Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,68

lobby, and shrugged his bag off onto a leather club chair. He seemed to have packed for a long trip. He sat down across from Corvallis and Maeve, who were in a love seat, just zoning out, not daring to look at the Miasma. Instead of greeting them, or even making eye contact, he opened up his laptop and pulled on a pair of reading glasses.

“Presbyopia has caught up with you, I see,” Corvallis said.

Maeve startled, and tensed; she hadn’t realized that this new guy and Corvallis knew each other.

“It would be unusual for one of my age not to have it!” Pluto scoffed.

Maeve had been sprawled back with her head resting on Corvallis’s outstretched arm, but she now sat up, the better to pay notice to this interloper.

Corvallis remembered, now, that back in the old days, the key persons at Corporation 9592 had made use of an iPhone app that enabled them to track each other’s locations on a map. It saved a lot of messing around with text messages whose sole purpose was to establish someone’s whereabouts. Corvallis had shared his location with Dodge and with Pluto. Dodge was dead. Pluto he had forgotten about. He made a mental note to turn the feature off. Not that he didn’t trust Pluto. But it was bad practice to just dumbly leave that stuff running.

“Your luggage is of impressive size and weight,” Corvallis observed, “and I note you have purchased a new sun hat.” For the price tag, and the tiny documentation booklet, were still dangling from Pluto’s headwear.

“Because of the ozone hole,” Pluto began, in a cadence suggesting he had a lot to say about it.

Maeve interrupted him, though. “This person is coming with us?”

“His name is Pluto,” Corvallis said. Then, before Pluto could correct the error, he amended his statement: “Nickname, I meant to say.”

Pluto seemed to finish whatever business he had been conducting on his laptop and peered over the lenses of his reading glasses at Maeve’s legs. Pluto’s general habit was to stare at people’s shoes when he was talking to them, and so Corvallis interpreted this as Pluto’s gearing up to engage in conversation. Maeve saw it as gawking at her prostheses. Corvallis, whose arm was still draped around behind Maeve, reached down to give her shoulder a squeeze and a pat.

“It came to my attention that you were being abused on the Internet,” Pluto said, “and so I am here to destroy it.”

“Destroy what?” Corvallis inquired.

“The Internet,” Pluto said. “Or what Dodge referred to as the Miasma. Does your jet have Wi-Fi?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t work over the Pacific Ocean.”

Pluto sighed. “Then it will have to wait until we have reached Australia.”

“I didn’t like your friend at first,” Maeve said, “but I’m warming up to him.”

“That is convenient, Maeve, if I may take the liberty of addressing the lady by her Christian name, because I will require your permission. Your complicity in utterly destroying your reputation.”

“It’s already destroyed, haven’t you seen a bloody thing?”

“It is not sufficiently destroyed yet,” Pluto said. He glanced at the screen of his laptop. “The total number of unique slanderous and defamatory statements that have been made about you, on all of the blogs, boards, and social media networks being tracked by my bots, currently stands at a little more than seventy-three thousand. Peak traffic occurred yesterday, at four point five kiloBradens.”

“What’s a kiloBraden?” asked Maeve, taking a personal interest since her last name was Braden.

“A Braden is a unit of measurement I coined for my own purposes, equal to the number of hostile posts made in an interval of one hour. It has now slumped to just over one hundred Bradens as the focal point of the attack has shifted to your mother and . . .” Pluto’s brow furrowed as he read something from the screen. “Someone called Lady?”

“Her Lhasa apso,” Maeve sighed. For the dog had been heard yapping incessantly on the soundtrack of Maeve’s mother’s front-stoop press conference, and was now receiving death threats.

“Anyway, we need to get that up into the megaBraden or preferably the gigaBraden range in order to achieve saturation,” Pluto intoned, “and we need much wider ontic coverage.”

“Ontic?” Corvallis asked, so Maeve wouldn’t have to.

The jet’s pilot entered through the door that communicated with the tarmac and gazed at Corvallis in an expectant way. “One more,” Corvallis told him, since there’d be paperwork. To Pluto he said, “Passport?” and then regretted it.

“A passport and a visa are required for entry to—”