Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,60

get to Moab.”

“If,” she corrected him.

“Bob’s pretty sure he can sneak us in somehow.”

She sighed. “I wonder what this is going to do to our business.”

“Long-term, it’s going to be great for your business. Because it’s going to bring attention to Moab, and that’s going to translate to clicks, and to revenue.”

“Clicks,” she repeated. “That’s what it’s all about I suppose.”

“If you write up the story of what’s happening right now and put it up on your social media accounts, it’ll get millions of page views.” Corvallis meant for this to be encouraging but he could tell he was getting nowhere. He was consistently getting the sense that she had a lot on her mind that she didn’t want to share with him, and that most of his conversational gambits were wide of the mark.

“I thought you techies wore hoodies and T-shirts,” she said.

“What?”

“You said you had a blazer and a dress shirt.”

“It’s what I wore to work the day I left Seattle. I had a board meeting.”

“Why didn’t you wear a T-shirt to your board meeting? Isn’t that what you do?”

“Yeah, but this wasn’t for a tech company. This is a private foundation. I serve on the board. It’s just a somewhat more conservative vibe. You’re in the room with lawyers and money people.”

“What kind of foundation?”

“A friend of mine died. He was rich. He’d made billions in the game industry. Some of his fortune went to this foundation.”

“Was it an untimely death?”

“Definitely.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“Thanks. Anyway, the foundation looks for ways to put game-related technology to use in solving various social problems.”

They jounced over a calamitous pothole and she reached out to keep her artificial legs from jumping out of the truck.

Corvallis was straining to remember some advice Zula had given him a couple of years ago after a date had gone bad.

“You’ve asked a number of questions relating to clothing,” he pointed out. “Is that an interest of yours?”

“All clothing is prosthetics,” she said. “That’s how I think about it. From this”—she plucked at her silver garment—“to this”—she patted a carbon-fiber leg—“is a matter of degree.”

“The shirt is some kind of anti-sun thing?”

“Yeah. Better than sunscreen.” She sighed. “I was studying design,” she admitted, as if it were a failing of some significance. “Hit a rough patch. Took a summer job paddling rafts. Got sidetracked.”

“It’s pretty normal to take a gap year. Or two.”

“I failed,” she announced.

“As in, flunked out of design school or—”

“Dropped out. To do a startup. Which failed.” She sighed. “I’m one of the losers in the war you won.”

“What happened?”

“It was my sister, Verna, and me. We got some angel money. Burned through it amazingly fast just getting our heads out of our arses. She got sick.”

“Well, that alone would be enough to kill a lot of angel-funded startups.”

Maeve shook her head. “It wasn’t that. I mean, it didn’t help. But what killed it was an awareness that came to me in the middle of the night.”

“Awareness of what?”

“That I’d been going about it wrong. That I hadn’t been thinking big enough.”

“Scale is tricky.”

“And that if I were to start thinking big enough, it would require much more capital than I could ever hope to raise. So I was stuck. And am still.” She pulled her sunglasses down so that she could look him in the eye. “Which is not me cracking on to you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m not asking you for money.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“Just wanted to be clear.”

“Okay. Noted. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, can you talk about what you were doing in a way that is a little less abstract?”

“Then you’ll get interested in it, and you’ll come up with ideas for how to make it work, and it’ll circle around to money.”

“It’s a long ride to Moab, we have to talk about something.”

“Well, I’ll just say that my idea of clothing as prosthetics, when I pursued it to the end of the line, led me out of my comfort zone. Because what we wear now is more than just material objects. We wear information. My avatar, my profile on social media, those do in cyberspace what clothing does in the world. And now you have blended situations—physical clothing with embedded electronics. I don’t know anything about those technologies.”

“Other people do. You could find programmers, engineers—”

“But then why me?”

Corvallis didn’t have an answer.

Maeve went on, “It’s as if I were a carpenter who had come up with an idea for a wooden boat. I started