Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson
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his appearance and grooming he was a straight-from-central-casting Harvard/Yale product with swept-back hair, rimless glasses, and an impeccable suit, protected for this occasion under an overcoat.
They ended up strolling down to the lakefront and, seemingly on the spur of the moment, renting a little electric boat from a business that catered to the tourist trade. Business was light because spring was being a little slow to turn into summer. It was cool and the lenses of Sinjin’s glasses were already flecked with tiny droplets of rain.
Sinjin sat down at the controls and piloted the boat out into the middle of the little lake. This had always been monitored by steep hills to the east and west but during the last couple of decades had been hemmed in along its southern reach by high-rise buildings occupied by tech companies. Some vestiges of old Seattle remained, including a seaplane terminal that helped make life good for tourists and for geeks who liked quick getaways to Vancouver or the San Juan Islands. Everyone who lived and worked within earshot had grown accustomed to the occasional sound of propellers coming up to speed as one of these planes made its takeoff run across the lake.
The water was a bit choppy, as the wind had come up and brought with it a gentle but assiduous rain. They deployed the boat’s folding canvas cover, snapping it to the top edge of the windshield. Sinjin dropped the throttle to the minimum needed to maintain headway and pottered about, keeping an eye out for outgoing and incoming planes. As this seemingly pointless idyll went on, Corvallis got the impression that he was 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 nanostate 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 video was delayed, and delayed again, as he pondered his next move. ENSU happened and seemed to take the wind out of his sails. He wasn’t expecting that.”
“It did a lot of his work for him,” Corvallis said, nodding. “Made the same point.”
“Inasmuch as ENSU succeeded, it made Moab seem unnecessary. Cack-handed. Inasmuch as ENSU failed, it made him wonder whether there was any real future in his own visions for a secure Internet.”
“When you say ENSU failed, you’re referring to the fact that—”
“That billions of people went on believing everything they saw on the Internet in spite of it.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Corvallis said.
“Then you must feel a little of what Elmo Shepherd felt,” Sinjin said.
“Why fight it?”
Sinjin nodded. “What’s the point? The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There’s no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool’s errand.”
“Seems kind of bleak. There are things you could do in the way of education—”
“Not if your primary focus is on preparing for the next world.”
“You mean, what happens after death.”
Sinjin nodded.
“I’ve seen El on social media, suggesting that Moab actually was nuked. Like, openly pandering to the people who still believe that,” Corvallis said. “I don’t see how that helps. That’s crazy.”
“Exactly!” Sinjin said, brightening. “This brings us back to the main thread of this conversation.”
“Which is?” Corvallis asked, throwing up his hands in bewilderment.
“El’s going crazy.”
Corvallis turned