Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,410

and that had been turned up to eleven. The sun was not only bouncing off of but refracting through every shaft of hair, making it both gleam and glow. The lenses of his eyes glistened with moisture, and she could see that he was just about to begin weeping. But the tear in the corner of his eye had not yet broken loose. She could see the world reflected in it.

He was beautiful. The whole place was beautiful.

“Makes you want to go there, doesn’t it?” asked a man’s voice, just next to her.

She turned to see that older chap who had made the joke earlier, and recognized him as Enoch Root.

“Did you really just ask me if I want to die?” she shot back.

He just got a wry look and said nothing. As if she had caught him out in some mischief.

“Why don’t you have a go,” she suggested, “and send me a message back from the next world?”

“I still have responsibilities in the previous one,” he answered.

“So this has happened before?” she asked. She began strolling over toward the visualization of Landform 2, where Dodge—Egdod—the REAP—whatever you wanted to call him—was poised, wings spread, above the top of his dark tower.

“Perhaps not this,” said Enoch, walking by her side, “but—”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” he confirmed.

“Ten to the minus five!” called True That. He was speaking a little distractedly, as he was fascinated by the appearance of Dodge.

“It’s all because of what is going on in the hive,” confirmed Eva. She’d been checking out some stats, evidently. “The processes in those cells are breaking loose—emerging into the world—like larvae coming out of their cocoons. Seeing the Landform for the first time, thinking, interacting. It’s like we’re uploading thousands of new processes every second. And it’s only going to get more so.”

“Ten to the minus six.”

“What are we going to do with all our free time?” someone joked.

“Look at basically freeze-frames,” Eva guessed. “Like illustrations in an old paper book, sort of.”

Zula had now drawn close enough to confirm that Dodge’s graphics had also been turned up to eleven. His face was not exactly that of Richard Forthrast, but his expressions matched what she remembered of her uncle. His gaze was intent upon the cupped palm of his hand, where nestled a tiny burst of finely structured light. In its complexity she imagined she could see the beginnings of a human form.

“I understand the speed of light!” she blurted.

Faces turned toward her, gawped, then turned away. A hundred years ago, someone would have taken her up on the gambit. Now people were too intimidated—or perhaps they assumed she was finally losing it.

Except for Enoch. “Explain it,” he urged her. “I’ve always wanted to understand.”

“Ever since I was a child, I’ve been hearing physicists insist that nothing can travel faster than light. That it would break the universe somehow. Something to do with causality.”

“You can’t have an effect until the cause has arrived,” Enoch said, nodding. “And causes can only travel so fast.”

“Never completely made sense to me when it was explained that way. Seemed arbitrary. Like a rule that had been imposed from outside the system.”

Enoch was nodding and smiling.

Zula went on, “But it’s what we are doing at this very moment to Bitworld! We are saying that according to the rules of the simulation, everything, everywhere, has to march forward in lockstep. As much as we might like to see how it all comes out—whether that tear is going to break loose from Mercury’s eye, for example—we may not. We can’t throw more mana at it and fast-forward that one part of the simulation, because then it would be out of sync with all the other parts. It would break the world.”

“And we can’t have that, can we?”

“No! We can’t have that, Enoch.”

Enoch looked over at the frozen god. “This is not going to change for a very long time,” he said, “for the reason that you just mentioned. There are young people here who may spend the next ten years of their lives managing the systems in orbit above us that will generate the next few moments of time in Bitworld. But you know what?”

“No. What?”

Enoch pivoted so that he was standing beside her, and bent his arm in what Zula recognized as a very old-fashioned courtly sort of gesture. She reached out with some caution, not wanting to poke him with her exoskeleton, and took it. “Outside,” Enoch said in a quiet voice just for her, “the