Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,125

never used before and will never use for any other purpose. Take your time. When you’re ready, type it in.” Uncle C slid a tablet across the table to her, keyboard ready for text entry.

“Okay. Thinking,” Sophia said.

“Because this is your password to DB, you’re probably thinking about using a password or phrase that has some kind of sentimental connection to your uncle Richard. Some kind of personal meaning to you. Don’t. This isn’t magic. It’s not an opportunity for you to express your feelings.”

Sophia nodded, feeling her face get slightly warm, as she had in fact been thinking of names from D’Aulaires’ as suitable passwords. Instead she typed in “IsasdftFffiI13da!,” for “I stole a shower daisy from the Forthrast family farmhouse in Iowa 13 days ago!” As she did so, Uncle C demurely looked away. The app asked her to reenter the password just to make sure, and she did. Then she slid the tablet back across the table, maneuvering it carefully between coffee cups and cream pitchers. “Done,” she said.

“Great.” C-plus spent a few moments working in the virtual space that he could see through the lenses of his glasses. He scanned the results for a few moments, then nodded. “Okay. Congratulations. You now have unlimited read-only access to Dodge’s Brain. As long as you remember that password—and no one steals it.” Meaning that she could read all she wanted and write programs that would pull data from the files, but not alter them.

“And are we going to stick with old-school passwords?” Sophia asked.

“No, we are not,” C-plus said. “Over time you want to migrate over to a DID protocol.” Sophia knew what it meant: Defense in Depth. Instead of all-or-nothing access to a whole system, you sort of had to work your way in, proving and reproving who you were using various factors. To make a long story short, it wasn’t very useful unless it was hooked up to a PURDAH-based system. Because that was the whole point of anonymous holography: your identity was verifiable not because you happened to know a password but because of your “handwriting”—which here meant just about every way in which you made an impression on the world.

“So the password will expire in a few weeks. You need to have switched this thing over to your PURDAH before that happens. Which should take place automatically as you use it and it gets to recognize you. What you do then is up to you, of course. You have a plan?”

“Learn my way around the connectome files. Use some of the tools that my professor’s group has invented to parse them—to ‘ring them out,’ as he likes to put it.”

“That’s probably a few weeks’ work right there.”

“More than likely,” she agreed. “If that works—which is a big if—then start actually trying to run neural simulations on a subset of that connectome. See what happens.”

22

Ten months later

As she walked down the hallway to Solly’s office, she could hear two men laughing and talking through the half-open door. No noisy open-office environment, this. Solly had enough pull to set himself up with an interdisciplinary gig, endowment funded, not tied to any one department. He hung out in an old pseudo-Gothic building on the Princeton campus, within striking distance of both neuroscientists and computer geeks. His office looked out over one of the campus’s many green quadrangles. It was big, book lined, and quiet.

She pushed at the open door and found Solly sitting there chatting with Corvallis Kawasaki and Enoch Root, both of whom had joined via videoconference on a flat-panel screen. This kind of thing was getting a little antiquated, but people still used it. “Hi, Sophia!” called C-plus when he saw her entering the frame.

“Am I late?”

“You’re early!” said Solly. He was a tiny guy, deeply embedded in a leather chair, like a mouse in a baseball mitt.

“Okay. Fyoosh!”

“We hopped on a little early,” C-plus explained. “We had some other things to talk about.”

“In Latin?”

There was an awkward pause, and then they all laughed. “I am sorry you heard my butchered Latin,” C-plus said. “How embarrassing.”

“I wouldn’t know butchered from non-butchered,” Sophia said. “But why?”

“It’s a running gag between me and Enoch,” C-plus explained. “He walked up to me once in a bar near the foundation and hailed me in conversational Latin.”

“Because he knew you spoke it,” Sophia guessed. “Because of the Roman-legion stuff you do.”

“Yes. It made quite an impression on all of the Amazon employees hanging out there.”

“And on you,” Enoch said. His