Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

What pathways in the brain, he wondered, connected these patterns of sound to pleasure? And were they intrinsic to the working of the mind or just an accident of evolution? Or to ask the same question another way, if there was an afterlife, either old-school analog or newfangled digital—if we lived on as spirits or were reconstituted as digital simulations of our own brains—would we still like music?

That’s what medicine was to kids: an acute response to disease. When you got older you understood it was more like brushing your teeth: a system of highly evolved strategies for preempting bad things that could happen to you if you took no preventive measures.

While in middle school Corvallis had started to become aware that he was not much good, compared to other people, at situations where he was called upon to express his emotions. Like the early warning signs of a dread disease, this had first surfaced when he had found himself at a party and discovered that he couldn’t dance. Movement per se he was good at—he already had a brown belt in tae kwon do—but movement expressive of feelings was impossible for him.

Humans were biology. They lived for the dopamine rush. They could get it either by putting the relevant chemicals directly into their bodies or by partaking of some clickbait that had been algorithmically perfected to make brains generate the dopamine through psychological alchemy.

“Identity” had been forever changed by the Internet; formerly it had meant “who you really are” but now it meant “any one of a number of persistent faces that you can present to the digital universe.”

“If it weren’t for the obvious drawbacks, I would recommend that everyone go crazy at least once in their lifetime,” El said. “It’s the most fascinating thing I’ve ever done. Going about it mindfully requires diligent effort. A kind of spiritual practice. I’m pretty sure that a lot of the old mystics—hermits and prophets who were enshrined by primitive cultures as having possessed some special connection to the divine—were in fact suffering from diagnosable mental illnesses but struggling to succumb to them mindfully. If they’d had access to modern diagnostic manuals they’d have been able to say, ‘Ah, it says right here here that I am a paranoid schizophrenic,’ but lacking such documentation, they had to self-observe. When certain processes in the mind run out of control, or, at the other end of the spectrum, cease to function at the level needed to preserve a kind of psychiatric homeostasis, the effects are observable to an introspective patient. If you’re a stylite monk, you’re pretty much screwed and you just have to think your way around it. But nowadays, therapeutic options suggest themselves—titrating levels of various psychoactive medications in an interactive manner, talking across the blood-brain barrier, or direct stimulation of certain ganglia using techniques that can reach into the brain and target interesting regions.

The tragedy—and the entire point—of being a parent was the moment when the story stopped being about you. It was prefigured and foreshadowed in the tear-jerking moments that parents captured in snapshots, and that advertisers looted for use in commercials: baby’s first steps, day one at kindergarten, riding a bicycle, soloing behind the wheel of a car.

Losing your child was the opposite of that. A perverse twist in the story, where the wrong person gets hit by that bus, leaving behind, alone on the stage, survivors who never expected and never wanted to be in the spotlight. It wasn’t the worst thing about losing your child, of course, but it was a part of the dismal picture.