Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,195

responded.

“You saw the video?”

“The kid with the broken arm? On the sidewalk?” Gerta was grinning, showing yellowed teeth and hideous gums, and nodding. Corvallis averted his gaze and spent a moment cueing it up in his mind’s eye: A GIF, just a few seconds long, recorded by the kid’s father. Richard standing next to the kid on the sidewalk, moments before he went into the building to die. The fat, expensive noise-canceling headphones down around Richard’s neck, spilling the music out into the chilly wet autumn air. Clearly playing the music of Pompitus Bombasticus.

“He had all of your stuff,” Corvallis said.

“Made me famous, for a little while,” Gerta said. “I got a gig because of it—did the music for a big triple-A game. Made me enough money to transition.”

“Then what happened? I seem to remember you’ve released a couple more albums.”

“No hits. That was my big break. I blew it.”

Corvallis took a sip of the expensive wine that Gerta had ordered from the sommelier. “But according to the itinerary your assistant forwarded to me, you flew in direct from Berlin on a private jet. You’re staying in the best hotel in Seattle, dining in the best restaurant, ordering the best wine. Am I picking up the check for this dinner?”

Gerta laughed and shook her head. “I am suddenly rich,” she said. “Two weeks ago I was on public assistance, living in a pension. Now money is flowing into my bank account. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a day.”

“From where?”

“From you, my friend. Don’t you ever audit your books?”

“Me personally or—”

“No, no, from your foundations and whatnot.”

“Why are we making payments into your bank account?”

“It’s all automatic,” Gerta said. “It’s the system that tracks music downloads. That pays artists like me whenever someone listens to their songs. Someone or something in your cloud is downloading my stuff like crazy. I am suddenly rich. And so—” Pompitus Bombasticus raised her arms, dragging electrical leads and IV tubes along with them. “I intend to die like a rich woman, with a fine dinner in my belly. And I want to have my corpse scanned like your other rich clients. And I want to go to this amazing place where everyone apparently listens to my music.”

Corvallis found time to audit the books a few days later, and found that Gerta was right about the downloads and the money. Pompitus Bombasticus had taken in more revenue during the last five weeks than during the entire preceding decade. To the living, she was still an obscure has-been, but to the dead she was bigger than the Beatles.

In normal circumstances, some watchdog process running on their system would have brought this cash flow spike to the attention of the Forthrast Family Foundation’s comptroller. In this case it had been swamped and masked by bigger trends. The ecosystem of computational activity that had begun five years ago, with Sophia launching Dodge’s Brain at Hole in the Wall, and that had since grown to encompass thousands of such processes running on an unknown number of quantum computing server farms that El had sprinkled all over the world like a digital Johnny Appleseed, had of late shunted itself into a mode they hadn’t seen before. The only thing they really knew about this new mode of operation was that it was expensive. And it was expensive in a new and different way. An understanding of what these processes were thinking and doing was, as ever, maddeningly elusive. All they could do was fall back on some of the tools that various ACTANSS attendees had devised and made available to the research community over the years: tools that sucked in such data as could be gleaned from message traffic and server loads, analyzed them in clever ways, and displayed the results in three-dimensional visualizations. Those now came in many flavors, but the most widely used were the original LVU—the Landform Visualization Utility—and the network mapping scheme that had emerged from one of Elmo Shepherd’s research institutes. Corvallis, or any other qualified token holder, could pull these up at any time and view them through wearables. The apps were social, which meant that, if you wanted to, you could turn on a feature that would display the avatars of all other people who were looking at the same visualization at the same time. You could hide yourself from the user community or let them know you were around. That community was an exclusive club, with no more than a hundred token holders