Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,115

exactly what they looked like: ordinary schoolgirls, VEILed and in PURDAH, not because they wanted to hide any malign intentions, but just to keep the creeps at bay, and to make sure that when they turned in their SATs and their AP exams, they’d be judged fairly.

18

Zula turned downhill and began walking briskly. This was her main form of exercise. Where she worked—the headquarters of the Forthrast Family Foundation—there was an employee gym. And where she lived, there was a gym for the use of residents and their guests. As she walked down Capitol Hill and into South Lake Union, she passed a windowless pink building with a tiny sign on the door that according to rumor was a boutique gym, so exclusive that you had to apply for membership and pass strenuous tests. Another gym, a few blocks farther along, occupied the entire ground floor of a skyscraper; several dozen elliptical trainers were lined up facing the window, occupied by early-rising, heavy-breathing nerds watching movies or doing work in head-mounted displays. She passed a steampunk gym where historically aware nerds with waxed mustaches worked out with Indian clubs of polished mahogany sourced from ecologically sustainable plantations. A glassed-in crag of artificial stone where harnessed nerds groped at CAD/CAMmed handholds with chalky fingers. A revamped warehouse where robed nerds fought solemn duels with simulated light sabers. A striped tent where upside-down nerds swung by their knees from a flying trapeze. An open-air obstacle course where parkour ninjas vaulted fences and ran vertically up concrete walls. A park where squads of nerds dropped and did push-ups under the faux-stern glare of a pretend drill sergeant. A thumping boîte where female nerds practiced their pole dancing. Cementing these establishments together like mortar between bricks was an equally far-fetched assortment of dining and drinking establishments where those who had just worked off a lot of calories and tuned up their bodies could further enhance their health by drinking smoothies made of pulverized botanical curiosities, or balance the scales by consuming things that were decidedly not good for them.

Zula had actually tried many of those cool new forms of exercise, and was likely to try more, for social reasons if nothing else. Csongor played in a hockey league that appeared to supply 90 percent of his needs in the way of both exercise and companionship. Zula too had gardened her social life by signing up for new exercise programs with female friends. But she had never stuck with any of them. Her only consistent form of exercise was walking to and from work, which she did alone, almost every day.

Walking this gantlet of physical fitness options often got her musing. These clean, affluent, well-informed techies certainly knew how to enjoy having bodies. At work they lived in their heads. Their free time was spent in the pleasures of exertion, of a hot shower after, of eating and drinking, and of going home to have sex, or at least a good night’s sleep, on firm mattresses covered in clean high-quality linens. There was nothing exactly wrong with it. But Zula had spent her early years in a refugee camp where sources of physical pleasure, or even comfort, had been few and far between. And somewhat later in her life she had spent a few weeks traveling against her will in the company of jihadists who had either come from, or made a choice to migrate to, some of the most hard-bitten places in the world. She abhorred everything about them. Yet she couldn’t help seeing all of this through their eyes. Jihadists, who were obsessed with a particular kind of religion, would see the gyms and the restaurants as temples to a false god, where people went to distract themselves from the reality that they were all sooner or later going to get sick and die. After which, if you believed what they believed, you’d meet your maker and be duly punished for having spent so much of your life reveling in pleasure.

None of which was particularly original—every sentient person had to fulfill a certain minimum quota of ruminating about this stuff—but in Zula’s case it was all turned around and upside down because of what had happened with Uncle Richard seventeen years ago. This had become her career.

It had taken her several of those years simply to understand and accept that her identity—the holograph that she was writing every day of her life—had been altered by it. Not so much the death itself as