Нил Стивенсон - Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

What was now clear to her was that all her seeing of the Landform up until now had been with the graphics turned down to the fast-but-crappy setting. It had to be that way, for the LVU to keep up with the pace of events in Bitworld.

“Ten to the minus four,” someone intoned. “Just unbelievable.”

Ten thousand seconds—about three hours—now had to go by to simulate one second of time in Bitworld. The system was overwhelmed.

“But everything’s still basically working, right?” Eva asked.

“Perfectly.” Meaning that the processes who inhabited Bitworld were not experiencing it any differently than they had been before this slowdown. The flow of time, the qualia they experienced, were all the same.

And what qualia! Zula stepped in even closer. Every hair on Mercury’s head was now being rendered by graphics algorithms that suddenly had a lot of time on their hands and that had been turned up to eleven. The sun was not only bouncing off of but refracting through every shaft of hair, making it both gleam and glow. The lenses of his eyes glistened with moisture, and she could see that he was just about to begin weeping. But the tear in the corner of his eye had not yet broken loose. She could see the world reflected in it.

He was beautiful. The whole place was beautiful.

“Makes you want to go there, doesn’t it?” asked a man’s voice, just next to her.

She turned to see that older chap who had made the joke earlier, and recognized him as Enoch Root.

“Did you really just ask me if I want to die?” she shot back.

He just got a wry look and said nothing. As if she had caught him out in some mischief.

“Why don’t you have a go,” she suggested, “and send me a message back from the next world?”

“I still have responsibilities in the previous one,” he answered.

“So this has happened before?” she asked. She began strolling over toward the visualization of Landform 2, where Dodge—Egdod—the REAP—whatever you wanted to call him—was poised, wings spread, above the top of his dark tower.

“Perhaps not this, ” said Enoch, walking by her side, “but—”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” he confirmed.

“Ten to the minus five!” called True That. He was speaking a little distractedly, as he was fascinated by the appearance of Dodge.

“It’s all because of what is going on in the hive,” confirmed Eva. She’d been checking out some stats, evidently. “The processes in those cells are breaking loose—emerging into the world—like larvae coming out of their cocoons. Seeing the Landform for the first time, thinking, interacting. It’s like we’re uploading thousands of new processes every second. And it’s only going to get more so.”

“Ten to the minus six.”

“What are we going to do with all our free time?” someone joked.

“Look at basically freeze-frames,” Eva guessed. “Like illustrations in an old paper book, sort of.”

Zula had now drawn close enough to confirm that Dodge’s graphics had also been turned up to eleven. His face was not exactly that of Richard Forthrast, but his expressions matched what she remembered of her uncle. His gaze was intent upon the cupped palm of his hand, where nestled a tiny burst of finely structured light. In its complexity she imagined she could see the beginnings of a human form.

“I understand the speed of light!” she blurted.

Faces turned toward her, gawped, then turned away. A hundred years ago, someone would have taken her up on the gambit. Now people were too intimidated—or perhaps they assumed she was finally losing it.

Except for Enoch. “Explain it,” he urged her. “I’ve always wanted to understand.”

“Ever since I was a child, I’ve been hearing physicists insist that nothing can travel faster than light. That it would break the universe somehow. Something to do with causality.”

“You can’t have an effect until the cause has arrived,” Enoch said, nodding. “And causes can only travel so fast.”

“Never completely made sense to me when it was explained that way. Seemed arbitrary. Like a rule that had been imposed from outside the system.”

Enoch was nodding and smiling.

Zula went on, “But it’s what we are doing at this very moment to Bitworld! We are saying that according to the rules of the simulation, everything, everywhere, has to march forward in lockstep. As much as we might like to see how it all comes out—whether that tear is going to break loose from Mercury’s eye, for example—we may not . We can’t throw more mana at it and fast-forward that one part of the simulation, because then it would be out of sync with all the other parts. It would break the world.”

“And we can’t have that, can we?”

“No! We can’t have that, Enoch.”

Enoch looked over at the frozen god. “This is not going to change for a very long time,” he said, “for the reason that you just mentioned. There are young people here who may spend the next ten years of their lives managing the systems in orbit above us that will generate the next few moments of time in Bitworld. But you know what?”

“No. What?”

Enoch pivoted so that he was standing beside her, and bent his arm in what Zula recognized as a very old-fashioned courtly sort of gesture. She reached out with some caution, not wanting to poke him with her exoskeleton, and took it. “Outside,” Enoch said in a quiet voice just for her, “the sun is about to come up on the other side of the hill.”

“We’ve been here all night!?”

“We’ve been here all night,” he confirmed, “and I don’t know about you but I could use some fresh air and a leg stretch.”

Without really talking about it, they walked in the general direction of the place where she had been living for the last few years, on the top of Capitol Hill. She had moved back up there after she’d become bored of the houseboat on the lake. The whole point of the boat had been to provide her with a flat walk to work, after her knees had gone bust. But the modern Fronk had no difficulty with hills and she had felt like getting a place with more of a view. So she had moved to a huge old mansion up on the crest of the hill, a thing built in the early 1900s for a ten-child family with a full complement of servants. It had been sitting empty for a while. She had acquired similar properties to either side of it, knocked the houses down, and converted their lots to gardens. It had amused her to populate these with small creatures, and so they now supported a carefully tended fake ecosystem of chickens, peacocks, goats, alpacas, and a pair of big mellow dogs. It was being looked after by a couple of young people who had been staying in her house for the last few months. She had forgotten their names. Having children was now an eccentric activity, so it was a good bet that their parents were what they had used to call hippies, or at least artists. Anyway they liked animals and enjoyed looking after them and had nothing else to do.

As they ascended, she fancied for a moment that something had gone awry with her vision system, for everything began to look soft, and she couldn’t see as far. She drew air into her lungs. One of those was the original, the other had gone on the blink some while ago and been replaced with a brand-new printed substitute. Anyway, when she drew the cool air into her new and her old lung, she sensed it was heavy and humid. Then she understood that up on the heights where the air was cold, it was foggy. Or, to put it another way, she and Enoch had, in a quite literal and technical sense, ascended into the clouds.

The time of year was late fall. Some leaves were still on the trees, and many more on the ground, but the color had gone from them, unless you considered dark brown to be a color. The lack of foliage drew attention to the trees themselves. These had become rampant. Planted along the streets two hundred years ago, they must have been mere saplings when the neighborhoods were new. By the time young Zula had moved to town, they had become problems. Their roots heaved up sidewalks and made great ripples across old red-brick streets. Their limbs fell off in windstorms. Their branches interfered with utility lines. Taxpayers paid for crews of arborists to roam about cutting weird rectangular vacancies in them for wires to run through. Paving crews did what they could about root damage.