Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,56

had gone to certain soundstages and recited certain lines. They and the production crew had all been paid in some untraceable way, through Bitcoin or whatever, and they’d moved on to the next job.

A text came through from Laurynas: We found the people who made the mushroom cloud sim—a CGI house in the Philippines.

He Googled Moab hoax and found a basically infinite amount of stuff already posted. Much of it was right for the wrong reasons. Ninety percent of it was about the bioweapon theory.

These people—the people who had done this—were awesome. They knew that some people would see through the hoax and denounce it as such. Those skeptics couldn’t be silenced. But they could be drowned out. So, the hoaxers had inoculated the Miasma with a ready-made hoax narrative that was obviously ridiculous, and tailor-made to appeal to the vociferous citizens of Crazytown. Right now everyone’s uncle Harry—the angry truther at Thanksgiving dinner—was typing as fast as he could with the caps lock key in effect. If you were a member of the reality-based community who suspected that it was a hoax, you had to wade through a hundred zombie-related postings in order to find one that made sense, and wherever you went on the Miasma to argue for a skeptical and reasoned approach, you were lumped in with the zombie truthers, ridiculed and downvoted. As an example, he found a thread in which zombie truthers were being shouted down by people who had just seen the fake Los Alamos news conference on YouTube and were using it as evidence that Moab had been nuked by foreign terrorists, not by the United States government.

Frank’s voice came through on the intercom. “Moab is under cloud cover.”

Of course it was under cloud cover. Corvallis wondered if the authors of this hoax had waited for a cloudy day in Moab before pulling the trigger.

He went up to the cockpit so that he could look out the windshield over the pilots’ shoulders. The weather was generally clear, but clouds were stuffed like cotton into low places in the landscape, including the valley of a prominent river that Corvallis assumed was the Colorado. No-fly zone or not, people could fly over Moab all day long and not be able to come back with a definitive answer as to whether it still existed.

“We need to land,” Corvallis announced.

“The Moab airport is closed,” Frank told him.

Without thinking, Corvallis said what Dodge would have said: “I didn’t say anything about an airport. See if there’s an airstrip or a straight stretch of highway.”

“Highway!?”

“I might be able to contact someone who knows the area,” Corvallis said, and stepped out of the cockpit. His phone was ringing. Or rather, the app running on his laptop that did what a phone did, except over the Internet. He strode up the aisle and pivoted to look at the screen. A window had popped up, making him aware of an incoming call from an international number with an 881 area code.

Corvallis fell in love with Maeve.

It was another one of those transitions like being rear-ended and clubbed in the base of the skull by the headrest. To say that he wasn’t aware of it would’ve been wrong. It was palpable. But the part of his nervous system that had registered it was way down in the boiler room, as it were, sending out email alerts that would take a long time to make their way through the spam filters and middle-management layers of his brain. Weeks might pass before the meeting in which, sitting in the boardroom of his soul, Corvallis Kawasaki would be confronted by a PowerPoint slide, projected eight feet wide, announcing in no-nonsense sans-serif type, “IN LOVE WITH MAEVE.” What he had just experienced was more like the subtle click of a really well-engineered piece of machinery being snapped together.

He plugged in his headphones and answered the call. “Maeve?”

“This is all a bit surreal,” she announced. “The Joneses have been talking to their freaked-out relatives. They have a bloody lot of them. High-strung family I gather.”

“So you kind of know what’s going on.”

“I know what’s going on in their little minds,” she said. The same words spoken by a tech geek would have seemed impossibly arrogant, but from her came off as more affectionate/exasperated.

Corvallis’s primary emotion was hopeful gratification over the fact that, right now, he was the only human in the world Maeve could talk to. It was beside the point and probably inappropriate. He was with other