Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  37

  Corvallis sometimes thought back on the day, three decades ago, when Richard Forthrast had reached down and plucked him out of his programming job at Corporation 9592 and given him a new position, reporting directly to Richard. Corvallis had asked the usual questions about job title and job description. Richard had answered, simply, “Weird stuff.” When this proved unsatisfactory to the company’s ISO-compliant HR department, Richard had been forced to go downstairs and expand upon it. In a memorable, extemporaneous work of performance art in the middle of the HR department’s open-plan workspace, he had explained that work of a routine, predictable nature could and should be embodied in computer programs. If that proved too difficult, it should be outsourced to humans far away. If it was somehow too sensitive or complicated for outsourcing, then “you people” (meaning the employees of the HR department) needed to slice it and dice it into tasks that could be summed up in job descriptions and advertised on the open employment market. Floating above all of that, however, in a realm that was out of the scope of “you people,” was “weird stuff.” It was important that the company have people to work on “weird stuff.” As a matter of fact it was more important than anything else. But trying to explain “weird stuff” to “you people” was like explaining blue to someone who had been blind since birth, and so there was no point in even trying. About then, he’d been interrupted by a spate of urgent text messages from one of the company’s novelists, who had run aground on some desolate narrative shore and needed moral support, and so the discussion had gone no further. Someone had intervened and written a sufficiently vague job description for Corvallis and made up a job title that would make it possible for him to get the level of compensation he was expecting. So it had all worked out fine. And it made for a fun story to tell on the increasingly rare occasions when people were reminiscing about Dodge back in the old days. But the story was inconclusive in the sense that Dodge had been interrupted before he could really get to the essence of what “weird stuff” actually was and why it was so important. As time went on, however, Corvallis understood that this very inconclusiveness was really a fitting and proper part of the story.

  His own professional journey, since then, could be seen as the single-minded pursuit of weird stuff, and the shedding, at every opportunity, of all responsibilities that didn’t qualify as such. It had led him into some alarming situations, forced him to make some tricky career choices, but whenever he was questioning it, he would summon forth that memory of Richard and he would try to do what Richard would have done.

  And that explained why he was sitting across the table, in the most expensive restaurant in Seattle, from Gerta Stock and the full-time nurse who apparently kept Gerta alive by looking after the tubes and wires hooked up to her body. Gerta appeared to be a transgender woman. She wasn’t that old, but she was a mess physically. Back in his Corporation 9592 days, Corvallis would have been seriously dismayed by what he was seeing, but the accident of Dodge’s will, combined with his laser-focused pursuit of weird stuff, had gradually made him over into a kind of high-tech Charon, assisting dead or dying people across the digital Styx, dropping them off on the far shore, never really seeing what lay beyond it. So he’d had a lot of encounters with desperately sick people, beginning with Dodge and moving on to Verna and others who had found their way into the cloud-based afterlife. Nothing surprised him about Gerta Stock’s physical condition.

  He was pretty damned surprised, though, when Gerta Stock mentioned what she did for a living. “I am a musician,” she said. “You’ve never heard my real name, but I know that you have heard my music. I made my career recording music under the name of Pompitus Bombasticus.”

  Corvallis knew it immediately. “The last music Richard Forthrast ever heard,” he said.

  “Unless they were playing some shit in the elevator,” Gerta responded.

  “You saw the video?”

  “The kid with the broken arm? On the sidewalk?” Gerta was grinning, showing yellowed teeth and hideous gums, and nodding. Corvallis averted his gaze and spent a moment cueing it up in his mind’s eye: A GIF, just a few seconds long, recorded by the kid’s father. Richard standing next to the kid on the sidewalk, moments before he went into the building to die. The fat, expensive noise-canceling headphones down around Richard’s neck, spilling the music out into the chilly wet autumn air. Clearly playing the music of Pompitus Bombasticus.

  “He had all of your stuff,” Corvallis said.

  “Made me famous, for a little while,” Gerta said. “I got a gig because of it—did the music for a big triple-A game. Made me enough money to transition.”

  “Then what happened? I seem to remember you’ve released a couple more albums.”

  “No hits. That was my big break. I blew it.”

  Corvallis took a sip of the expensive wine that Gerta had ordered from the sommelier. “But according to the itinerary your assistant forwarded to me, you flew in direct from Berlin on a private jet. You’re staying in the best hotel in Seattle, dining in the best restaurant, ordering the best wine. Am I picking up the check for this dinner?”

  Gerta laughed and shook her head. “I am suddenly rich,” she said. “Two weeks ago I was on public assistance, living in a pension. Now money is flowing into my bank account. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a day.”

  “From where?”

  “From you, my friend. Don’t you ever audit your books?”

  “Me personally or—”

  “No, no, from your foundations and whatnot.”

  “Why are we making payments into your bank account?”

  “It’s all automatic,” Gerta said. “It’s the system that tracks music downloads. That pays artists like me whenever someone listens to their songs. Someone or something in your cloud is downloading my stuff like crazy. I am suddenly rich. And so—” Pompitus Bombasticus raised her arms, dragging electrical leads and IV tubes along with them. “I intend to die like a rich woman, with a fine dinner in my belly. And I want to have my corpse scanned like your other rich clients. And I want to go to this amazing place where everyone apparently listens to my music.”

  Corvallis found time to audit the books a few days later, and found that Gerta was right about the downloads and the money. Pompitus Bombasticus had taken in more revenue during the last five weeks than during the entire preceding decade. To the living, she was still an obscure has-been, but to the dead she was bigger than the Beatles.

  In normal circumstances, some watchdog process running on their system would have brought this cash flow spike to the attention of the Forthrast Family Foundation’s comptroller. In this case it had been swamped and masked by bigger trends. The ecosystem of computational activity that had begun five years ago, with Sophia launching Dodge’s Brain at Hole in the Wall, and that had since grown to encompass thousands of such processes running on an unknown number of quantum computing server farms that El had sprinkled all over the world like a digital Johnny Appleseed, had of late shunted itself into a mode they hadn’t seen before. The only thing they really knew about this new mode of operation was that it was expensive. And it was expensive in a new and different way. An understanding of what these processes were thinking and doing was, as ever, maddeningly elusive. All they could do was fall back on some of the tools that various ACTANSS attendees had devised and made available to the research community over the years: tools that sucked in such data as could be gleaned from message traffic and server loads, analyzed them in clever ways, and displayed the results in three-dimensional visualizations. Those now came in many flavors, but the most widely used were the original LVU—the Landform Visualization Utility—and the network mapping scheme that had emerged from one of Elmo Shepherd’s research institutes. Corvallis, or any other qualified token holder, could pull these up at any time and view them through wearables. The apps were social, which meant that, if you wanted to, you could turn on a feature that would display the avatars of all other people who were looking at the s
ame visualization at the same time. You could hide yourself from the user community or let them know you were around. That community was an exclusive club, with no more than a hundred token holders spread around the world. The only people who got to look at these things were researchers and administrators belonging to the Big Three foundation clusters: Waterhouse, Forthrast, and Shepherd.

  A couple of weeks ago, Forthrast’s comptroller had let the board members and the top administrators know that trouble was brewing and that they needed to pay attention. Since then Corvallis had left the visualizations running in his peripheral vision all the time, and checked in on them a few times a day.

  One region of the Landform had always been troublesome: up in the mountains, some distance north of Town, was a place that had somehow failed to cohere as an intelligible three-dimensional shape. Some of the researchers had taken to calling it Escherville, after the artist M. C. Escher, who’d been good at making pictures of shapes that could not actually exist. Escherville had been around for at least as long as the LVU had been running and didn’t seem to change much. Traffic analysis made it pretty obvious that Dodge and Pluto and some of the other “Pantheon” processes had a lot to do with it.

  Escherville was weird, but at least it was stable. The other problematic zone in the Landform was what they had used to call the Town Square, after Sophia had pointed out its similarity to the park in the middle of Richard Forthrast’s hometown. But the name was now obsolete, for of late the similarity had been obliterated. In the last few weeks it had become too bright to see clearly unless you dialed back the power on your wearable to the point where the rest of the Landform faded into darkness. All of the little green points plotted by the LVU had the same brightness level, so when a region of the Landform was generating that much light, it simply meant that a huge number of points were concentrated there. If the Landform was a shaped swarm of fireflies, then Town Square was a jar in which nearly all of the fireflies had decided, for some reason, to concentrate themselves. The LVU was doing its best to track all of the data and map it into a three-dimensional shape, but its system for doing so was now failing to make sense of the information flowing into it, or perhaps observers like Corvallis were having trouble mapping what they saw onto shapes and patterns that they knew how to recognize from lives spent in a coherent three-dimensional universe. Maybe these dead people had a different understanding of geometry, or maybe they weren’t making sense at all.

  The other tool Corvallis favored was El’s system for displaying network traffic as a three-dimensional universe of colored blobs representing different processes, joined together by thin lines symbolizing messages passed between them. The first time he’d seen this, it had been dominated by a big yellow ball at the top, representing Dodge’s Brain, with the Pantheon spread out below it, and, at the bottom, thousands of tiny white balls suspended in cobwebs. When he looked at it now, many of the same features were still there, but the bottom layer just looked like a ball of cotton the size of a car. If he zoomed in close to it he could begin to make out individual concentrations, but the messages passing among them were flying so thick and fast as to obscure their identities.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  Corvallis had come to know that voice. Since their last face-to-face meeting in Zelrijk-Aalberg, it was the only voice in which Corvallis had heard Elmo Shepherd speak.

  People had long since got in the habit of representing themselves, in virtual spaces, with avatars. Audio representation—the voice your avatar spoke in—had lagged somewhat behind. It had become important in T’Rain, the game that Richard and Pluto and Corvallis and others at Corporation 9592 had pioneered. It was a devilish problem that no programming team in its right mind would want to be saddled with, and so it had fallen into, or been elevated to the status of, weird stuff. It was all well and good to imagine how cool it would be if your dungeon-raiding team of wizards, dwarves, elves, and the like could all communicate freely in voices and accents that were movie-quality, as finely realized in their own way as the avatars, weapons, and environments. But when one of the players was Chinese and didn’t speak much English; and another was from rural Arkansas and making no effort to hide his accent; and another was from Boston but trying to fake the Scottish accent that he fancied a dwarf would speak in; and another was in London and acutely sensitive to how badly the guy from Boston was getting it wrong; and one of them was a woman playing a male character; and one of them was carrying on a running argument with his mom, who wanted him to take out the garbage; when all of that was happening at once, in real time, making those characters sound as good as they did in the movies was impossible. The Weird Stuff team had made some headway using a divide-and-conquer approach. They had figured out ways to make male voices sound female and vice versa. They had used speech-to-text systems to decode what the players were saying, then used AI algorithms to filter out the “Take out the garbage now or you are grounded” chatter, then used text-to-speech technology to re-render them with correct accents, and so on. That technology had made its way into applications beyond gaming.

  El was using it to talk now. Some years ago, when he had begun using the Metatron to manifest himself at conferences and meetings, he’d mapped his own face onto its blank mannikin head and he’d piped his own voice straight through, essentially using the robot as a mobile speakerphone. Since then he had gradually changed his ways. He had turned off the face mapping so that no one could see him, and he’d begun using speech-generation technology. At first the Metatron had spoken in a generic, off-the-shelf voice and accent, but he or his staff had been customizing it. The voice was now recognizable as El’s. It did not sound exactly like El sounded when he was physically sitting across the table from you and pushing air through his vocal cords, but close enough that people who knew him would cock an ear, nod, and admit that it was not bad. Exactly how the speech was being generated was not clear, and had been the topic of many debates held in bars and coffee shops among people who had just finished “talking” to El’s Metatron. Sometimes the voice had a natural cadence suggesting that El was speaking into a microphone and his speech being reprocessed. Other times it sounded like the results of a text-to-speech algorithm. Since those algorithms were pretty good now, there was a considerable gray area between those theories—which was why it made for such good arguments in bars. Most of those arguments could have been settled if someone had actually laid eyes on Elmo Shepherd in the flesh recently. But no one had seen him in over a year, and opinions varied as to what condition he was in. Some said he was already dead. Of those, one faction believed that the speech they were listening to was actually coming from Sinjin Kerr or Enoch Root or perhaps a cabal of token holders sitting in a room together. Another faction held that El’s brain had already been scanned and was running in the cloud as a process that could interface directly with the voice-generation system. Most people, however, assumed that El was still alive.

  Making it somewhat spookier was that the Voice of El could emerge from different instruments at different times, depending on how he wanted to manifest himself. In the early going, they’d all come to associate it with his Metatron. He had them planted in cities all over the place, and they were smart enough to take public transit to a FedEx facility and ship themselves wherever they needed to be, sometimes traveling more quickly than human beings with airplane tickets. He used the same voice for old-fashioned phone calls and teleconferences. And it was the voice of his avatar when he manifested himself in virtual or augmented reality.

  As now. Hearing the voice, Corvallis turned his head to see El’s avatar standing a couple of meters off to his side. The avatar was also gazing at the Wad, as people had begun referring to the dense cottony underlayment of this display. El turned his head to look at Corvallis. The avatar didn’t look much like Elmo Shepherd. Whoever had designed it had apparently started with a 3-D scan of the Metatron and then tweaked it over time. It had passed through a phase of looking dangerously like t
he statuette on an Academy Award, and people had started calling it Oscar. But then El must have called in an artist or a designer or something, because it had taken on more human features and acquired a vague resemblance, in a shiny metallic way, to his high school yearbook photo. As avatars went, it wasn’t a good one. You could buy far more expressive avatars for next to nothing. Most people did. El’s using this one was a conscious choice on his part, presumably for the same reason he chose to use a voice generated by an algorithm: he didn’t want people to know his real condition, or indeed whether this thing was embodying a single human or a committee of handlers.

  “In old TV shows,” said the voice of El, “and I mean really old, like campy sitcoms from the 1960s, sometimes they’d do a dream sequence or something in heaven. Dress the actors up in bedsheets, hang wings on them, give them harps and halos. But there was always this.” The avatar extended its hand and skated it through the Wad. “You could see that off camera there had to be buckets of water with dry ice in them, bubbling away. Covering the floor of the studio with dense white fog.”

  “So it would look like they were in the clouds,” Corvallis said. “Yes, I remember seeing a few of those.”

  “Reminds me of that,” said El’s avatar, drawing its hand back.

  “A deliberate choice?” Corvallis asked.

  “Oh, of course not!” El scoffed. Corvallis was sure, now, that he was actually talking to Elmo Shepherd. That he was alive, at least temporarily lucid, and speaking through this avatar as directly as his failing body would allow. “This visualization algorithm is what it is. The spatial organization fell out naturally—it was the best way to sort out what was going on. White was the default color—it’s used when we don’t have a clear sense of the identity or role of a given process. Which is true of almost all of them, as you can see. It’s only in the last few weeks, as things changed, that it began to remind me of 1960s-sitcom heaven.”