Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,302

to think of it that way (in baseball terms, maybe a seventh-inning stretch), lasted for a couple of Meatspace years. During that time both SLU and Z-A were laying plans for the next phase of Bitworld’s expansion: the demographic transition from Mag 6 to Mag 8 (a million souls up to a hundred million); the bringing online, in orbit, of vast new arrays of solar power, computing systems, and thermal radiators to shine dull infrared into the cosmos. So it wasn’t a bad time anyway for an intermission. When finally the switches were thrown and the new equipment brought online, the Time Slip Ratio sprang ahead by orders of magnitude, to the point where months would fly by in Bitworld during a single day in Meatspace. Over the course of an afternoon C-plus could, if he so chose, watch bare trees wax soft and green, go red and orange with the colors of the fall, and lose their leaves.

As such it became impossible to really track the stories of individual souls. The audience could no longer follow it like a Mexican soap opera or a Russian novel. Now the fans were all like psychohistorians, seeing history unfold in broad sweeps.

The new race of souls that El had invented in his tower continued to issue forth in waves, and it seemed clear that El had given them the task of making things run smoothly, seeing to it that the customers—the much more numerous souls spawned from scanned biologicals—didn’t run rampant. They rarely crossed the widening channel that separated most of the Land from the chunk that had split off. This continued to fragment over time, gradually turning into a close-packed archipelago. Sooner or later most of the Mag 1–3 souls ended up there in various guises. The later children of Eve had sex with each other and made more of their kind.

Centuries passed in Bitworld, years passed in Meatspace. C-plus felt himself undergoing a slow transition from young-old to old-old. He spent less and less time trying to track events in Bitworld, only checking in occasionally on Maeve, Verna, and a few others. Metatrons showed up occasionally to lodge complaints about alleged further activities of the REAP. C-plus heard them out patiently, as one did with a distant relative who has gone off his rocker and begun fulminating about the Illuminati. Dodge was here, Dodge was there, Dodge was everywhere in disguise, something had to be done about Dodge. Eventually they seemed to fix the problem and then they stopped complaining.

He didn’t care, because he was flying.

When he had been a child, ninety years ago, Corvallis Kawasaki had dreamed of flying. Not in a daydreamy way, but in really convincing night dreams in which he had spread his arms like wings and taken to the air above the town that was his namesake and banked and wheeled above his school playground, looking down on the other kids on their teeter-totters and jungle gyms. All of which had been just as exhilarating as you would expect.

As with so many other things that seemed, in a child’s imagination, like they would be awesome, the reality of flight was more complicated, and how you dealt emotionally with the mismatch between the little-kid dream and the grown-up truth of the matter said a lot about you and basically kind of determined what you were going to do with your life. He had also, for a while, wanted to be a fireman, a ninja, and a private eye. But when he had come to understand what those occupations were really like, he had changed his mind. Being a Roman soldier had been fun for a while too, but past a certain age you couldn’t dig those ditches anymore.

When Maeve had passed on, C-plus had already been an old man by some standards. He could tell as much by the way strangers treated him. Young women, no longer seeing him as a threat, were open and friendly. Other old men felt free to address him on the street as if he were a member of the same secret club.

So when he had inherited Maeve’s flying apparatus and the somewhat disturbing stockpile of neuroactive pharmaceuticals that went with it, he might have been forgiven for junking it with the explanation that he was too old for this.

But then he had remembered his childhood dream of flying, and resolved that this was not to be one of those abandoned dreams. Private eye and ninja might never come to pass.