Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,170

of the LVU, it became possible to resolve—albeit in ghostly, pointillistic form—the virtual bodies that corresponded to individual processes. Most appeared to be strictly—almost disappointingly—humanoid. But some had been augmented with wings or other appendages, and a few had shapes that were very strange indeed.

Once that fact had been noticed, it was the work of a few days to run statistics. The results were too striking to be argued with. The earlier a process had been launched—the older the scan on which it was based—the less likely it was to have a conventional humanoid form. Weirdest of all were Dodge, the Most Favored Nation processes, and the Ephrata Eleven. Of those, Dodge had been booted up first and the others, beginning with Verna and soon numbering a few dozen all told, had been launched only after Dodge had existed in Bitworld for a while.

And it wasn’t simply the case that their bodies all started out humanlike and got weirder over time. In the stats it was possible to see a crisp fault line that coincided with the advent of full-body scanning. Processes that entered Bitworld with full information about the bodies from which they were derived ended up living in digital simulacra of those bodies. Those that had come into the world from severed heads showed a wider range of morphologies. But they also had a much higher failure rate, and some left no trace in the system at all. If they were alive, they were not discernible.

31

Sorry to see you here under these, uh, circumstances,” Corvallis said.

“It’s okay,” Zula returned. “It’s my job or something now to be the Angel of Death.”

Zula and Corvallis, along with two ambulance crews, a fire engine, several sheriff’s deputies, three lawyers, a mortician, and a doctor had all, during the last forty-five minutes or so, convened, between a house and a garage that was nearly as big as the house, in the countryside northeast of Seattle. The buildings were at the end of a quarter-mile-long driveway—the private extension of a county road that snaked its way up into the foothills of the Cascades from a river valley patchworked with dairy farms and horse barns. Snow-covered mountains rose up into the mist only a few miles away. Cold wet air drained out of them, encouraging people to stand in the lee of Pluto’s garage.

Which might have been seen as ironic given that Pluto’s garage was much, much colder yet, at least on the inside.

Pluto had bought the property ages ago and lived in the house—a fairly dull bit of 1970s architecture gone somewhat mildewy—while gradually, over a span of decades, turning the garage into a fully equipped science lab and machine shop. Neighbors had looked on with consternation as heavy trucks had negotiated the puddle-spattered dirt driveway towing multiton machine tools on flatbeds. Deliveries of bottled gases and cryogenic fluids had become commonplace. No one really knew what he did there. The answer seemed to be: whatever he felt like at the time. He’d gone through a phase of making various kinds of lava by melting stones with huge oxy-fuel burners of his own design. He had built rocket engines and tested them in his backyard.

Today one of the garage doors had been hauled open to reveal his latest project, which was an exceptionally complicated suicide machine hermetically sealed behind a wall of bulletproof glass plastered with prominent signs and legal documents.

On the hour-long drive up here, Zula had been given some of the details over the phone, so she knew approximately what to expect. On the other side of that glass wall, Pluto was reclining on a gurney in the middle of the science lab. Everything was illuminated brilliantly by the cold white light of LEDs. So it was possible to see a great many tubes. His body and all of his head, except for his face, were swaddled in some kind of thing that looked like an expeditionary sleeping bag, and most of his face was covered by a virtual reality headset hooked up to its own computer. The sleeping bag—or perhaps “dying bag” was a better term for it—was pervaded by a network of tubes. Whatever was in those tubes was cold, judging from the jackets of frost that had gathered on them. The tubes ran away to a boxy device in the corner that, one had to guess, was some kind of a chiller. Lots of smaller tubes ran into the thing, snaking round the curve of Pluto’s jaw and