Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,198

or something, because it had taken on more human features and acquired a vague resemblance, in a shiny metallic way, to his high school yearbook photo. As avatars went, it wasn’t a good one. You could buy far more expressive avatars for next to nothing. Most people did. El’s using this one was a conscious choice on his part, presumably for the same reason he chose to use a voice generated by an algorithm: he didn’t want people to know his real condition, or indeed whether this thing was embodying a single human or a committee of handlers.

“In old TV shows,” said the voice of El, “and I mean really old, like campy sitcoms from the 1960s, sometimes they’d do a dream sequence or something in heaven. Dress the actors up in bedsheets, hang wings on them, give them harps and halos. But there was always this.” The avatar extended its hand and skated it through the Wad. “You could see that off camera there had to be buckets of water with dry ice in them, bubbling away. Covering the floor of the studio with dense white fog.”

“So it would look like they were in the clouds,” Corvallis said. “Yes, I remember seeing a few of those.”

“Reminds me of that,” said El’s avatar, drawing its hand back.

“A deliberate choice?” Corvallis asked.

“Oh, of course not!” El scoffed. Corvallis was sure, now, that he was actually talking to Elmo Shepherd. That he was alive, at least temporarily lucid, and speaking through this avatar as directly as his failing body would allow. “This visualization algorithm is what it is. The spatial organization fell out naturally—it was the best way to sort out what was going on. White was the default color—it’s used when we don’t have a clear sense of the identity or role of a given process. Which is true of almost all of them, as you can see. It’s only in the last few weeks, as things changed, that it began to remind me of 1960s-sitcom heaven.”

“What did change, Elmo? Why does it look so different now? How’s it related to what is going on in the Town Square?”

“It’s a phase transition, I think.”

Corvallis smiled. “You know what Richard used to say about those?”

“No.”

“We had mathematicians working on weird stuff. Richard had no idea what they were talking about most of the time. But he learned that when they trotted out certain phrases, it meant they were really excited. ‘Phase transition’ was at the top of the list.”

“There’s this very complicated system with a lot of parts. Way too many to keep track of. You can only make sense of it statistically. Most of the time it just kind of does what it does—falls into certain habits. But then all of a sudden something happens. There’s a complete top-to-bottom change that anyone can see. That’s what this is,” El said.

“What do you see in it? A minute ago you said, ‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’ What did you mean by that?”

“I had qualms about how it was shaping up before. You know that,” El said. “The early processes had gained a head start that seemed prohibitive. Constructed a crude spatial matrix echoing their fractured and hazy memories of landforms and built environments. The new processes flocked to it for some reason, instead of starting from scratch. It became a straitjacket—a prison. Not sufficiently different from the world they’d left behind—the world that you and I live in. What’s the point of dying and being transmogrified into a digital entity if you’re going to use all of that computational power to re-create the analog world you just managed to escape from? Worse, to exist in a hierarchical social structure where resources are dominated by a few at the top with godlike power? I was deeply worried that Dodge and his Pantheon had created a stable system.”

“Stable is good, right?”

“Except when it’s bad. Totalitarian regimes, corrupt systems are stable. I was afraid this was one of those. And maybe it was—but now, among the late-arriving processes that constitute the vast majority of working souls, we are seeing an accumulation of power and resources that rivals that of the old guard. Getting ready for a Titanomachia, I believe.”

“The word rings a bell but you’re going to have to help me out,” Corvallis said.

“When the gods of Olympus overthrew the Titans. Replaced them with something new, more brilliant, more perfect.”

“Chained the Titans to rocks, threw them into the pit of Hades, or whatever,” Corvallis said.

“I’m not