Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,257

away to college. For they had, of course, scanned Sophia’s remains when they’d pulled her out of the water. She hadn’t been dead that long, and the brain had been well preserved by the cold. A new process had been launched, in accordance with detailed and unprecedented instructions that Sophia had left behind in a last will and testament that she had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare in the weeks before her death. Corvallis Kawasaki had been the executor of that will and he had seen to it that everything was done.

The resulting process had, from time to time, interacted with the granddaddy of all processes—the one that Sophia herself had launched out of Dodge’s Brain—until the latter had mysteriously ceased functioning. Around the same time, observers in Meatspace had begun to lose visibility into Bitworld. Until then, the whole Landform had been an open book, containing nothing that was hidden from the all-seeing eye of the Landform Visualization Utility. But the new place that had been established by Dodge, Sophia, and the Pantheon—Landform Prime or Landform 2, as some called it—was obfuscated by some kind of trickery. “Obnubilated,” according to Enoch Root—a word that had forced everyone to go to their dictionaries. It meant “hidden under clouds.”

Sophia had coinvented the Landform Visualization Utility and so it seemed most unlikely that this was a mere coincidence.

Her process left enough of a data trail in the system that they could be certain it was still up and running. But it never phoned home—never made any effort, so far as they could discern, to communicate with those left behind. In the offices of the Forthrast Family Foundation, Zula and other mourners had watched, as best they could, the flows of data and inscrutable shiftings of money and of mana associated with the Sophia process. But they heard nothing.

The Forthrasts had been early adopters, so they had these experiences sooner than other families. But in the decade that followed the deaths of Sophia and of Elmo Shepherd, the scanning of dead people’s remains became as ubiquitous as burial or cremation had been for earlier generations. Thus millions of other families found themselves waiting in vain for a definite sign from the great beyond. The living wondered what was happening. Had the memories of the dead been erased? That had been a popular theory early but seemed less likely as the years went by and the souls constructed a digital world that obviously recalled the one in which they’d lived their past lives. And this raised another, less palatable hypothesis, which was that Bitworld, like a college dorm full of young, pretty, brilliant, fun people, was just so much more interesting than Meatspace that it never occurred to anyone in it that they should bother getting in touch with those dull, smelly leftovers still embodying themselves in atoms.

The dead’s lack of curiosity about the living had become a topic of study and of discussion among the sorts of people who attended ACTANSS. Thousands packed into vast auditoriums to hear people talk about ideas like RSD, or Radical Semantic Disconnect: an idea that had been floated in a bar at ACTANSS 3 by Enoch Root and subsequently developed into a flourishing academic subdiscipline, all based on the notion that the rebooted dead couldn’t communicate back to Meatspace even if they wanted to because there simply was no common ground that could serve as the basis for communication.

There was only one form of communication—if you even wanted to call it by that term—that actually worked, and it was the one they’d been using all along: the LVU. This had got steadily better over the nearly two decades since Sophia and Matilda had first unveiled it. Since then it had improved at least as much as television had between the staticky black-and-white figments of the 1950s and the sharper full-color images of the 1970s. Nowadays, with any decent augmented-reality eyewear, you could fly around the Landform and see it in color, with good enough resolution to make out the bodies that the dead had created for themselves: mostly humanoid, with an admixture of winged forms and other types taken straight out of the collective mythos that these souls had apparently dragged behind them to Bitworld. You could hover above the town squares in the cities of the dead and watch them mingle with one another and, to all appearances, talk, trade, fight, and copulate.

Depending on the current value of the Time Slip Ratio, sometimes