Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  “Signals have to pass between neurons or you don’t have a brain,” Zula said.

  “We’re getting pretty far afield from how it actually works,” Sophia said, “but no matter how you simulate a brain, the point is that you’re going to have a lot of separate, independently running processes that have to communicate over a wiring diagram that basically represents the connectome. And every signal—every separate communication—has some overhead that you have to pay in terms of computation and bandwidth. If you’re doing it the way it ought to be done, crypto-wise—”

  “The way all communication happens nowadays,” Zula said, quoting Sophia’s own words back to her. She winked at Marcus.

  “—yeah, the overhead is large and everything is some combination of slow and expensive. To figure out how to do those computations faster was kind of an obvious fat target for companies building quantum computers. Instead of waiting for Moore’s Law to catch up with what was needed, they were able to leapfrog it, and bring us devices that were decades or centuries ahead of the curve in terms of their ability to do this stuff.”

  “Distributed secure computation,” Marcus said, just to be sure he was tracking.

  Sophia nodded. She had begun moving her hands while she talked, in a way that suggested she was working with a user interface. Marcus and Zula both took the hint and put on their glasses. They saw a carousel hovering in the middle of the office, displaying a few thousand photos that Sophia and her friends had apparently captured during their cross-country drive. Zula recognized some exterior shots of the Forthrast farmhouse in Iowa. Then Sophia spun it forward and finally zeroed in on some more recent pictures.

  The landscape of central Washington State was distinctive with its red-brown basalt, purple haze of sagebrush, and deep blue Columbia River water. On the shore of that river, on a flat triangle of alluvial ground at the mouth of a slot canyon, was a big dusty building ensnared in a web of power lines. It had a large parking lot, made for a blue-collar workforce that no longer existed, currently occupied by all of three vehicles. One of those was a pickup truck marked SECURITY, and standing next to it was a burly man in mirror shades, watching Sophia—or whichever of her friends had taken the photograph—and no doubt recording her.

  “And that is what is happening at Hole in the Wall Coulee,” Sophia was saying. “On the outside it looks the same as any other processor farm. Electricity and cold water go in, bits and warm water come out. But behind the walls of this old factory, the amount of useful computation that’s happening is thousands or maybe even millions of times in excess of what you’d see in old-school processor farms just up the river.”

  “Got it,” Marcus said. “So I see what you mean that this is a game-changer in terms of the ability to run a big neurological simulation.”

  “Not my insight,” Sophia admitted. “Solly—one of my professors at Princeton—brought it up a few months ago, when this thing came online, and said basically, ‘Look, we might actually be able to do it now.’”

  “Meaning, run a simulation of something more ambitious than a cubic millimeter of one mouse’s brain,” Zula said.

  “Yeah. And I just thought to myself, when I heard that, ‘Hey. DB is part of my birthright. Opportunity knocks.’ And that’s when I applied for this internship.”

  Marcus was nodding. “Does your professor know about this? Is he or she part of the picture?”

  “He. Most definitely. It’s Solly.” Which in a lot of tech nerd circles would have been sufficient. He was one of those guys who had been around forever and played roles in tech companies going at least as far back as Hewlett-Packard.

  But Zula wasn’t really a part of that culture. “Rings a bell,” she said.

  “Solly Pesador. Old-school tech geek turned neuro hacker.”

  “You’ve crossed paths with him,” Marcus informed Zula. “He’s the one who dropped out of the whole Bay Area tech scene so he could go back to school in middle age and get a degree in neuroscience.”

  “I remember him now,” Zula said.

  “He’s probably a known quantity to the foundation,” Sophia said. “I think he’s participated in some ONE colloquia, advised on some DB-related stuff.” Which, as they all knew, wasn’t saying much—any neuroscientist of any significance to the field had probably crossed paths, at some point in his or her career, with the Forthrast and Waterhouse foundations.

  “Is he advising you on this?”

  “He’s aware that I’m going to attempt it. I have his support. As important, I have code that came out of his research group.”

  “Code for simulating what brains do.”

  “What neurons do.” Sophia shrugged. “I mean, that’s no big deal. You could have it too—it’s open source. But the point is that it’s easy for me to get in touch with the experts who wrote that code, get their advice, work on fixing bugs. Actually get something up and running during the short time that I am going to have here.” She paused for a moment, and pressed her lips together, and then went on: “If you’ll have me, that is.”

  Zula sat back in her chair and looked out the window. The outcome had never really been in doubt. But being the director of a foundation had taught her a few things. One: much of what she did for a living was symbolic. But two: just because it was symbolic didn’t mean it wasn’t important. She had to put on at least a performance of thinking about it.

  “Based on what you’ve said in this interview, I don’t think that even the most skeptical observer could claim that you are not qualified. And the steps you took to hide your identity behind PURDAH during the application process should dispel any serious questions around favoritism. So, you’re in. But—” She held up her index finger in warning, since Sophia was about to bounce out of her chair. “We have to talk about what it means. Whether this is just an academic research project, taking some new code for a spin on the Hole in the Wall system, or a serious effort to turn Dodge’s Brain on. Because no matter how we spin it, some people are going to see it as the latter.” Zula turned her attention to Marcus. “So we should sit down with Letitia.” Letitia was the foundation’s public relations director.

  Marcus nodded.

  “But that’s not for you to worry about. That is my problem,” Zula said, turning back to Sophia. “Your problem is seeing how much of this you can actually pull off in two short months.”

  21

  It’s kind of amazing that after all this time we are still using passwords for anything,” Sophia exclaimed.

  It was three hours later. She was sitting in a restaurant along Lake Union with the man she knew as Uncle C.

  Corvallis Kawasaki was now in his late forties. Like a lot of men whose hairlines had simply gone wrong at a certain age, he had taken to shaving his head. As a result, he looked radically different from the mop-topped Asian-American kid visible in some of Richard’s old photographs from the Corporation 9592 days. He had also got in the habit of wearing suits. He had never quite resigned himself to neckties, though, and so he had his shirts tailored with stand-up collars meant to be worn unbuttoned. That, combined with his prominence in the tech world, had made him easily recognizable; when he’d walked into the restaurant, ten minutes late, the hostess had greeted him by name, and diners’ heads had turned, tracking his progress across the room to the private booth where Sophia had been waiting for him.

  In this part of town, all lunches were business lunches, and all conversations over food and drink involved disclosures of sensitive IP. The restaurants had been designed accordingly; tables were widely spaced, sound barriers were inserted wherever possible, and when it got too quiet, randomized noise welled up from discreetly placed speakers and filled in awkward gaps. Private dining rooms of various sizes ringed the main floor. Some of these were mere booths, capable of seating two to four, with doors on them. In one of those, C-plus and Sophia had been able to get through the hugging and cheek-kissing part of the meeting without too many eyes on them. They had then enjoyed a light lunch together
and spent a little while catching up. He was doing well. He and Maeve now had a brood of three kids, all indexing their way through school and soccer and robotics, exhaustively photo-documented in a way that had to be shared with Sophia.

  It was only after the plates had been cleared away and coffee served that C-plus had buckled down to the serious business of making her a token holder—or, in the inevitable tech industry abbreviation, a toho—with access privileges to Dodge’s Brain.

  In essence, this was no different from handing someone a key to an apartment or giving them the combination to a padlock. There was this entity in the cloud called Dodge’s Brain. It was mostly just a passive, inert repository of data. But it did include some executables—some actual running code—that were active all the time, like a sentry pacing back and forth in front of a locked library door. That code was as secure and unhackable as it was possible for anything to be in this world, and it would only open the door for entities that could prove—and keep proving—that they had been granted the requisite authority.

  Corvallis Kawasaki had the power to confer those tokens on others. In the Meatspace world, “others” meant “human beings.” But the digital sentry in front of the door was just a computer program running on a server somewhere, or more likely distributed across a number of servers. It didn’t really have the ability to recognize humans, or to reliably tell one human from another.

  “We could use biometrics,” C-plus admitted. Meaning, devices like fingerprint readers or iris scanners. “But that just moves the vulnerability elsewhere. Let’s say I had a gadget that could read your fingerprint with one hundred percent accuracy. Fine. The gadget knows it’s Sophia. But in order for that to be of any use, the gadget has to send a message to some other process, somewhere in the world, saying, ‘I checked her fingerprint and it’s definitely Sophia.’”

  “And that could be hacked.”

  “Yeah. Still, probably good enough. But I am trying to abide by the highest possible standards here.”

  “To make a point. To set an example,” Sophia said.

  “And to avoid looking like a fool,” he said. “If it came out that I had let standards slip, cut corners, and gotten burned, it would be embarrassing.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Now, passwords are ridiculously old-school, but they work as a stopgap. I want you to make one up, right now. One that you’ve never used before and will never use for any other purpose. Take your time. When you’re ready, type it in.” Uncle C slid a tablet across the table to her, keyboard ready for text entry.

  “Okay. Thinking,” Sophia said.

  “Because this is your password to DB, you’re probably thinking about using a password or phrase that has some kind of sentimental connection to your uncle Richard. Some kind of personal meaning to you. Don’t. This isn’t magic. It’s not an opportunity for you to express your feelings.”

  Sophia nodded, feeling her face get slightly warm, as she had in fact been thinking of names from D’Aulaires’ as suitable passwords. Instead she typed in “IsasdftFffiI13da!,” for “I stole a shower daisy from the Forthrast family farmhouse in Iowa 13 days ago!” As she did so, Uncle C demurely looked away. The app asked her to reenter the password just to make sure, and she did. Then she slid the tablet back across the table, maneuvering it carefully between coffee cups and cream pitchers. “Done,” she said.

  “Great.” C-plus spent a few moments working in the virtual space that he could see through the lenses of his glasses. He scanned the results for a few moments, then nodded. “Okay. Congratulations. You now have unlimited read-only access to Dodge’s Brain. As long as you remember that password—and no one steals it.” Meaning that she could read all she wanted and write programs that would pull data from the files, but not alter them.

  “And are we going to stick with old-school passwords?” Sophia asked.

  “No, we are not,” C-plus said. “Over time you want to migrate over to a DID protocol.” Sophia knew what it meant: Defense in Depth. Instead of all-or-nothing access to a whole system, you sort of had to work your way in, proving and reproving who you were using various factors. To make a long story short, it wasn’t very useful unless it was hooked up to a PURDAH-based system. Because that was the whole point of anonymous holography: your identity was verifiable not because you happened to know a password but because of your “handwriting”—which here meant just about every way in which you made an impression on the world.

  “So the password will expire in a few weeks. You need to have switched this thing over to your PURDAH before that happens. Which should take place automatically as you use it and it gets to recognize you. What you do then is up to you, of course. You have a plan?”

  “Learn my way around the connectome files. Use some of the tools that my professor’s group has invented to parse them—to ‘ring them out,’ as he likes to put it.”

  “That’s probably a few weeks’ work right there.”

  “More than likely,” she agreed. “If that works—which is a big if—then start actually trying to run neural simulations on a subset of that connectome. See what happens.”

  22

  Ten months later

  As she walked down the hallway to Solly’s office, she could hear two men laughing and talking through the half-open door. No noisy open-office environment, this. Solly had enough pull to set himself up with an interdisciplinary gig, endowment funded, not tied to any one department. He hung out in an old pseudo-Gothic building on the Princeton campus, within striking distance of both neuroscientists and computer geeks. His office looked out over one of the campus’s many green quadrangles. It was big, book lined, and quiet.

  She pushed at the open door and found Solly sitting there chatting with Corvallis Kawasaki and Enoch Root, both of whom had joined via videoconference on a flat-panel screen. This kind of thing was getting a little antiquated, but people still used it. “Hi, Sophia!” called C-plus when he saw her entering the frame.

  “Am I late?”

  “You’re early!” said Solly. He was a tiny guy, deeply embedded in a leather chair, like a mouse in a baseball mitt.

  “Okay. Fyoosh!”

  “We hopped on a little early,” C-plus explained. “We had some other things to talk about.”

  “In Latin?”

  There was an awkward pause, and then they all laughed. “I am sorry you heard my butchered Latin,” C-plus said. “How embarrassing.”

  “I wouldn’t know butchered from non-butchered,” Sophia said. “But why?”

  “It’s a running gag between me and Enoch,” C-plus explained. “He walked up to me once in a bar near the foundation and hailed me in conversational Latin.”

  “Because he knew you spoke it,” Sophia guessed. “Because of the Roman-legion stuff you do.”

  “Yes. It made quite an impression on all of the Amazon employees hanging out there.”

  “And on you,” Enoch said. His face was sharing the screen with a pint of amber fluid, topped with foam.

  “I didn’t know Enoch at the time. So, yes! It came as quite a surprise,” C-plus admitted. “Anyway, we practice our Latin sometimes. His is much better than mine.”

  “Hi, Enoch!” said Sophia. “Where are you?”

  Enoch reached out with the hand that wasn’t holding the beer and moved the camera around, giving them a blurred panorama of what seemed to be a very charming pub.

  “England?” Sophia guessed. “Ireland?”

  “No,” Enoch answered. “The independent, sovereign nation of . . . wait for it . . .” With utmost gravity, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a passport. He held it up to the camera. It looked newly minted. Embossed in gold letters on the front, it claimed, in French, Dutch, and English, to be an official document from Zelrijk-Aalberg.

  “You’re printing passports now!?” C-plus exclaimed.

  “It’s just a piece of paper,” Enoch said with a shrug. “You know El. He is fascinated by nation-states. Always hacki
ng the system.”

  “Well, speaking of hacking the system,” Solly said. “I think we are all here?” He was referring, as everyone knew, to Sophia’s thesis committee. This was a big and strangely diverse committee for a mere senior thesis. But it had all got a bit complicated, and so there were reasons why all three of these men were in on it.

  “Yes, let’s go,” said C-plus. Enoch signaled his assent by raising his pint and nodding.

  “You’ve been busy,” said Solly, swiveling his chair to face Sophia.

  Sophia sighed. “I’m glad you see it that way.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “My classes—my grades—”

  “Those are formalities that the university has set up to make sure students don’t go off the rails, because of inattention or laziness or whatever.”

  “A safety net?”

  He laughed. “A safety net for the university. A danger net for the student. As the one person in this meeting who is supposed to be paying attention to such things, let me say that I see you as having cleared all of those hurdles a year ago. Your senior year has effectively been graduate school. That’s how I can say with confidence that you’ve been busy—because I hear about your efforts from Corvallis. From Enoch. And from my graduate students and my postdocs.”

  “My efforts,” Sophia snorted. “Mostly asking them questions.”

  “That is as good a metric of effort as any. Better than tests and grades, certainly.”

  “I’m glad you see it that way. The grades I have received during the last year are the worst of my life.”

  “The only thing that matters is whether you can clear the bureaucratic hurdles required to graduate,” Solly pointed out. “No one gives a shit about your grades, Sophia. No one will ever look at them again.”

  She looked at the screen. Both Enoch and C-plus had politely averted their gazes. “That’s kind of mind-blowing,” she said.

  “Because you’ve spent your whole life on the academic treadmill. Now you’re stepping off of it. What matters, from here on out, is your work. Your holograph. In the non–three-D–graphics sense of that word.”