Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,48

with raven iconography. He’d found a graphic artist on Craigslist who had produced some convincingly classical-looking line art for him, and he’d found others willing to stitch that artwork onto his clothing or hammer it into his armor. You could get anything on the Miasma, including a whole alternate historical identity.

“Corvus” turned around and sank into his customary position on the front right and buckled the seat belt over his tunic, then pulled his laptop out of its bag and got it booted up as the jet was taxiing to the head of the runway. The laptop fell into a kind of stupor as umpteen different apps tried to synchronize themselves over an overloaded wireless connection. It wasn’t until the jet had taken off and climbed to an altitude where its onboard Wi-Fi system kicked in that Corvallis was able to get proper Internet. On the left side of his screen he set up an ordinary browser window so that he could see the world as other people saw it, and on the right he launched a couple of other apps that were connected directly to Lyke’s internal systems over an encrypted, secure connection. The former was sluggish. The latter showed why: Lyke’s systems were badly bogged down, and the same was presumably true of all the other social media platforms.

Weather forecasters, as a public service, had taken to posting maps based on current and projected wind patterns, showing the area likely to be contaminated by the fallout plume. A traffic jam had formed on I-70 near Grand Junction, Colorado, as residents fled and commenced banging into each other. Another kind of jam-up had materialized on the tarmac at Aspen as every private jet tried to get clearance for takeoff at once. Such images were played over and over again by networks lacking actual footage of Moab.

Suddenly the lidless eye of Breaking News swung around to Las Vegas. What looked like the entire Las Vegas Police Department was evacuating a high-rise casino/hotel, landing choppers on the roof, and (clearly visible to long-lensed cameras on drones, or simply aimed out the windows of surrounding high-rises) conducting a room-to-room search of a penthouse suite using sniffer dogs and Geiger counters. Military experts, watching the raid in real time on television, pointed out that the top of such a tower would be the optimal location to detonate a tactical nuke—much more devastating than a ground burst. By the time the official order went out to evacuate every building within a mile, the streets were jammed anyway with tourists who’d decided not to wait.

From Corvallis’s point of view—watching the feeds in one window while monitoring Lyke’s systems in another—the events in Vegas produced the social media equivalent of a nuclear chain reaction as seemingly everyone there tried to post pictures and videos at the same moment. The result was something approaching a blackout. Lyke’s server farms had been designed to handle huge traffic surges, and the technology they’d acquired from Nubilant had made them even better at doing so. All of that stuff was working. But there were only so many computers and so much bandwidth to go around. When those had all been maxed out, there was nothing to do but wait for things to settle down.

So he waited, along with a billion other Miasma users staring at frozen screens. His mind went back to poor Moab. Remote, difficult to reach, cut off by roadblocks, radioactive, probably reduced to cinders, it had become something of an afterthought. He had been there, a few years ago, on a rafting trip, and thought it a nice little town, a Mecca for young, strenuous, happy-go-lucky dudes in cargo shorts and girls with sports bras and pigtails.

It occurred to him that this would be the best time to change out of his Roman legionary clothes and into the normal-guy clothing he’d brought with him. Yesterday, when he’d reached the site of the camp, he’d changed in the backseat of his Tesla and stashed the modern garb in a duffel bag in the trunk of his car. But that duffel bag was now in the plane’s luggage compartment, unreachable until they landed.

A meme cropped up claiming that Moab had actually gone off the grid two days earlier as most of its residents had fallen victim to an explosively contagious plague that had presumably escaped from a nearby bioweapons facility, and that the president had made the decision to sterilize the whole town with a nuke. The roadblocks on