Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,112

along, at the end of a long straightaway, a few dusty pickups and old-school SUVs were parked almost-but-not-quite blocking the road. To either side, roughly parallel courses of yellow plastic tape connected makeshift fence posts, extending for some little distance into the desert until the fence makers had lost their savor for the job. Someone had erected a rude arch of lumber over the road and, at its apex, nailed up a sheet of plywood painted highway-sign green and blazoned in hand-painted white letters:

DANGER

RADIATON

NO ADMITANCE

About the time they got close enough to read those words and to begin remarking upon the misspellings, the car’s autopilot became concerned about the clutter on the roadway ahead, emitted a warning tone, and slowed down. Sophia shut it off and assumed manual control, then, for good measure, stifled any additional warning beeps that might be forthcoming.

On an RV parked by the side of the road, a door flew open and a man, still in the act of shrugging an assault rifle over his shoulder by its strap, pounded down an external staircase and turned to face them. Watching on the other side with only mild curiosity was an older man standing before a smoking steel drum and using tongs to flip hot dogs. The one with the rifle strutted into the road and began waving both arms above his head. Following the instructions from the woman in the information center, Sophia kept the car moving at maybe five miles per hour and simply drove around the guy, slaloming around a series of barriers that did not quite block the road and passing into the uninhabitable radioactive wasteland beyond. The road negotiated a few curves and dips that limited visibility for a while, and then came out in full view of a Starbucks.

“What was it like before?” Sophia asked Enoch a few minutes later, after they had all got drinks at the drive-thru. The autopilot was back in effect and they were heading toward the relatively bright lights of Moab, still a couple of miles distant. She was thinking about the woman reading the book in the information center. About the whole idea of information centers. About information.

“Depends on how far back you want to go,” Enoch pointed out.

“Just saying that for everyone else in this car the post-Moab world is basically all we’ve ever known. Where people can’t even agree that this town exists.”

“What was it like when people agreed on facts, you mean?” Enoch asked. He seemed a little amused by the question. Not in a condescending way. More charmed.

“Yeah. Because they did, right? Walter Cronkite and all that?”

Enoch pondered it for a bit. “I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I think that the main thing it conferred on people was social mobility, so that if you were a smart kid growing up on a farm in Kansas or a slum in India you had a chance to do something interesting with your life. Before it—before that three-hundred-year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts—we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A lot better. Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.”

“But in order for the rich to get what they want, they also have to have a functioning tech economy, right? Because their wealth isn’t based on controlling land, like in the old days. It’s based on stock.”

Enoch nodded. “The system is selective enough now to identify those with the ability to contribute to the tech economy and bring them to places like this.” He waved out the windshield at Moab, which in a low-slung and easygoing way bore earmarks, for those who knew what to look for, of being the kind of place where smart people lived. They had traveled two thousand miles to end up back in Princeton. And once they left it in their rearview camera