Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,194

to gain an even greater vantage over whatever might remain of the Tower in the morning. But when the storm lessened he could hear the humming as loud as before, and when the sun rose in the morning he saw the Tower standing unaffected, and taller than at sundown.

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