Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,113

they would travel another thousand miles to end up in the same place again.

“So is it ever coming back?”

“The state of affairs that existed during those three hundred years?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. It’s the kind of big woo-woo topic your uncle Jake thinks about. You are free to think about it too, of course. Or to focus on the task at hand. Maybe one applies to the other.”

It took her a second to process that. “You’re talking about what you mentioned before,” she said, “that a brain, or a digital simulation of one, needs to be embedded in a world that agrees with itself as to what is what.”

“Yes. And it has to agree with any other brains that happen to be hanging around in the same world.”

“Not an issue for me,” Sophia said. “There’s just the one. Dodge’s.”

“Not for long,” Enoch said.

Coincidentally or not, they had reached the center of town and pulled up in front of one of the larger buildings, a former bank that was now the local offices of ONE: the Organization for New Eschatology. Sophia had been sharing her location with family members and apparently Jake had passed the word to the local staff, and so a few people, whom Sophia could only assume were professional eschatologists, or perhaps eschatological support staff, were emerging from the building’s grand old doors to greet their colleague. “Here is where I leave you,” said Enoch. “Thank you for helping take me down from that cross and for bringing me this far.”

Part 4

17

With her husband, Csongor, Zula still lived in the same condo where they had dwelled at the time of Richard’s death. They had raised Sophia there. Upon sending her off to Princeton, they had shopped around for a new place but decided that the condo—two thousand square feet on the eighteenth floor of a twenty-story building in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood—still suited them just fine.

Richard had bought it for them a long time ago, in the aftermath of events that had made them briefly famous and placed them at some hazard of violent reprisals. They could not safely go back to their homes, which were easily findable, and they had no money to speak of. Richard had eliminated the problem by setting up an untraceable shell company and using it to purchase the condo. By the time the Miasma had caught up with the ruse and figured out where they lived, they were no longer all that famous, and the existing security in the building had proved adequate to their needs.

Security was, though, an ongoing rock-paper-scissors match between technologies that all seemed to want different things. The lobby of the building, its elevators and stairwells, and its exterior belts of walkways and gardens had all been covered by security cameras from the very beginning of Zula and Csongor’s tenancy. In those days a security guard would sit all day behind a reception desk in the lobby, keeping an eye on the main entrance, glancing down from time to time at an array of flat-panel monitors that showed him the feeds from those cameras. But the desk had been torn out some years ago and replaced with a big saltwater aquarium. The building still employed a security firm. But those guards who were human, and who were actually on site, spent most of the day up on their feet, strolling about the property while keeping track of events in wearable devices. Some of the “guards” were just algorithms, analyzing video and audio feeds for suspicious behavior, recognizing faces and cross-checking them against a whitelist of residents, friends, and neighbors, and a blacklist of predators, stalkers, and ex-husbands. Anything ambiguous was forwarded to a Southeast Asian eyeball farm.

On a certain morning in June, Zula emerged from the building’s elevator into its lobby and donned her sunglasses. A yellow ball—the mildest of warnings—flickered in the corner of her vision. She glanced at it. It noticed the movement of her eyes and responded by letting her know that three VEILed pedestrians happened to be passing by outside.

Zula ignored it, pushed the door open, and saw them immediately: three high-school-aged girls, coffee cups in hand, gaily laughing and talking.

They all had wearables with large, reflective lenses, and so their eyes could not be seen. From the cheekbones down, their faces were exposed. But points and patches of light, projected by lasers in the lower rims of the glasses, were flashing and sliding all over their faces in a programmed manner that had been