Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,126

face was sharing the screen with a pint of amber fluid, topped with foam.

“I didn’t know Enoch at the time. So, yes! It came as quite a surprise,” C-plus admitted. “Anyway, we practice our Latin sometimes. His is much better than mine.”

“Hi, Enoch!” said Sophia. “Where are you?”

Enoch reached out with the hand that wasn’t holding the beer and moved the camera around, giving them a blurred panorama of what seemed to be a very charming pub.

“England?” Sophia guessed. “Ireland?”

“No,” Enoch answered. “The independent, sovereign nation of . . . wait for it . . .” With utmost gravity, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a passport. He held it up to the camera. It looked newly minted. Embossed in gold letters on the front, it claimed, in French, Dutch, and English, to be an official document from Zelrijk-Aalberg.

“You’re printing passports now!?” C-plus exclaimed.

“It’s just a piece of paper,” Enoch said with a shrug. “You know El. He is fascinated by nation-states. Always hacking the system.”

“Well, speaking of hacking the system,” Solly said. “I think we are all here?” He was referring, as everyone knew, to Sophia’s thesis committee. This was a big and strangely diverse committee for a mere senior thesis. But it had all got a bit complicated, and so there were reasons why all three of these men were in on it.

“Yes, let’s go,” said C-plus. Enoch signaled his assent by raising his pint and nodding.

“You’ve been busy,” said Solly, swiveling his chair to face Sophia.

Sophia sighed. “I’m glad you see it that way.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“My classes—my grades—”

“Those are formalities that the university has set up to make sure students don’t go off the rails, because of inattention or laziness or whatever.”

“A safety net?”

He laughed. “A safety net for the university. A danger net for the student. As the one person in this meeting who is supposed to be paying attention to such things, let me say that I see you as having cleared all of those hurdles a year ago. Your senior year has effectively been graduate school. That’s how I can say with confidence that you’ve been busy—because I hear about your efforts from Corvallis. From Enoch. And from my graduate students and my postdocs.”

“My efforts,” Sophia snorted. “Mostly asking them questions.”

“That is as good a metric of effort as any. Better than tests and grades, certainly.”

“I’m glad you see it that way. The grades I have received during the last year are the worst of my life.”

“The only thing that matters is whether you can clear the bureaucratic hurdles required to graduate,” Solly pointed out. “No one gives a shit about your grades, Sophia. No one will ever look at them again.”

She looked at the screen. Both Enoch and C-plus had politely averted their gazes. “That’s kind of mind-blowing,” she said.

“Because you’ve spent your whole life on the academic treadmill. Now you’re stepping off of it. What matters, from here on out, is your work. Your holograph. In the non–three-D–graphics sense of that word.”

She shrugged. “Okay, should we talk about that?”

“Yes. This is your so-called capstone project. Or keystone. Whatever you want to call it.” Solly glanced out the window of his office for a moment, trying to access the relevant memory from the tiny compartment of his brain where he kept track of administrative minutiae.

“I believe ‘senior thesis’ is the term they’ll be looking for,” Sophia ventured, since Solly appeared to be looking in the direction of the dean’s office.

“Very well. You incubated it last summer, during your internship in Seattle.” Solly glanced at the screen, eliciting a nod of confirmation from C-plus.

“That’s a nice way of saying it. What really happened was that I got in way over my head there. I had no idea what a big deal it was, how long it would take. I barely even got started before I had to come back here.”

“You incubated it last summer,” Solly repeated, raising his hands to make air quotes, and glancing again toward the dean’s office. “Building on the foundation of knowledge, and the code base, that you established during those months, you returned to Princeton in the fall with a clear understanding of how to move forward.” Again he looked at the screen. C-plus and Enoch were both poker-faced. No objections.

“Yes. Absolutely. Whatever.”

Solly nodded toward the pad of paper that was sitting on the table in front of Sophia and paused for a few moments while she jotted this down. He’d been speaking toward the screen,