Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,108

trucks burned liquid fuel and were piloted by humans. Now it had adapted by turning into an automated facility for people traveling as they were. The rooms themselves hadn’t changed in a quarter of a century, but the interface for checking in and paying for them had been ripped out and replaced by much newer and more gleaming systems. So it all looked good on the way in but was appallingly gloomy once you actually got into the room. It was, in fact, the sort of room you could only tolerate when your eyes were closed.

Sophia wasn’t going to close her eyes for a while, partly because she wasn’t that tired, but also partly because she was afraid of what she would see in the nightmares she assumed must be coming. She walked back down the long corridor to the front of the building, where there was a common area serving in lieu of lobby, restaurant, and bar. And in lieu of human staff there were vending machines. Enoch Root was there; he had already availed himself of a hot dog and a Heineken. “I had my eyes on the Szechuan noodle bowl,” he remarked, “but couldn’t work out how to manage the chopsticks.”

Sophia got the noodle bowl and a bottle of flavored seltzer and sat across the table from him. He had got rid of the ice packs, so his fingers were now all peeking out from tunnels of bandaging that in turn peeked out from the sleeves of a black hoodie. He had the hood up, maybe to shield his head from an air-conditioning system that was still on full blast even though a prairie thunderstorm was frosting the windowsills with BBs of white ice. This gave him a monkish aspect and, combined with the weird purple-green light of the storm and the frequent flashes of lightning, made the lobby seem like one of those roadside inns where Dungeons and Dragons campaigns invariably kicked off.

“Enough about me,” Enoch said, though they hadn’t talked about him at all. “What is your plan? I get that most of you have internships lined up on the West Coast?”

“Yes, and I am one of those,” Sophia said. “I get off in Seattle. The others will go south to the Bay Area.”

“Seattle. Your hometown?” he asked, just for the sake of politeness, since he already knew this.

“Yes.”

“Your parents are looking forward to seeing you, I’m sure.”

“They don’t know I’m coming.”

“Then they are in for a delightful surprise.”

“I hope so. I’ve been sort of pulling the wool over my mom’s eyes.”

“Oh? How so?”

“Well, my first choice for an internship was the Forthrast Family Foundation. But I didn’t want to be seen as having obtained the position because of the family connection. So I applied anonymously.”

“Using a PURDAH.”

“Yeah.”

“But that must be a routine procedure for an organization as enlightened as the FFF.”

“Oh, certainly. I just didn’t mention anything to my mom.”

“How remarkable,” Enoch said, “that of all the interests a brilliant young lady such as you might pursue, you landed on one that is best pursued at the Forthrast Family Foundation.”

“Your tone of voice, Enoch, suggests you don’t really see it as a coincidence.” Sophia laughed.

“My tone is only meant to convey curiosity.”

“Well, of course, it’s not a coincidence,” she admitted. “How much do you remember, Enoch, from when you were four years old?”

He smiled. “That was a long time ago.”

“Well, that’s all I have of my uncle Dodge. Richard Forthrast. Those kinds of ill-formed memories. Just a few images. Moments.”

“You are speaking,” Enoch said, “of the man whose brain was the first to be scanned using a fully modern procedure.” Which of course Sophia knew perfectly well. So the same words could have come across as mansplaining. But Enoch managed to deliver them in a mild tone and with respectful, inquiring glances as Sophia, making it clear that he was in fact working with her to move the conversation forward. “A procedure that was carried out by the FFF and that yielded a database—”

“The DB. Dodge’s Brain.”

“—that has been the cynosure of brain researchers ever since. You are one of those, I take it.”

“A brain researcher? Not exactly. I guess I’m coming at it more from the digital than the analog-slash-biological side.”

Enoch nodded. “You want to go into Dodge’s Brain with computational tools and—do what?”

“Well, it’s already mid-June. Two months from now I’ll be staring at a blank screen, getting ready to write up my findings. Supposing there are any.”

“Not a lot of time