Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,177

dominated by a live-updated display of the Landform.

A year and a half had passed since the LVU—the Landform Visualization Utility—had first been unveiled at ACTANSS 3. During that time, it had changed its general shape very little. But the algorithms had improved. More data now flowed into them. The Landform could now be mapped with higher precision and greater certainty. Its finer contours had undergone changes. There was no getting around the fact that these changes were exactly the sorts of improvements they’d have expected Pluto to make. He had gone there—he had killed himself—to fix the place up. And he was doing it.

Still Corvallis had doubted the evidence of his own eyes until Sophia had drawn his attention to the tower in the middle of the park. People had stopped using scare quotes. It was no longer a “tower” in a “park” but a tower in the park, as anyone could plainly see. She had shown Corvallis a photo she had taken several years ago of the park in the middle of the Iowa town where Richard had grown up. A similar tower was right in the middle of it.

There was simply no denying the fact that the processes that had been spawned to simulate the brains of Egdod and of Pluto now inhabited a world that they had created in accordance with how they thought a world ought to look. They had learned how to allocate memory in the cloud for storing that world’s map. There was even evidence that they were using other kinds of resources—clusters of high-performance processors—to simulate its wind and its waves.

And if that was true for those two processes, presumably it was true for all of the others as well: thousands of them now.

“I am not pleased with what is going on,” said the Metatron. “This is not the way it was supposed to happen.”

“By ‘it,’ what do you even mean, El?” Zula asked.

“You know perfectly well.”

“Yes. I think I do. But by just talking about ‘it’ as though we all have some shared notion of what ‘it’ was supposed to be, you’re kinda pulling a fast one. We need to unpack this ‘it’ you speak of.”

Here El might have got a word in edgewise, had he been sitting in the room. But the time lag between Flanders and Seattle spoiled his cadence. Zula went on: “I first encountered you in the days after my uncle’s death, when, against my will, I had to take a little crash course on Eutropians and cryonics and all of that stuff. I’d heard about the idea of the Singularity, read articles about it, but never met anyone who actually believed in it seriously enough to plan for it. Since then, you and I and Corvallis and Sophia and Sinjin and Jake and so many others have devoted significant portions of our careers to working on the nuts and bolts of it. We haven’t had a whole lot of conversations about the big picture: why we’re actually doing this, what is the goal. So when you say ‘This is not the way it was supposed to happen’ I tend to think you’re envisioning a big picture that maybe the rest of us don’t share. Maybe you should share ‘it’ with us.”

“I already have, in a sense,” the Metatron said. “When I mentioned that we are doing eschatology here.”

“End-of-the-world-type stuff?” Corvallis asked.

“What is humanity’s ultimate destiny? That is my preferred definition,” El returned. “The timeless preoccupation of great religions. Except that prophets and theologians didn’t have any factual information to work with. We have facts. We can actually do this. We can decide what our ultimate destiny is and we can put it into effect. We are the first people in history to whom that choice, that power, has been given. And I’m not going to see us blow the opportunity.”

“Who says we’re blowing it?” Zula asked. “We don’t know what’s going on on the Landform. Maybe it’s the Garden of Eden. Maybe it’s terrific there.”

“Maybe it’s a digital North Korea,” El countered. “Whatever it is, it looks like a simulation of an Earthlike environment. We can’t really tell what goes on there. People—processes—seem to be concentrated in a thing that looks like a town. They communicate with each other, or so it appears. Other processes locate themselves in other parts of the Landform. If you’ll let me have the table, I’d like to show you the results of some network analysis that one of my teams has