Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,199

a mythology geek the way Sophia is,” El admitted. “The point is just that there is a change coming. For the first time, I see a way out. I am optimistic that when I upload—which won’t be long now, C—when I upload I’ll be going to a place where I can actually look forward to operating. A better place.”

“What do you mean, it won’t be long now?” Corvallis asked. He’d been staring, not at the Wad, but at the big colored blobs hovering above it, wondering what this display would look like if El’s prophecy came true and they were all hauled down in some kind of Titanomachia. Were they beautiful, those souls? Were they brilliant and good? Or were they hideous ogres that needed to be thrown down and chained to rocks in the lowest circles of hell?

He turned to look at Elmo Shepherd’s avatar, but it had winked out. As if he, or someone who was responsible for looking after him in Zelrijk-Aalberg, had pulled the plug.

38

Sinjin Kerr was a really good lawyer. Today he was launching an offensive against the Forthrast Family Foundation. He was a really good lawyer. He and his staff had clearly been planning this attack for years. He was a really good lawyer. Zula, as the person responsible for everything that the foundation did, was the primary target of the attack. Sinjin Kerr was a really good lawyer. She was going to have to put everything else in her life on hold and do nothing else besides fight back, probably for the next several years, or else resign and hand the foundation over to a professional war-fighter.

Sinjin Kerr was a really good lawyer.

Thus Zula’s internal monologue during the three hours that Sinjin spent patiently laying out his case. They were meeting on neutral ground, in a hotel conference room in downtown Seattle. Once the scope and scale of the assault became clear, Zula’s reptile brain began calling for a fight-or-flight reaction. But her foundation had lawyers of its own, almost as good as Sinjin, who had seen this coming for a long time and erected many-layered interlocking defenses. Years would pass before Zula’s reptile brain was of any use whatsoever. Ditches would have to be taken one by one, moats drained, walls undermined, gates rammed down, ramparts scaled, watchtowers burned, and defenders picked off before Zula found herself locked in the highest room of the tallest tower, Sinjin’s soldiers banging on the locked door with a sledgehammer as she gripped a dagger in her sweaty hand. So once again, as in so many other cases during her tenure as the head of the foundation, her presence in the room was largely symbolic and her mind couldn’t help but drift. She was fascinated by Sinjin because he had an essential humanity about him that could not be teased apart from his excellence as a lawyer. He opened his carefully planned legal offensive with a single, uninterrupted, hour-long monologue, delivered without notes, on the topic of graphs. Not even three-dimensional augmented-reality plots with glowing lines and such. No animations. Just straight two-dimensional plots that could just as well have been delivered on a flipchart. As a convenience to the people he was attacking, he had printed these out on paper and handed them around, as if this were a business meeting in 1995 or something. And yet these hokey, outmoded physical artifacts made it all seem more serious and more real. Sinjin was kicking it old-school! During the second hour Zula’s mind wandered even further afield and she found herself thinking about the weird talismanic power of hard copies. She was thinking of medieval documents she’d seen in museums in Europe, handwritten on sheepskin, with huge wax seals dangling from them. The physical reality of the object was proof that humans had put intention into their contents, that this was real, not just a game played with pixels.

The fabulous complexities of Sinjin’s case had all been researched and footnoted to the nth degree by his staff, which must by this point have occupied several new office buildings adjacent to Zelrijk-Aalberg’s convoluted border. The burden of detail had been lifted from his shoulders, freeing him to do what his subordinates were not capable of: to tell the story of it in a way that was engaging, coherent, and disturbingly close to being absolutely convincing. It was, as everyone understood, a sort of dress rehearsal for future pleadings before judges or juries. Elmo Shepherd was demonstrating the