gonna buy some flowers,” Sophia said, “to put on the grave. 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. So if we want to buy anything, we have to buy it here.”

Gomer Bolstrood

“You mean, they have gone off the deep end compared to people who build two-hundred-foot-tall flaming crosses next to the Applebee’s!?” Sophia asked.

“Do they ever cross the river?” “When they get desperate or some meme convinces them it’s a good idea. They follow these weird edit streams. No one knows where they come from. I looked at one of them once. I thought it would be conspiracy-theory stuff but it wasn’t even coherent enough to be called that.” “Hmm.

“Count of Zelrijk-Aalberg,”

Much older than them,

Oh children, you’ve no idea.

“Anyway, we practice our Latin sometimes. His is much better than mine.”

No shit. LOL!

others had signed similar deals with the Forthrast Family Foundation. Of those, eight—including Randall Waterhouse; his wife, Amy Shaftoe; and several of their business partners—had since died,

Noooooooo

dealings with the material world, and did so in a way that kept the frail nonagenarian

Which confirmed it. For nine years had now passed since the day when

The hero who falls because of a cramp in his hamstring is not sung of.”

“And King Anvellyne ruled wisely over Calla with Mardellian as his closest