Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,77

timing some of his utterances so that the most important words would be spoken just when a seaplane was droning overhead. Sometimes Sinjin would turn toward Corvallis, prop an elbow casually on the boat’s dashboard, and raise his hand to cover his mouth. Only later, in memory, did Corvallis understand that he had done so to hide his message from any lip readers who might be tracking them through telescopes.

They’d been chatting about their respective families. Catching up with each other, as people did when they were maintaining these long-running, sporadic business relationships.

“You might find it a curious thing, Corvallis, that your family is an inadvertent, and happy, by-product of something that Mr. Shepherd was involved with,” Sinjin mumbled through his fingers as a plane buzzed past them at full throttle.

Corvallis was a while processing that news. There was only one way to make sense of it: El was behind the Moab hoax that had brought Maeve and Corvallis together.

Sinjin seemed to derive a bit of light amusement from watching him think about it. “Your next question ought to be, why did I just tell you that?”

“Not because you get a kick out of snitching on your client, I’m guessing.”

Sinjin thought that was funny. “Indeed. Otherwise I’d have a very fun, very brief career. No, it’s my job to look out for Mr. Shepherd’s interests. I’m divulging this to you, and you only, because the time has come when his interests are best served by allowing you, Corvallis, to have a broader understanding of the context within which Mr. Shepherd and his foundations and companies have been operating.”

“I’ve suspected from day one that El was responsible for Moab,” Corvallis said. “Up to a point it kind of made sense. The Internet—what Dodge used to call the Miasma—had just gone completely wrong. Down to the molecular level it was still a hippie grad student project. Like a geodesic dome that a bunch of flower children had assembled from scrap lumber on ground infested with termites and carpenter ants. So rotten that rot was the only thing that was holding it together. So I can totally see why El or anyone with a shred of crypto knowledge would want to just burn it down. To make it so that no one would ever trust it again. Moab was a pretty effective way of doing that, and ENSU came along right on its heels and dumped a 747-load of gasoline on that fire. But the other shoe never dropped.”

“What do you suppose the other shoe ought to have been in this case?” Sinjin asked.

Corvallis was about to answer, then stopped himself, sensing the absurdity of it.

Sinjin let him work it out on his own for a bit, then, in a gentle tone that barely rose above the lapping of the waves on the boat’s hull, said, “Elmo Shepherd releases a statement a week after Moab in which he fesses up. Pulls back the veil. Maybe plays some behind-the-scenes video showing how the hoax was staged—a blooper reel of the actors, some ‘making of’ footage about burn makeup and CGI mushroom clouds. ‘All this was done on a one-million-dollar budget,’ he says, and gives a sermon about how if he can get you to believe Moab was nuked by spending a million bucks, just imagine what the Russians and the big Internet companies are doing to your mind every day with much larger budgets. Followed by a pitch for a cryptographically secure successor to the Internet.”

“Yeah,” Corvallis said. “That’s pretty much what I had in mind in the way of an other shoe.”

“That video was actually made,” Sinjin said.

“No shit!?”

“I kid you not. I was there, Corvallis. I vetted the script and sat off camera while he read it off the teleprompter. That whole video was in the can, ready to go, before the exploit was launched.”

“But he changed his mind.”

“By degrees.”

“What?”

“El changed his mind by degrees, over a period of weeks. He was holed up in Z-A to avoid any possible issues around extradition.”

As Corvallis knew, Z-A was Zelrijk-Aalberg, a Flemish nano-state and tax haven where El had been spending most of his time the last few years.

“So there was a degree of insulation from legal consequences—but even so he was disconcerted by how effective it had been. By the fact that people died.”

“I can see how that would give you pause,” Corvallis said, a bit sarcastically.

Sinjin raised his eyes studiously and declined to rise to the bait. “So the airing of the