Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,132

work for the university.

They met in an old room, lined with wood paneling and bookshelves. Above the head of the table was a stretch of wall that showed signs of having been used for many different purposes over the centuries. A portrait of a great man must have hung there for at least a hundred years. Then a pull-down screen had been installed in the ceiling for slide shows and overhead projectors. That had been supplanted by at least two generations of flat-panel monitors and multiple rewiring jobs. They’d probably got the cabling perfect just in time for everything to go wireless. Within the last few years they’d finally carted the last monitor off to the junkyard and sealed the useless cables up inside the walls. Now it was just an expanse of wood paneling, featureless except for the fine subtle patterning of the grain. Everyone present had wearables of one kind or another that would project shared hallucinations onto that surface. Since most of the presentation consisted of Sophia’s talking, they didn’t actually use that capability until the very end, when a shift in posture and tone of voice sent the message that it was all over and that Sophia had cleared the hurdle. From here on out it was just chitchat—intelligent people expressing curiosity about this or that.

One of them voiced interest in seeing the data plots. Sophia brought them up on the virtual screen, just as she had a week earlier in Solly’s office. The burn-rate plot mostly looked the same, up to the point a few days ago when Sophia had turned on the ability of the connectome to self-modify. The results were immediate and obvious: burn rate shot up. The repetitive sawtooth wave pattern vanished and was replaced by something more chaotic. But with just enough structure to draw the viewer’s attention and beguile them into thinking that there was some structure to it.

“Let me just refresh the data so they’re fully up-to-date,” Sophia muttered, and invoked a menu item. A message flashed up informing them that it was downloading information from Hole in the Wall and that there might be a little delay.

Then the graph refreshed itself automatically. But it had gone all wonky.

One of the examiners chuckled—not unkindly. It was the timeless fate of all demos to go awry at moments like this, and everyone in the room knew it.

“What the . . . ?” Sophia exclaimed. “How’d that down spike get in there?” For the burn-rate graph looked basically the same, except that at the very end of it, the plot suddenly shot straight down to a huge negative number, then just as quickly jumped up and resumed the former sawtooth pattern. “Just a bad data point maybe. An outlier.”

“Do me a favor, Sophia, and check the balance in the account,” Solly said.

“It’s gonna be damn near zero,” Sophia said. “I was expecting to exhaust the funds this morning, but I’ve been too distracted to check.”

She turned her attention to the Hole in the Wall account status window and navigated to the “Balance and Billing” screen. Featured prominently was a large number.

“That’s wrong,” she said. “It’s way too large.”

“Check ‘recent activity,’” Solly suggested.

She did so. A little spreadsheet came up. The most recent entry had been made three hours ago.

Someone had made a deposit into the account. A very large deposit. Ten times as much as had been placed in the account back in February.

“It looks like your anonymous benefactor approves of your work,” Solly said.

“What do you think I should do?”

“Let it live,” Solly said.

23

What came next could not, of course, be described without using words. But that was deceptive in a way since he no longer had words. Nor did he have memories, or coherent thoughts, or any other way to describe or think about the qualia he was experiencing. And those qualia were of miserably low quality. To the extent he was seeing, he was seeing incoherent patterns of fluctuating light. For people of a certain age, the closest descriptor for this was “static”: the sheets, waves, and bands of noise that had covered the screens of malfunctioning television sets. Static, in a sense, wasn’t real. It was simply what you got out of a system when it was unable to lock on to any strong signal—“Strong” meaning actually conveying useful, or at least understandable, information. Modern computer screens were smart enough to just shut down, or put up an error message, when the signal was lost. Old analog