Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,72

PURDAHs that operates by an agreed-on set of rules just like a normal company, but with no identifiable center.”

“You’re saying that the people who ran the Moab hoax could have secretly set up one of these distributed organizations to do it. And they didn’t invite you, because you didn’t know the secret handshake or you said the wrong thing once in a discussion thread.”

“It’s possible. But I doubt it.”

“Who do you think did it?”

“Russians again?”

“What’s their upside in running something this big, though?” Corvallis asked. “Who benefits from Moab?”

“What’s your opinion?” Pluto asked.

“ENSU benefits. People who hate the Miasma for being so unreliable, who have been dreaming of replacing it with something better, more secure.”

“I can’t argue with that!” Pluto said, with a delighted chuckle. And something in that childlike expression of enjoyment twigged Corvallis to a flaw in his own argument. Pluto had an infinite amount of money, sure. So he had means. But did he have a motive? Well, sort of. He and thousands of other hackers, including all of his ENSU buddies, were perpetually annoyed with the Miasma’s security deficiencies. But was that alone sufficient motive to perpetrate a hoax on the scale of Moab? People had died. Thirty-one, at last count, had perished in traffic accidents or of heart attacks and strokes suffered while fleeing from imaginary bombs. Who would do something like that?

The obvious motive was money. Someone had figured out a way to profit from the hoax, most likely by short-selling stock. And no doubt the SEC was already investigating that angle, combing through stock exchange records for suspicious patterns of activity in the days leading up to it. Or maybe it was a more subtle play, something that the SEC wouldn’t be able to pin on anyone.

But it seemed like a roundabout and uncommonly irresponsible way to get slightly richer. Anyone with the brains and the technical acumen needed to pull this off would have other opportunities.

Corvallis pondered it as the jet winged south and west, across the equator, across the international date line. Pluto fell asleep in front of his laptop, which obligingly shut itself off, plunging the cabin into darkness. Corvallis looked out the window and saw nothing but stars, and a single, isolated light down below that must have been a ship.

He realized that it had been done by Elmo Shepherd.

The awareness came full-blown into his brain. No train of thought led to it and no evidence supported it, but he knew it as certainly as if El had been sitting across from him in the jet and confided in him personally. Like a scholar looking at an anonymous holograph in a library, Corvallis had simply recognized El’s handwriting.

Australia—at least the first bit of it that hove into view—was greener than Corvallis had been led to expect. He was debating whether to wake Maeve up, but some internal alarm seemed to have gone off in her head alerting her to their arrival in her home country’s airspace. He dreaded asking her whether she’d made a choice regarding what Pluto had proposed. She had a placid confidence about her that he hadn’t seen since she’d found herself in the crosshairs of the Moab truthers. After enjoying a heavy breakfast served up by the flight attendant, she took over the bathroom for half an hour and emerged in triumphal makeup. Maeve took an all-or-nothing approach to makeup, going completely without it most of the time but turning it into an impressive production when she had decided the occasion was right. Corvallis hadn’t known her long enough to be able to predict what those occasions would be; it wasn’t always the obvious triggers, like going on a date. He knew without asking that it was all tied in with Sthetix and that, if he dared ask, she’d explain to him that makeup was just another prosthetic, and she’d remind him that the root of the word had something to do with strength. She looked strong when she came out of the plane’s bathroom, though not necessarily strong in a way that would be recognized or respected by her legions of Miasma detractors. She was getting ready to use her face to send a message to her family, written in a code of incredible sophistication that he would never understand.

By that time Australia had turned red-beige and begun to make Utah look, by comparison, like a rain forest. She spent the last hour of the flight quizzing Pluto about APEs and about how it