Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  “You got here just in time!” someone exclaimed. It was Eva, a younger staff member whose mere presence and energy always made Zula feel very much like Uncle Claude. But she was a lovely person and Zula really didn’t mind.

  “Just in time for what?” Zula asked. Her voice cracked and rasped; she didn’t use it much nowadays. She was maneuvering sideways trying to get a better angle; Fronk was respecting her overall dictates but doing so in a way that didn’t violate any safety heuristics. Zula, left to her own devices, would have used her little-old-lady prerogatives to elbow her way through the crowd. So progress was safe, polite, and slow.

  She was piecing together glimpses. The display had been zoomed and panned to a part of the Landform that was not immediately familiar to her. She had a strong Uncle Claude feeling of not being able to make sense of what she was looking at. Then she spied a detail that helped her understand that this was the vicinity of the region once dubbed Escherville, exactly because it did not, in fact, make sense. It was a zone where notoriously the Landform Visualization Utility had never been able to pull together a coherent geometry. For decades, Ph.D. students and postdocs had tried to debug it. They had concluded that there was no bug; the LVU was working perfectly; the Landform hereabouts actually did not make any sense and so it just had to be shown in a suggestive and unstable way.

  So Zula was looking at Escherville: the baroque castle-like structure that Dodge had built in the middle of it, the unsightly additions that El had made to it later. Not far away, the verdant zone where Verna tended to hang out with one of the new processes she had spawned—the one that looked female—inevitably, Eve. Probably, come to think of it, the namesake of the young woman at Zula’s elbow.

  “What’s been going on?” Zula asked.

  “Time Slip Ratio has been dropping—big processes using a lot of mana, loading the heck out of the systems,” said Eva. “It is actually approaching one now. That’s the lowest—”

  “Lowest it has been in decades,” said Zula.

  “But earlier today—in Meatspace time, that is—Sophia and the people she’s with teleported from the extreme southwest to an area north of here. Later they teleported a second time—not as far.”

  Eva was so freaked out by that that Zula felt obliged to let her know, “Pluto used to teleport, way back when. We haven’t seen much of it since he moved to Landform Two.”

  “Well anyway, they’ve been on the move southward ever since.”

  “They?”

  “Sophia and a group of other processes—including Corvallis and Maeve! And guess who has been hot on their trail?”

  “I don’t need to guess,” said Zula. She had finally maneuvered to a position where she could clearly see El himself striding south across high territory toward Escherville. “All of this just happened in the last few hours?”

  “Meatspace time? Yes.”

  Zula glanced at a chronograph on Fronk’s arm. It was now eight o’clock in the evening. “How long is that in Bitworld?”

  “Three days have passed there. But as you can see,” Eva went on, “it is slowing way down. And look! Now Verna is on the move!” Her attention had been drawn by exclamations from other viewers positioned farther to the east. Indeed it was possible to see a female form astride a horse, galloping as if to intercept El. The movement was too fast for the horse’s gait to look quite natural. But as Eva had pointed out, the Time Slip Ratio was dropping fast. So it got slower and more normal-looking as Verna drew closer.

  “What is that woman carrying? It looks heavy!” Zula asked, pointing to a figure who seemed to be bent under a heavy load.

  “We’ve been trying to categorize it. Grepping through ancient datasets. It seems to be the avatar of a cryptographic key. El made it a long time ago. Then he destroyed it. But not before Corvallis did something sneaky—used his privs to make a copy.”

  “So, that’s the copy?”

  “Apparently.”

  One reason for the slowdown was obvious: the Landform was changing its shape. El was causing a bridge to grow across the gap separating him from Escherville, where Sophia and Maeve and several others were up to something at the approaches to the abandoned castle.

  “I get it,” Zula said, in a bold assertion of non–Uncle Claude–ness. “He’s burning a lot of mana. Actually reshaping the Landform in real time. But just making a bridge isn’t expensive enough to slow things down that much.”

  “True that,” said a young man nearby. Inevitably, Zula couldn’t remember his name, but she basically liked him, which was all that mattered. “Most of the slowdown is actually being caused by mana use from processes over in Landform Two. Old-school Pantheon gangstas. Including the notorious REAP.”

  True That, as Zula had decided to call him, had been mostly hanging around in a corner of the big room with a smaller cluster of people who were looking at visualizations related to Landform 2: the separate chunk of Bitworld where the Pantheon seemed to hang out. Because it was all veiled in weird crypto over there, no one could really tell what it looked like, and so they were looking at abstractions: moving charts, fluctuating surfaces of data, rivers of text.

  “And how do you know it is a Renascent Egdod-Associated Process?” Zula asked.

  True That got an awkward look on his face. She could tell she’d committed a sort of faux pas. If she’d been a twenty-year-old intern he’d have confidently mansplained it to her. Because she was who she was, he couldn’t see a way forward.

  She had to find it for him. “Never mind,” she said. “You can just tell. You have heuristics. REAPs just give off a certain holographic vibe. When one pops up, alarms go off.”

  “Something like that, ma’am,” he answered with a nod so deep it almost became a bow. Behind him, she could see the thing they were looking at over there: one of those 3-D data visualizations you had to have a math degree to make sense of.

  A notion occurred to her and she tossed it out, just to be mischievous: “Has anyone actually looked at it recently?”

  “At what?”

  “Landform Two. You know, my uncle’s neighborhood.”

  “Well . . . you can’t see anything there, it’s . . . scrambled.”

  She shrugged. “Just curious. You definitely can’t see if you don’t look.”

  True That seemed to take her point. He raised a hand in a way indicative of working with some kind of interface. But Zula’s across-the-room conversation with him had become impossible as the larger group in the middle of the room had become very noisy. Not so much like professionals in a meeting. More in the manner of fans at a boxing match.

  So Zula, along with everyone else, watched it happen. The Time Slip Ratio was definitely less than one, and so things happened slowly, on a time scale that reminded her of grand opera, where a twenty-minute aria might stand in for what normal people would cover in a quick exchange of text messages. Some kind of epic slugfest was taking place between El and a rock monster. All kinds of other things were going on too and were being excitedly noticed and pointed to by various onlookers. A lot of El’s custom-made humanoids were galloping toward Escherville. Other humanoids, and things that moved like bears, were on the move with Verna, crossing a bridge luxuriant with flowered vines, forming a defensive perimeter.

  Her growing sense of Uncle Claude–like confusion was—mercifully—broken by a touch on her elbow. It was True That. “Something you should see, ma’am.”

  “More so than all of this?” she exclaimed, gesturing at the melee in Escherville.

  “I think so. Oh, and would you like a snack? It’s after midnight.” He proffered an energy bar or something, a gnarled confection of chocolate and granola. She accepted it gratefully, and chomped into it with artificial teeth.

  She followed True That into the corner where he and his claque had been hanging out for the last few hours. They had extinguished their inscrutable data-viz-ware and replaced it with a rendering of a city.

  It was a city she had never seen before. As sh
e walked closer to it, she assumed it was somewhere in Europe. As she got closer, she began to think China. Some older burg, low lying, built on broken terrain, with an irregular medieval-style street pattern and the odd ancient castle. But it had been modernized with newer high-rises. One in particular rose above it all: a dark tower that somehow managed to combine features of a modern skyscraper and an ancient fortification.

  The only thing that made it not look like a realistic rendering of a city on Earth was a huge figure poised atop that tower. It had wings. Leathery, not feathery. It was gazing downward in a brooding way at a big lake below the tower. The lake was almost perfectly circular.

  “What is that?” Zula asked.

  “Landform Two,” True That said. “Uncloaked. This is the first time we’ve ever actually seen what it looks like. As you know. Ma’am.”

  “And the figure on the top of the tower is—”

  He nodded. “The REAP.”

  It was about then that the whole room came apart into pandemonium as, apparently, very dramatic and exciting things happened in Escherville. Zula didn’t know what to look at. The REAP spread his wings and sprang into the air. He was diving into the lake. But he did so in slow motion.

  A few minutes after disappearing beneath the surface of the round lake, he popped up in Escherville, on top of the castle that he had built there long ago. The stuff El had bolted around it had all fallen off. She couldn’t make out where her daughter was. This distressed her as a mother.

  Much as she wanted to stare at Landform 2, nothing was going on there. All of the Pantheon had followed Dodge (there was no point in calling him anything else now) through the portal that apparently connected the lake to the unshackled castle. So she made her way back to the place where everyone was watching that. Some kind of slow-motion melee played out. The rock monster made another appearance and bear-hugged El into a canyon. People screamed, not so much in horror as in sheer astonishment.

  Long ago in the early days of the Pantheon, Zula had got in the habit—which she knew at some level was lazy and wrongheaded—of identifying certain of its members with classical deities of antiquity. Dodge was some combination of Zeus and God. Pluto was, well, Pluto. One of them had always struck her as very Mercury-like in the way he moved about. Another she saw as a kind of Mars. Not that there were a lot of wars to fight in those days, but he was big and seemed to serve as a kind of bouncer. Since they spent all their time in Landform 2, it had been decades since she had seen them.

  But there they were, embroiled in this melee around Escherville. Two of them—“Mars” and “Mercury”—took flight, headed south. Whoever was controlling the display made it zoom out so that the spectators could keep those two in view. They were winging southward, soaring over snowcapped mountains, and pretty obviously headed for the palace on the pinnacle. Time was speeding up again as things stabilized. Even so, covering that distance took them a little while. Spectators went out for bathroom breaks or snacks, leaving Zula largely alone. She stood there for a long time watching Dodge, who was tending to something very small and faint that he had cupped in his hand.

  Mars and Mercury landed atop the palace without opposition. Meanwhile, back in Escherville, Dodge flew to the top of his castle, then dove into the crack that ran beneath it. Zula, getting the hang of it, swiveled her head toward the Landform 2 display. Sure enough, Dodge emerged a bit later from the round lake in the middle of the city. He beat his wings to gain altitude, then spread them wide to come in for a landing on the top of his dark tower.

  At the same moment, in a strikingly symmetrical way, back over in the middle of Landform 1, Mercury rose up into the air above the white tower. In one hand he was holding a thing that looked like a horn. He raised this to his lips, and blew.

  They could not hear the sound of it, but they could see it spreading outward like a shock wave. Above, this dissipated into the sky like one of those ice halos sometimes visible around the sun on a cold day. But below, as it propagated downward along the sheer shaft of the pinnacle, it seemed to touch off a disturbance in the hivelike cellular structure that had grown around the rock. This was a little like seeing a trail of gunpowder flash into smoke. Or one of those things atomic scientists used to see the trails of subatomic particles through vapor. A cloud chamber. But too it put her in mind of buds unfurling in time-lapse.

  It propagated quickly down the skinny part of the pinnacle where the hive was thin but slowed dramatically as it reached the lower stretch where it broadened to include many more cells.

  And at some point, the display simply froze up. She turned toward Landform 2 and saw it frozen as well. She heard a man, an older chap, making a joke about needing to reboot the projector—a reference that meant nothing to most of the people in the room.

  “It’s not actually frozen,” someone explained. “The Time Slip Ratio has dropped to ten to the minus three. And still dropping.” Meaning that a thousand or more seconds had to elapse in Meatspace to simulate one second of time in Bitworld.

  “I see it changing though!” Eva exclaimed. She sounded so convinced of this that Zula maneuvered closer to where she was standing, trying to see it. Eva was gazing at “Mercury,” suspended above the palace with wings spread wide, horn pressed to his lips. And something about him created the most extraordinary impression in Zula’s mind. He was not moving. And yet he was changing all the time. Changing for the better. His wings, his hair, the expression on his face: the display simply couldn’t update itself fast enough to capture all the detail.

  Zula was remembering her early days working for Dodge’s video game company, when the graphics cards that drew the pixels on your screen sometimes just didn’t have the oomph to get the job done and so you would have to turn down the resolution, slow the frame rate, get rid of the fancy textures, just so you could play the game at full speed. It made everything look bad, but sometimes you just had to do it. When you turned that stuff back on, it was striking how beautiful, how real, the graphics could look.

  What was now clear to her was that all her seeing of the Landform up until now had been with the graphics turned down to the fast-but-crappy setting. It had to be that way, for the LVU to keep up with the pace of events in Bitworld.

  “Ten to the minus four,” someone intoned. “Just unbelievable.”

  Ten thousand seconds—about three hours—now had to go by to simulate one second of time in Bitworld. The system was overwhelmed.

  “But everything’s still basically working, right?” Eva asked.

  “Perfectly.” Meaning that the processes who inhabited Bitworld were not experiencing it any differently than they had been before this slowdown. The flow of time, the qualia they experienced, were all the same.

  And what qualia! Zula stepped in even closer. Every hair on Mercury’s head was now being rendered by graphics algorithms that suddenly had a lot of time on their hands and that had been turned up to eleven. The sun was not only bouncing off of but refracting through every shaft of hair, making it both gleam and glow. The lenses of his eyes glistened with moisture, and she could see that he was just about to begin weeping. But the tear in the corner of his eye had not yet broken loose. She could see the world reflected in it.

  He was beautiful. The whole place was beautiful.

  “Makes you want to go there, doesn’t it?” asked a man’s voice, just next to her.

  She turned to see that older chap who had made the joke earlier, and recognized him as Enoch Root.

  “Did you really just ask me if I want to die?” she shot back.

  He just got a wry look and said nothing. As if she had caught him out in some mischief.

  “Why don’t you have a go,” she suggested, “and send me a message back from the next world?”

  “I still have responsibilities in the previous one,” he answered.

  “So this has happened before?” she asked. She began strolling over toward the visualization of Landform 2, where Dodge—Egdod—the REAP—whatever you wanted
to call him—was poised, wings spread, above the top of his dark tower.

  “Perhaps not this,” said Enoch, walking by her side, “but—”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes,” he confirmed.

  “Ten to the minus five!” called True That. He was speaking a little distractedly, as he was fascinated by the appearance of Dodge.

  “It’s all because of what is going on in the hive,” confirmed Eva. She’d been checking out some stats, evidently. “The processes in those cells are breaking loose—emerging into the world—like larvae coming out of their cocoons. Seeing the Landform for the first time, thinking, interacting. It’s like we’re uploading thousands of new processes every second. And it’s only going to get more so.”

  “Ten to the minus six.”

  “What are we going to do with all our free time?” someone joked.

  “Look at basically freeze-frames,” Eva guessed. “Like illustrations in an old paper book, sort of.”

  Zula had now drawn close enough to confirm that Dodge’s graphics had also been turned up to eleven. His face was not exactly that of Richard Forthrast, but his expressions matched what she remembered of her uncle. His gaze was intent upon the cupped palm of his hand, where nestled a tiny burst of finely structured light. In its complexity she imagined she could see the beginnings of a human form.

  “I understand the speed of light!” she blurted.

  Faces turned toward her, gawped, then turned away. A hundred years ago, someone would have taken her up on the gambit. Now people were too intimidated—or perhaps they assumed she was finally losing it.

  Except for Enoch. “Explain it,” he urged her. “I’ve always wanted to understand.”

  “Ever since I was a child, I’ve been hearing physicists insist that nothing can travel faster than light. That it would break the universe somehow. Something to do with causality.”

  “You can’t have an effect until the cause has arrived,” Enoch said, nodding. “And causes can only travel so fast.”