Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,96

doing it.”

16

Tom turned on his four-ways and let the Tactical (as they now referred to the pickup truck with the machine gun) coast to a stop on the shoulder of the road, just at the crest of a gentle rise in the land. Topography around here was subtle, but a long picket line of wind turbines, running approximately north-south, hinted at some kind of ridgeline. The maps in their glasses gave them a hint as to what was going on, and they confirmed it by climbing out of the Land Cruiser and walking up to the place where Tom and Kevin had parked. From there it was possible to look west across the valley of the Missouri River, separating this part of the state from Nebraska to the west.

The SUV had stopped behind them. Formerly gleaming and sleek in a chunky, huge SUV-ish way, it was now a cluttered beast of burden with two ladders strapped to its roof rack and a flatbed utility trailer, laden with tarp-wrapped consumer goods, trailing behind. Most of its occupants remained in their air-conditioned seats but Pete came out for a chat. He was strapped with a holster that was mostly inside of his khaki trousers but allowed the handle of a semiautomatic pistol to show above the waistline. He caught Sophia looking at it as he approached. “It’s like a cheese head,” he explained.

“Huh?”

“Packers fans wear big silly hats shaped like wedges of cheese. Why? To show affiliation. All of this”—he waved vaguely toward the machine gun in the back of the Tactical, then patted the grip of his pistol—“is to announce, to anyone looking at us from a drone, that we speak their language.”

“You’re members of their tribe.”

“I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s a way of saying that, A, we can be talked to, and B, we are not to be messed with.”

“It’s . . . disarming to be armed?”

“Exactly.”

Kevin had been staring at output from their drone while Tom scanned the sky around them for drones operated by other people. He was gazing fixedly at one such. It was too small and far away to be seen with the naked eye. Apparently, though, his goggles were running some kind of augmented ware that enabled him to know of its existence and, in some sense, “see” it.

He slid them up on his backward baseball cap and turned toward Pete. “What’s the word, boss?”

Microaggression. Sophia had hired Tom and Kevin to escort them to Sioux City, but now that a middle-aged white guy had entered the picture, suddenly he was “boss.” Sophia was getting ready to say something when she noticed Pete watching her face wryly. Pete held up a placating hand. “I have taken the liberty of hiring these fellas for the extra job that needs doing,” he explained.

“Okay,” Sophia said. “I was kind of wondering why you were following us in the war wagon. Assumed you were just being courteous above and beyond the call of family duty.”

“We do try to extend courtesy,” Pete said.

“Noted. Appreciated.”

“But there is this other thing that has come up. Across the river. Just across the river.”

“Do I get to know what it is? Now I’m all curious.”

Pete looked ready to say no but then thought better of it. “You might hear about it from Jake. I know you are headed out to Seattle and that you might cross paths there. I don’t want you to feel left out. So, yes. You get to know what it is.” Pete exchanged nods with Tom, then continued: “You know that Jake has this ONE thing.”

“The Organization for New Eschatology.”

“Yes. His nonprofit.” Unsaid by Pete, because Sophia was the last person on earth to whom it needed to be explained, was that the entire financial empire over which Pete presided on behalf of Alice’s estate, vast as it was, was actually somewhat smaller than that controlled by Jake. Dodge’s estate had been split down the middle between them. But whereas Pete invested his half in utilities and real estate, Jake put his money into weird bot-controlled investment vehicles that reputedly brought a higher rate of return. He appeared to spend a lot of the proceeds on the nonprofit known as ONE, which was his way of wrestling with matters religious and spiritual. Before suddenly becoming a billionaire he had lived in a compound in northern Idaho and practiced a fringy kind of Christianity; since then, he had been reaching out and talking to all kinds of people who