Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson
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the fake press conference video to a close-up of the woman scientist, took a screen grab of her face, and pasted it into Lyke’s face-recognition app. Within seconds he was reading the IMDb profile of this actress, a veteran of numerous television commercials and a few indie films. He didn’t waste his time repeating the experiment with the other members of the cast. Or for that matter with the scruffy young actor who had climbed off the red-eye earlier and released the mushroom cloud footage to the world. Or the truck driver in Utah. Or Larry Proctor, the blogger. It would be the same with all of them. And when the hoax was discovered and quashed, all of them would be tracked down by vengeful Miasma sleuths and all of them would probably tell a similar story: they had been recruited by a production company working on a low-budget indie thriller, they 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 people, but basically alone in a private jet. She was with other people, but basically alone on a raft thirty thousand feet below him (for the jet had begun descending).
“Do they want to bail out?” he asked.
“What are you asking?”
“How long is the trip supposed to last?”
“Three days. Two overnight stays. We come out on the other end of the park.” Meaning, as he could infer, Canyonlands National Park.
“Are you in the park yet?”
“Not quite. We stopped on a sandbar for lunch and endless phone chatting.”
“If they could cancel it now, would they? And go home to their freaked-out family members?”
“Is it good and ruined, you’re asking. Can they really enjoy the next three days.”
“Yeah, and on that note, is there an airstrip near you?”
Her answers turned out to be yes—the Joneses wanted to bail out—and yes: there was an airstrip near them, belonging to a ranch adjoining the park. Half an hour later, the jet was on the ground there. The descent and landing seemed normal to him, but after the plane had come to a full stop, Frank and Lenny high-fived each other. Bonnie looked out the tiny window in the door and thought better of changing back into her heels. She opened the door, deployed the stairway, and stood at attention holding Corvallis’s wool cloak. The scent of sagebrush flooded into the plane.
Corvallis had been hoping for something authentically rustic, but the ranch had remade itself as a tourist operation and so the first thing he saw was its swag kiosk, currently unmanned. He watched disbelievingly as an actual tumbleweed blew past it. The airstrip had been laid down on a dry lake bed or something, so it was surrounded by low hills of rubble from which sprouted cool-looking outcroppings of rock. Maybe that explained the pilots’ high five.
Approaching was one of those especially huge pickup trucks with double rear wheels and a crew cabin. It was skidding around switchbacks and kicking up rooster tails of ocher dust.
Corvallis was pretty sure that, at this moment, he was closer (twenty miles) to Moab than any other C-suite executive of a major social media company. He felt he should commemorate that with a text message. But his phone reported no service. He didn’t have a sat phone. He had no more communications technology at his disposal than a Roman legionary. Probably less, since those guys had messengers and pigeons and so on.
Speaking of which, Lenny got his bag out of the luggage compartment and hustled it over and thrust it at him in a manner suggesting that it might be time to change his clothes. He accepted the bag and slung it over his shoulder for now. There was no place to change here unless he wanted to kick down the door of the kiosk.
Blazoned on the door of the pickup was the logo of the Angel Rock Ranch, which he recognized from having seen it on the Miasma half an hour ago. Aesthetically, this