Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,110

dwelled in prefab homes. Then back down into the rough-and-tumble desert of the Intermountain West, no less hostile than what lay east of the Rockies, but far more rewarding to look at.

“Case in point,” Enoch said to Sophia, apparently picking up last night’s conversation where it had left off. “You and I are sitting, what, about a meter apart, looking at this.” And he did not have to explain that this was the extraordinary scenic panorama of Glenwood Canyon. A human driver would have slowed down to enjoy it, but the car’s algorithms seemed to take it as a challenge and treated it as a slalom course. “We’re not just seeing it, we’re feeling it!” he half-joked as everyone was slammed leftward by an abrupt right curve. “Literally feeling it in our bones. The geometry of it, and of our trajectory through space-time, made manifest in our inner ears, in a way that could never by faked by virtual or augmented reality. And it’s all perfectly self-consistent, what you’re experiencing and what I’m experiencing, so that our understandings of the world tally. I keep trying to get Elmo to understand that the brain needs this—that if this kind of coherent world isn’t supplied, why, then not only can I not talk to you, my own brain can’t even talk to itself from one moment to the next.”

“Aaaand case in point,” said Phil, who was sitting in the middle back. He flipped his glasses up on his forehead, the better to see a thing looming above the road ahead.

They had emerged, abruptly and conclusively, from Glenwood Canyon and come out into a more open valley containing the crossroads town of Glenwood Springs. From here a highway doubled back east toward the elite paradise of Aspen. Travelers who, like them, chose to continue west toward Utah were confronted by an animated mushroom cloud rising from the interstate’s median.

Billboards in the traditional sense had gone the way of gas stations and ashtrays. Much cheaper and more efficient was to target the audience with personalized messages that would show up in their glasses, and those messages had better be interesting and germane or else they’d be filtered out by even the most bargain-basement edit stream. If you really wanted to put something up by the side of a road that everyone could see with the naked eye, then a stationary holographic projection system was a better bet, on every level, than erecting a physical object. Those could pose a fatal distraction to human drivers. But humans didn’t drive much anymore and so the only real objection that could be mounted against holographic billboards was that they were tasteless and annoying. Standards as to that varied. It could be inferred that, in the municipality of Glenwood Springs proper, good taste prevailed, lest one-percenters en route to Aspen be displeased by vulgar displays and decide to hurry down the road and buy their coffee in some place easier on the eyes. But west of town was some kind of invisible boundary on the other side of which anything was permissible. And someone had taken advantage of that by putting up this multimegawatt holograph of an animated mushroom cloud running on infinite loop and surmounted by yellow block letters proclaiming THE TRUTH ABOUT MOAB!

This turned out to be the first of several such advertisements spaced at intervals along the hundred and sixty miles to the Moab turnoff. It became clear that there were at least two different Moab-truther sites vying for their eyeballs and their mindshare: a “visitor center” and a “museum.” Both were founded upon the premise that Moab had been obliterated and its obliteration covered up by a vast global conspiracy. Both seemed to be very much for-profit tourist traps in the threadbare trappings of old-school nonprofit institutions. In addition a third attraction seemed to await them; this was much less heavily advertised, and such branding as it did have was understated in a way that Sophia associated with National Public Radio. It was called either the Moab Official Welcome and Information Center or the Nest of Lies, depending on your edit stream. It could be inferred that it had been put there by members of the reality-based community, perhaps bolstered by infusions of cash from a desolate Moab Chamber of Commerce.

The closer they got to the turnoff, the looser the local regs—assuming there were any—concerning signage, and the more desperate the competition grew. The last mile looked like an effects-laden movie or video game