Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,206

normal: a little tower in a park.”

Wearables came out of pockets all around the table, or people flipped them down from where they’d been parked atop their heads. Everyone went to the Landform display first and verified that Marcus was correct: the towering flare that during the last several weeks had risen above the Town Square like an oil well fire was now completely gone. But the building atop the nearby hill stood just as it had before, the only difference being that the hill kept growing taller and steeper.

“We’re sure this isn’t just a fail in the LVU?” Maeve asked.

Marcus shook his head. “It’s screamingly obvious in the burn rate. The financials. And if you switch over to the other viz you can see what’s up with the Wad.”

They all checked out the more abstract visualization scheme—the one that for the last few weeks had been dominated by the amorphous cloud of dense white lines. The Dodge process and the Pantheon still hovered above everything else, as bright and as dominant as ever. But the Wad was no more. In its place was a thin white layer that looked like the aftermath of a hailstorm: thousands of hard-looking white pellets. Each of them represented a separate process. They had always been embedded in the Wad. Until a few minutes ago, though, they’d been concealed by the dense matting of white lines representing the messages being passed between them. Now, if you bent close and stared at one of those pellets, you could see white fibers zapping in and out of it as messages were passed. But Marcus was right: the level of activity had dropped to something approaching zero.

They all received the same notification at once. It was a terse message from Sinjin Kerr, letting them know that he needed to cancel this afternoon’s meeting and apologizing for the short notice. Moments later he sent another one very much regretting that he would not be seeing them at ACTANSS 5 next week.

40

In lieu of a purse, Sophia carried Daisy: a sort of disembodied pocket whose purpose was to atone for the sins of the women’s clothing industry. It was a flat wallet that she slung over her shoulder on a thin strap. It was big enough to carry ID, tampons, pens, a miniature multitool, a spare house key, and an improvised rosary of electronic fobs and dongles and mini-flashlights. Every so often it grew bulky enough that she could feel it thudding against her hip, and then she would go through and clean out all the little scraps of paper she’d stuffed into it. When prepping for a day at work or a night out, she could put it into a larger bag. At ACTANSS 5, it carried a key token to her room and one of the pocket notebooks that the organizers handed out as swag. On one side it had an outer sleeve consisting of a rectangle of tough clear plastic, closed by a zipper. Some while ago, while pawing through a drawer in search of her passport, she had come across the peel-and-stick op-art shower daisy that she had purloined from the Forthrast family farmhouse. On the spur of the moment, she had slipped it into the transparent sleeve so that she could see it more often. Since then, it had become a visual hook, like a distinctive piece of jewelry or a dyed streak in the hair, that friends associated with her and strangers used as a conversation starter. Her more stylish girlfriends had begun rolling their eyes at the increasingly frayed and dingy wallet, and begun addressing it as Daisy.

After a long day of sitting still in conference sessions, it was her habit to wind down by going to the spa, where she would walk on a treadmill for half an hour or so, just to wake up the muscles and get the blood moving. The machine had a shelf intended to hold reading material. It was no longer all that useful since wearables tended to be easier to read from when you were bobbing along at full stride. She put Daisy on that and cranked the treadmill up to a brisk pace. Then she pulled her wearable down from the top of her head and settled it on the bridge of her nose and began wading through all of the message traffic that had piled up during the day. Her editor, assisted by various bots, had done her best to sort that into