Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  Her process left enough of a data trail in the system that they could be certain it was still up and running. But it never phoned home—never made any effort, so far as they could discern, to communicate with those left behind. In the offices of the Forthrast Family Foundation, Zula and other mourners had watched, as best they could, the flows of data and inscrutable shiftings of money and of mana associated with the Sophia process. But they heard nothing.

  The Forthrasts had been early adopters, so they had these experiences sooner than other families. But in the decade that followed the deaths of Sophia and of Elmo Shepherd, the scanning of dead people’s remains became as ubiquitous as burial or cremation had been for earlier generations. Thus millions of other families found themselves waiting in vain for a definite sign from the great beyond. The living wondered what was happening. Had the memories of the dead been erased? That had been a popular theory early but seemed less likely as the years went by and the souls constructed a digital world that obviously recalled the one in which they’d lived their past lives. And this raised another, less palatable hypothesis, which was that Bitworld, like a college dorm full of young, pretty, brilliant, fun people, was just so much more interesting than Meatspace that it never occurred to anyone in it that they should bother getting in touch with those dull, smelly leftovers still embodying themselves in atoms.

  The dead’s lack of curiosity about the living had become a topic of study and of discussion among the sorts of people who attended ACTANSS. Thousands packed into vast auditoriums to hear people talk about ideas like RSD, or Radical Semantic Disconnect: an idea that had been floated in a bar at ACTANSS 3 by Enoch Root and subsequently developed into a flourishing academic subdiscipline, all based on the notion that the rebooted dead couldn’t communicate back to Meatspace even if they wanted to because there simply was no common ground that could serve as the basis for communication.

  There was only one form of communication—if you even wanted to call it by that term—that actually worked, and it was the one they’d been using all along: the LVU. This had got steadily better over the nearly two decades since Sophia and Matilda had first unveiled it. Since then it had improved at least as much as television had between the staticky black-and-white figments of the 1950s and the sharper full-color images of the 1970s. Nowadays, with any decent augmented-reality eyewear, you could fly around the Landform and see it in color, with good enough resolution to make out the bodies that the dead had created for themselves: mostly humanoid, with an admixture of winged forms and other types taken straight out of the collective mythos that these souls had apparently dragged behind them to Bitworld. You could hover above the town squares in the cities of the dead and watch them mingle with one another and, to all appearances, talk, trade, fight, and copulate.

  Depending on the current value of the Time Slip Ratio, sometimes they did those things very fast and sometimes very slowly. When SLUZA had more than sufficient mana to throw at Bitworld, it could run faster than reality. The dead people in those towns became blurs. Buildings went up and forests were cut down as if in a time-lapse movie. When ALISS—AfterLife Infrastructure and Systems Support—sagged under the load, Bitworld slowed to a crawl. You could sit there for hours watching your dead grandmother walk across a room. As SLUZA had got good at manufacturing quantum computers and laying down fiber, the Time Slip Ratio had shot up. Time in Bitworld had leapt forward. But this had attracted more uploads and created more demand, slowing it down again until more capacity could be added, and so on and so forth. Back and forth that pendulum had swung a few times since Sophia and El had gone into the afterlife. On average, though, time in Bitworld had run faster. Hundreds of simulated years had passed. Their view of it had looked like a time-lapse. You had to slow it down in order to see what was happening. Lately, the pendulum had been swinging the other way and it had been running slower—approaching parity, meaning that time in the two worlds was progressing at about the same pace. Zula had checked in on it from time to time, out of idle curiosity, and out of a hope that she might glimpse her daughter.

  So it was with spectation on the activities of the dead in Bitworld. In many ways, these were as mundane as they could be. Except that there was one difference, which was psychologically important to living spectators: the dead were dead. They had once been flesh-and-blood humans. Now their bodies were gone, and by any biological standard they were dead. But there was no doubt that they had gone on to an afterlife. And there didn’t seem to be any limit as to how long they could stay there.

  The awareness that death was not permanent and that everyone could potentially live forever was the most momentous thing that humans could possibly have learned. The only things that might have rivaled it would have been proof of the existence of God, or the discovery of alien civilizations in other star systems. But neither of those had actually happened.

  One of the funny things about it, in retrospect, was its slowness, the lack of any dramatic Moment When It Had Happened. It was a little bit like the world’s adoption of the Internet, which had started with a few nerds and within decades become so ubiquitous that no person under thirty could really grasp what life had been like before you could Google everything. In retrospect, the Internet had been a revolution in human affairs, but one that had taken place just slowly enough that those who’d lived through it had had time to adjust in modest increments. But, centuries from now, people—if there were any—would see it as having happened in the blink of an eye.

  Lying there in the gutter with her blown-up knees, Zula felt ignored by everyone: her ex-husband and her dead uncle and her dead daughter as well as the living humans all around her too wrapped up in the mysterious activities of the dead to look out the windows of their cars or apartments and notice her predicament. She was carrying electronic devices that she could have used to summon assistance, but the accident had put her into a strangely placid frame of mind, and she was content to lie there and relax for a minute or two. Then water began to soak up through her clothing and her knees really began to hurt.

  A cop car pulled up and turned on its red and blue flashing LEDs. All other traffic vanished from the block as word got out among the civilian vehicles. Zula couldn’t tell, from her pavement-level viewpoint, whether there were any humans in the cop car. It disgorged a robot about the size of one of your larger microwave ovens, which ambulated over to her on elaborate triangular devices that sometimes worked like tank treads, sometimes tumbled vertex-over-vertex like ungainly wheels, other times elbowed along like old-school GIs belly-crawling under barbed wire. A couple of aerial drones showed up to supply even more unflattering camera angles. She had a brief conversation with a face on a screen, the purpose of which was to establish that she was not crazy or dangerous. She couldn’t really make out whether the face was a video feed of a live human, a simulation, or some blended combination of both.

  More vehicles showed up. Humans got out of them, pulling on gloves, and did nothing except watch a different kind of robot—an intelligent stretcher/gurney—approach Zula. The logo was that of a Japanese company. They’d long ago begun thinking about how to build robots that would handle many of the routine functions of keeping senior citizens safe, clean, and healthy.

  The robot unfurled many-jointed arms terminated with white Teflon spatulas, which it very gingerly and precisely slid under her. It lifted her up out of the gutter and got her gliding with exquisite smoothness toward the nearest medical facility, which was actually so nearby that they didn’t even bother putting her in a vehicle. There, for the first time, she was touched by humans, who gave her something for the pain and informed her that she had suffered patellar tendon ruptures in both of her knees—a fairly common sort of occurrence—and that it was going to be a while before she was on her feet again. Robots did surgery on her knees through incisions so small that placing Band-Aids over them seemed like overkill. She was out of the hospital before sundown. Friends and family came to see her in the place where she had lived n
ow for more than forty years. Cards and flowers began to clutter her field of vision. Serious conversations were had about whether she ought to consider selling the place and moving down to flatter parts of the city, closer to the offices of the Forthrast Family Foundation. Or conversely whether the office itself should be shut down, since most people worked from home now, and meetings happened in a crazy-quilt pseudo-space of real bodies in a room, videoconference, telepresence robots, and augmented reality. But Zula and Corvallis continued to go there almost every day, as if daring each other to be the first to give up on it.

  The younger Zula’s friends were, the more nervous they were about her way of life. She understood why, of course: they wanted to make sure they got a good scan of her brain when she died, so that she could live forever.

  This was how people thought nowadays. It wasn’t only cops, soldiers, and firemen who did everything through telepresence. It had been obvious for a long time that certain activities, such as going to the grocery store for a quart of milk, weren’t worth the effort of leaving the house, parking the car, and waiting in the checkout lane. Buying things online, and having them delivered by drones, was better. Added to this, now that death had been disrupted, was the factor of what had come to be known as “brain safety.” Even in the most prosperous and stable communities, going to the grocery store brought with it a small risk that one might die in a traffic accident en route, and if the accident were of the wrong sort, it might lead to destruction of the brain, barring the victim’s entry into the afterlife. Better to remain indoors and do as much as possible through telepresence. The time saved could perhaps be spent in virtual wanderings around the fascinating geography of the world that Dodge had brought into being, that Pluto had perfected, and that El had taken over. The living stayed home, haunting the world of the dead like ghosts.

  During the weeks after her fall, Zula was a little creeped out by just how little it really mattered that she could not walk. It seemed like that ought to be a much bigger deal. But this only went to show how stuck she was in outmoded ways of thinking, born as she was in the days when crutches, wheelchairs, and other such medieval improvisations had still been a thing. Remnants of those days—dilapidated wheelchair ramps and cracked yellow curb cuts—still peppered the streetscape. Having access to a basically infinite amount of money, Zula could get the best assistance robots in the world—contraptions that could pick her up and carry her to the toilet, or hold her up in the shower, whenever she wanted. They could even dress and undress her. Millions must have been spent on the bra-strap-hooking algorithm. Their code libraries knew how to do and undo every type of necklace ever devised by the jewelry industry, how to flush every sort of toilet, and how to fiddle with the knobs on even the most poorly conceived and wretchedly executed shower stall plumbing. Stairs were nothing. While carrying things much heavier than Zula, robots could climb stairs faster than humans could sprint on a level track.

  Her handlers even tried to fit her out with a wearable robot—a set of bionic legs that would carry all of her weight while allowing her to move about like a proper bipedal humanoid. She drew the line at that and tried to graduate as soon as possible to hobbling about under her own power with a robot at her elbow—a sort of android wedding usher, wearisomely feature packed, more capable than an aircraft carrier. As she gained strength and stability and cleared various medical hurdles, she configured this thing to back farther and farther the fuck off until it was trailing her five paces behind like some lackey of feudal times.

  She knuckled under and sold the place on the hill and moved to a houseboat on the lake, far enough from the office to afford her a decent walk every day. When she was really in a hurry she could do the commute in a robot boat or a robot car, always accompanied by Frankenstein, as she had dubbed her usher-ninja-bodyguard–bra-hook–stairway-sprinter robot. It didn’t feel like such a big concession at the time.

  Five more years passed in Meatspace. Even fully recovered, walking and running with ease, she kept Frankenstein around. It was an unwieldy name. Someone pointed out that she was pronouncing it wrong. It became Fronk. One thing she liked about Fronk’s design was that it wasn’t all that humanoid. Admittedly it had to have legs and hands, but these were not at all humanlike; the legs bent the other way, like a dog’s, and the arms were generalized stumps that could pull various “hands”—none of which looked much like a human hand—from a carousel-shaped holster encircling what passed for the torso. Its “head” was just a slender conning tower speckled with tiny lenses.

  In other words, it looked nothing at all like the Metatron that had killed her daughter.

  That model had been discontinued after the tragedy, as much for PR as safety reasons, and replaced, after a decent interval, by something meant to look rather different but still, to Zula’s eye, similar enough to trigger PTSD whenever she noticed one loping down the street or unfolding itself from a fetal position on a loading dock.

  One morning during her seventy-second year of life she began the day by allowing a car to drive her to a doctor’s appointment on Pill Hill. Nothing momentous. Just one of those regularly scheduled check-ups that tiled the calendars of persons her age. It just happened to take place in the very building where her uncle Richard had, forty-some years earlier, been stricken during a routine procedure. Even so, the building held no strong emotional associations for Zula, since on that day she had not actually caught up with Richard until he had been moved to the nearby hospital. And that was where all of the heavy trauma had been inflicted.

  She visited this particular physician twice a year. Each visit prompted a bit of musing about Dodge. He seemed to have lived and died a few times. One could never be entirely certain that he was dead. The Process that had been launched from his brain scan had ceased functioning years ago. No trace of it had been observed since. They would know if it woke up. Dodge’s account had shown debits of zero dollars and zero cents over the last two decades. At its zenith, a billion a month had coursed through it. So he seemed pretty dead.

  After the appointment, she and Fronk got into another car for the trip down to the office. En route, as the car swung round a corner, Zula got a view over Lake Union. It was a vista she’d enjoyed every day when she’d lived up on the hill, but she now saw it with fresh eyes. Her mind went back to her academic training, which had been in geology. She thought about the glacier that had scooped the lake out long ago. She saw it in her mind’s eye, a cliff of ice shoving ruined mountains before it, and compared its size to all that humans had built upon the rocky earth it had left when it had melted. She thought about how recent the works of humans were, and how ephemeral, compared to geology, and wondered how long it would take for all of it to disappear.

  The foundation’s building’s four elevators had begun breaking down almost as soon as they had been installed, for back in the day frugal young Zula had given the contract to the lowest bidder. The foundation had stopped repairing them a few years ago. Only one still worked. Humans and humanoid robots generally used the stairs—the building was only six stories high, and humans who couldn’t manage the climb under their own power could simply be carried. With a little help from Fronk, now at her elbow in wedding-usher mode, she made it to the top floor and entered the offices of the Forthrast Family Foundation, where she found two surprises waiting for her.

  One of them was Corvallis Kawasaki. His presence in the office wasn’t unusual, but today was the first time he had shown his face since the death of his wife of thirty-eight years, Maeve Braden-Kawasaki. This had occurred three weeks ago as the result of a sudden cardiac event—some kind of arrhythmia, it seemed. She had of course been scanned and uploaded. C-plus had been going through the normal evolutions of grieving, which nowadays were torqued heavily out of their traditional shape by the awareness that the departed was, in some sense, alive and well—and, if Maeve’s preparations had actually worked, flying around Bitworld on a pair of wings.

  So it was a pleasant, if poignant, surprise
to see him at the table in the main conference room.

  Less agreeable was Surprise Number 2: a late-model Metatron, seated across from him and engaged in conversation. Telepresence robots weren’t surprising in and of themselves. But most of the people who did business with the Forthrast Family Foundation understood that sending a Metatron was just plain tasteless.

  The look that C-plus gave her, when he spied her through the glass wall, told her that she should come in and get a load of this. So she entered. The robot had its back to the door. Of course, robots did not actually need to sit down in chairs, but it was conventional for them to do so. Zula circled halfway around the table and gave C-plus a warm shoulder squeeze as she slipped behind him. Then she sat down to look at the robot. Its face was blank. C-plus was, therefore, talking either to a human who (somewhat rudely) wished to remain anonymous, or to some artificial intelligence advanced enough to be worth treating as human.

  Something about the whole vibe, in other words, told her that this thing must have issued forth from the center of all El-like weirdness in Zelrijk-Aalberg.

  Last time she had bothered to check numbers, the server farms owned by El’s part of ALISS had consumed 31 percent of all electrical power generated on the planet, and they’d begun building solar power stations in orbit. Which she’d have found astonishing, were it not for the fact that Forthrast-related entities consumed 11 percent of all power on Earth, and had funded a lot of the research on orbital energy supply.

  Generating all of that mana took a lot of electricity, not just for the computers but for the cooling systems needed to keep them from overheating. Technology existed for that, and new tech could be invented, but new laws of thermodynamics couldn’t. All cooling systems needed to reject waste heat somewhere—which is why the back of a refrigerator is warm. Thinking on a planetary scale—which, looking ahead to a future Mag 10 system, was the only way you could usefully think—the world was going to become a large spherical refrigerator hurtling through space. It would get energy from the sun and it would eject heat into the universe by aiming vast warm panels into the dark.