Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,161

first thirty seconds of its emergence were fascinating to people who’d never seen one of these things before, but after that most people began to lose interest as it became clear that this was going to be about as interesting as, say, staring through the window of a front-loading laundry machine while it washed a load of bedsheets. Its general program was to find its way around the resort, moving slowly enough that it couldn’t possibly hurt anyone while scanning its surroundings through visible and infrared cameras. Its pace was so deliberate that people instinctively veered around it as if it were a statue. But if you sat in one place and glanced up at it occasionally while reading a book or sipping a pint, you’d see it in a different place each time you looked. In the dark it turned on running lights so people wouldn’t bang into it. Thanks to these preparations, El didn’t have to joystick the Metatron around every corner, he just had to tell it “Follow that guy” or “Stay with this group” or “Go to the conference center” and it would do so.

So neither El nor his Metatron ever heard the safety briefing, but maybe it didn’t matter since the robot could be replaced if it blundered into the water. This was only one of a family of related questions that the conference’s organizers had to ponder under the general heading of whether to count Elmo Shepherd as an attendee. The Metatron took up the same space in the hall as a human being. But it didn’t count against fire code limits. It didn’t need to eat, and it didn’t require a bed, or even a room; every evening, when the after-dinner speech concluded and most of the attendees went to bed, the Metatron turned its back on them, walked to a dark corner, found an electrical outlet on the wall, pulled an extension cord out of its belly, bent over, and plugged itself in to recharge. Then it just stood there until proceedings resumed in the morning.

The question was largely academic, since El was going to attend whether or not they counted him. Assuming that it was really him controlling the robot, he came to all of the sessions, standing quietly in the back of the room. The Metatron had a built-in speaker, so he could have piped in his voice at any time, but he didn’t use it; on the rare occasions when he wanted to ask a question, he would send it in the form of a brief text. Sometimes, though, the robot could be seen standing in a quiet corner, apparently having a conversation with Sinjin Kerr, Enoch Root, or one of his other advisers.

Sophia’s ACTANSS 3 talk was co-presented with her collaborator Dr. Matilda Napolitano, a mathematical physicist at the University of Bologna. Its title was “Virtual-Space Cartography from Manifold-Based Traffic Analysis.” They staged the presentation on the resort’s tennis court, which was protected from cold and wet by an inflatable dome. They did it just before dinner, as the light was dying outside, but they chose not to turn on the dome’s powerful illumination system, which would have competed with what they wanted to display. Resort staff had taken down the tennis net and scattered a few faint, indirect lights around the place so that the attendees wouldn’t bump into one another. As recently as ten years ago it would have seemed a bizarre setting for a technical presentation, but now everyone understood what it meant: Sophia and Matilda were going to be presenting some visuals, and they’d be using augmented reality to do it, and this would all be easier if people could stroll freely through whatever three-dimensional imagery was going to be projected into this space.

The opening graphics were two-dimensional, however. Sophia caused them to appear on a virtual screen at one end of the tennis court, so that all of the attendees were at first facing in the same direction.

She started with a map of Europe, the national borders curiously wrong until a caption came up identifying it as the Europe of 1941.

“As a way of introducing this subject matter to people who, like me, are not mathematical physicists, I wanted to make an analogy to how the world looked to Allied codebreakers in the early part of the Second World War, before they had broken the German codes,” Sophia began.

The map began to move, panning and zooming to focus on Great Britain. Cartoon installations