Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,162

began to pop up at various locations on the island: little icons, each consisting of a small building with an antenna on its roof, swiveling this way and that, but mostly pointed east and south toward Axis-controlled Europe.

“They couldn’t read the actual content of the messages, but they could still copy them down. And through a technology called high-frequency direction finding, or huffduff, they could figure out where each transmission originated.”

The animation on the screen now demonstrated huffduff. Across the English Channel in German-occupied France, a swastika icon popped up, and red circles began to radiate from it, like ripples on the surface of a pond. The red arcs crossed the channel and lit up two of the huffduff stations, from which dotted lines then reached out, tracing the enemy transmission back to its source. A bell chimed and a teletype sound loop began to play as data about the transmission was hammered out onto the screen.

Sophia continued, “The technical details of how it all worked are sort of cool, and many here would find them interesting, but that’s another topic for another day. The point is that by running the huffduff network day in and day out, Allied intelligence was able to build up what we would today refer to as a database giving information about who talked to whom when. There was still no information about what they were actually saying—the messages themselves were indecipherable—but it was still possible to get a picture of how things were hooked up internally within the Axis chain of command, and which parts of the front were most active.”

As she spoke, the map of Europe zoomed back and panned east, focusing more on the Eastern Front. Little swastikas popped up all over the place, talking to each other, and glowing lines came into existence on the ground, connecting Berlin with various occupied capitals and hot spots on the front. Suddenly a battle seemed to break out in the Ukraine; no actual fighting was depicted, but a huge amount of radio traffic erupted from closely spaced sites that were all situated along a meandering line across that region. In slow creeps and sudden leaps, the shape of the line changed, and one could sense that the Germans were winning the battle, cleaning up surrounded pockets of Red Army troops, consolidating their gains, moving their radio transmitters forward.

“This is called traffic analysis, and it’s surprisingly powerful. In this animation, for example, none of us had access to the actual text of the German messages emanating from this part of the front. Yet, I’m pretty sure we all got the picture that a battle happened, that the Germans won the battle, and that they advanced to new locations on the map.”

The web of lines grew brighter and the underlying geography faded into darkness until they were all just looking at a black wall reticulated with a complex pattern of glowing lines.

“How does this apply to the subject matter of this conference? Well, the message traffic within the Process has vastly higher bandwidth than anything that existed in World War Two. But we have computers that are vastly more capable of analyzing it.”

The black background grew brighter, turning pale gray and taking on some complexity and definition. The pattern of bright lines was still the same, but now it spanned a different geography: the undulating folds of a human brain. New lines flashed into existence and old ones winked out.

“Where does that actually get us? Well, that’s a pretty deep question about consciousness and epistemology, as some of our colleagues at this and previous MonsterCons—excuse me, ACTANSSes—have shared with us. But I’ll give you a quick, glib answer: it gets us nowhere. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that we had a way to wiretap every single axon within a living human brain, so that we could make a record of every firing of every single nerve cell.”

The animation zoomed in deeply until a single nerve cell filled most of the screen. Leading away from it was its main output channel: an axon. Clamped onto that was a cartoon alligator clip with a wire running away to a teletype. Whenever the nerve cell fired, a pulse of light ran down the axon, a signal shot up the wire, and the teletype chunked out a line of data.

The animation then zoomed back out, slowly at first, revealing that every single nerve cell in the brain had its own alligator clip and its own teletype. Then the zoom