Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,165

they were perhaps waist high on a typical person’s body. So the general sense—once everyone had had a few minutes to walk around and view it from different angles—was that they were looking at a three-dimensional terrain map of an island or a continent, bounded all around by the sea, with high land in the middle.

“Ireland,” someone declared.

“Much too mountainous!” someone else scoffed. “Just possibly the Isle of Man? It has a mountain in the middle.”

“This is far larger than that, if you look at all the rivers, the mountain ranges,” said a third. “I’m going to say the North Island of New Zealand? Hard to tell unless we get a ladder and look straight down on it.”

“This is no place that exists on Earth,” said a man speaking in a mild tone of voice but with a calm authority that brooked no argument. Heads turned toward a bald-headed, shaggy-bearded man, who looked to be in his sixties. Through most of ACTANSS 3 he had made a habit of sitting quietly in the back of the room, sans wearable, sometimes paying close attention and sometimes humming to himself as his mind apparently wandered. Through most of the current presentation he had shown a kind of mildly amused boredom, as if finding the subject matter too infantile for words, but when the landscape had appeared in the middle of the room he had been galvanized, and had practically knocked one person over while striding through the point cloud to focus his attention on an interesting feature.

“Pluto’s correct,” Sophia announced. “This doesn’t match against any known—”

“There’s no way that it could. That is obvious by inspection,” Pluto announced.

Sophia turned to glance over her shoulder at the bemused Matilda and winked at her as if to say, I told you so! Then she said to Pluto, “Would you like to explain what you mean by that?”

“It’s impressionistic. Not a physics-driven map. The alluvial formations are all wrong. These mountain valleys are V-shaped rather than U-shaped, as they ought to be—no understanding of how glaciation shapes them. The mountains are just high places in the landscape—they have no history. No exposed sedimentary layers, no evidence of volcanism.” Pluto snorted. “This is programmer art. It reminds me of the first maps of T’Rain that Dodge sketched, when he was trying to recruit me.”

“That’s a compelling statement,” Sophia said.

Pluto realized that everyone was listening to him and clammed up. He became interested in a particular river mouth and began tracing it upstream. The room was nearly silent for several minutes as the attendees feasted their eyes on the new continent. Small clusters formed to mutter and point at interesting features. The green points winked and shifted. “Are they moving?” someone asked. “Or is it just me?”

“This is a live display,” Matilda confirmed. “Small shifts are to be expected as new data come in. But its overall shape has changed very little in the past few months.”

Some attendees waded in to view features in the interior of the continent. Those people looked as if their bodies had been truncated below knee or thigh level. But viewed from too close, the points just looked like an amorphous, green Milky Way. “This is the highest resolution we could attain with the time and the processing power we had,” Sophia remarked. “So it’s like a pointillist painting. Stand back and it’s fine.”

An unfamiliar voice, electronically distorted, sounded from somewhere near the middle of the continent. Heads turned toward Elmo Shepherd’s Metatron. The voice, relayed from the other side of the world, had emerged from the speaker array mounted to its blank face. “What is this?” he asked.

Sophia responded, “The bright patch in the middle?”

“Yes.”

“It’s bright because there is a much higher concentration of points in that zone.”

“I can see that.”

“That’s because we have a hundred times as much data from that patch as from anywhere else,” Sophia explained. “It is where almost all of the computational activity is focused.”

“Can it be zoomed in, then?”

“We expected someone might ask,” Sophia said. “I suggest you all close your eyes for a few moments, or put your wearables up on your head. The display is going to change and some may feel disoriented.” She nodded at Matilda.

Matilda waited for a count of three and then began to manipulate the user interface again. Those who had ignored Sophia’s warning were treated to a sudden, dizzying zoom as the tiny bright patch in the center of the display became much larger, banishing most of the