Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,128

diplomatic by leaving out another factor, which is the academic mind-set. Academic science advances in many micro-steps, one paper at a time. Peer-reviewed papers are the way we keep score. The more papers, the better. If you can take a project and slice it fine, like prosciutto, you publish more papers, and your score goes up. But you were behaving like someone who didn’t know or care about that.”

Sophia blushed. “Maybe I’m naive. Okay.”

“You’re rich,” Enoch announced.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re rich,” he repeated. “There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not a criticism.”

“How does that enter into it?”

“Two ways. First, you simply don’t care about playing the game—publishing as many papers as possible,” Enoch explained, with a nod at Solly. “Second, you had access to the resources needed.”

There was a long silence, during which it seemed entirely possible that Sophia might start crying.

“Listen,” Enoch said, “there is a long and honorable history, dating back to the Royal Society, of the gentleman scientist. And now the lady scientist. We don’t like to acknowledge it because we wish to maintain a polite facade of egalitarianism. But there’s a reason why so many important theorems are named after members of the titled nobility of Europe.”

Sophia didn’t answer, but she seemed to be settling down a bit.

“You don’t have to put Enoch’s observations into your thesis, of course,” Solly said. “But you should be prepared for people to ask the question.”

“If that happens,” she said, “I may not have satisfactory answers.”

“How so?”

“I still don’t really know where the money came from.” She said it loudly, with a sidelong glance at the screen.

“An anonymous donation,” Enoch said. “Happens all the time.”

“Is that how I should say it? In my thesis?”

“Be as brief as possible, Sophia, I beg of you,” Solly said. “It gives me a headache, trying to sort out the Forthrasts and the Waterhouses and the Shepherds and all of their interlocking bits. It’s like binge-watching a Mexican soap opera.”

“Well,” Sophia said, “between you and me . . .”

Solly shut off the recording.

“Over Christmas I spent a little time with my uncle Jake and his family. He asked me what I was up to and I told him. By the time I got back to Princeton after the break . . .”

“You had an account at Hole in the Wall,” Solly said.

“Yes.”

“Set up in your name by a mysterious benefactor.”

“Yes. And when I logged on to it, I was able to see the available balance—the amount of money I had to spend. It was a pretty impressive number.” She looked at Enoch’s face on the screen, but he seemed to be preoccupied by something in the charming pub—perhaps an engaging barmaid, perhaps a soccer game on the television.

“We’ll clean this up verbally,” Solly mentioned.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’ll help you tidy up the language so that it better befits a Princeton senior thesis.”

“Right. Thank you.” She knew what he really meant: she’d better tidy it up herself, then run it by him. “Anyway, there was enough money in the account that I was able to transfer all of the files from our servers here, where they’d been living, to local storage at Hole in the Wall.”

“Much faster,” C-plus translated, “a more solid platform on which to base further work.”

“Yes,” Sophia agreed, jotting this down. “Then there was a couple of months of tweaking the code and the algorithms to run on their devices.”

“We originally wrote the code to run on conventional computers,” Solly said, translating this. “Quantum computers require different strategies, different optimization.”

“That’s very much a work in progress, by the way.”

“Of course. Fuck’s sake, Sophia, it’s just a senior thesis. A simple but workable port is all any sane person would expect.”

“Well, that’s what I did. The bare minimum that would run. With a lot of help from your postdocs.”

“Who will of course be copiously acknowledged.”

“That’s the only part of the thesis that’s actually written!” she replied, beaming. “The acks.”

“So, now we are up to, what—?”

“Mid-April.”

“About a month ago. You got it running.”

“I got a neural simulation running on the Hole in the Wall system with one neuron. Then two, with the neurons passing messages back and forth.”

“With each being a separate, independent process—that’s important to mention.”

“Right.”

“And everything bolted down nice and proper—the messages all being transmitted through modern cloud protocols, suitably encrypted and verified,” C-plus reminded her.

“Of course. So that it would scale.”

“Very good. And then?”

“Then I scaled it.”

“You flipped the switch.”

“Yeah.”

“The big red-handled blade switch on the wall of the mad-scientist lab.”

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