Neal Stephenson - Fall or, Dodge in Hell

Love,

Uncle Dodge

Second, there was a leaf—a big maple leaf, fire-engine red—flattened between the front cover and the first page. It was still damp and flexible. Dodge must have put it in there sopping wet, because the surrounding pages had soaked up enough water to pick up the sinusoidal warping that Corvallis had noticed a minute ago. It was obvious to him what had happened: Dodge had picked it up off the sidewalk outside of the medical building just before he had gone in there for the procedure. As a way of preserving it for his niece, he had slipped it under the cover of the book.

He felt shame at having looked in on something that was none of his business. He closed the cover of the book gently and put it back on the table.

Not fifteen minutes later, he heard the front door opening as someone came in from the elevator lobby. Someone who had a key to the apartment, obviously. He tortured himself for a few brief moments with the fantasy that it was Dodge, and that all of this stuff had been some kind of dream or hallucination. But then he heard a high-pitched voice calling, “Uncle Richard? Uncle Richard? Hello! Are you getting better?”

In answer came a much deeper voice, speaking with an Eastern European accent. “Ssh, you mustn’t disturb Uncle Richard, he is sleeping.” This was Csongor, Zula’s husband. “Remember, he is very sick.”

Corvallis understood something suddenly and clearly: this was all a sort of performance that the family was mounting, at great effort and expense, for no one’s benefit but Sophia’s. It was difficult to explain to a girl of her age that her favorite uncle had simply ceased to exist for no apparent reason. A brief, serious illness followed by death: miserable as it was, that was the best story they could come up with. She wasn’t ready to hear the facts of the situation, to understand the idea that a seemingly normal and healthy Uncle Richard was in fact a vegetable with no brain to speak of. They would say that he was sick, that he was sleeping. And in a few days they would break the terrible news to her that he had died. A full explanation of the protocols embedded in the health care directive and the disposition of remains would be many years in coming.

“Hello, Corvallis Kawasaki!” Sophia always addressed him thus, reveling in her ability to pronounce the name. She was a tiny thing, barely coming up to midthigh on her bulky father. Fortunately for her, she was more Zula than Csongor, with glorious curls. The Hungarian blood came through in her eyes, which were pale bluegreen with a vaguely Asiatic slant.

Corvallis could not prevent himself from smiling broadly for the first time since all of this had started. “Hello, Sophia!” he said. “How was school today?”

“Fine,” she said, inevitably.

Corvallis and Csongor exchanged nods.

“There they are!” Sophia hollered. She bolted into the room, vaulted up onto the coffee table, and skidded to a halt where she could gaze down on the covers of the books. “Doe-lair’s Book of Greek Myths, ” she said, “and Doe-lair’s Book of Norse Myths . My uncle Richard got them for me.” She turned her head and threw Csongor a reproachful look. “Mom and Dad forgot them!”

“Uncle Richard wanted you to have them,” Corvallis said. “He wrote you a note in this one. And left a surprise.”

She grabbed Greek, spun it around, and flipped the cover open. The sudden movement caused the red leaf to lift off the page and become airborne. This surprised her and she fell back on her bottom with an exclamation, and watched it skid to a stop on the surface of the table.

She looked at Corvallis, all serious. “Is that the surprise?”

“Yes.”

“It’s so pretty!” she said.

“Yes, it is.”

“Did he bring me that apple too?”

Corvallis picked up the apple and looked at Csongor, who nodded approval. “Yes, he did,” Corvallis said. “It’s all yours.”

Over the next three years Nubilant expanded, somewhat jerkily, as its CEO leapt from one funding predicament to the next like a video game character being presented with various contrived, dire challenges. With each round of funding its valuation grew and Corvallis’s theoretical net worth became larger. He began to consider whether it might be time to begin having a social life. He was not quite sure how to go about it. Much of his spare time was devoted to his hobby: the painstaking reenactment, in parks and on beaches around the Pacific Northwest, of the activities of a Roman legion of ancient times. It was an almost exclusively male pursuit, which would have been very convenient if (as rumor apparently had it) he were gay, but he was pretty resolutely heterosexual. When he did engage in normal social activities such as going out to dinner, it tended to be with Csongor, Zula, and Sophia, who had become like family to him. Sometimes, unaccompanied females would be present and Corvallis would become tongue-tied and withdrawn as he realized that Zula was trying to set him up with potential dates. He rationalized his failure to have a social life by saying that he was in “startup mode” and when you were in startup mode, normal rules didn’t apply. There would be plenty of time to sort things out after Failure or Exit, which were the two possible end states for a startup.

Exit—in the sense of suddenly becoming more rich—happened when Nubilant was acquired by Lyke, a Bay Area social media company that was much larger. Lyke had cloud computing systems of its own that were much more capable, by most measures, than Nubilant’s. But thanks to some canny decisions that Corvallis had made, Nubilant happened to be especially good at certain things that had turned out to be important to social media companies and so was doubly desirable—both on its own merits as a company and because of the prestige, and the bragging rights, that came from having snatched it away from the competition. Thus did Corvallis Kawasaki, just short of forty years old, become a centimillionaire. He was now the chief research officer at Lyke, which was a major publicly traded company based in Mountain View. He could easily have retired but chose to stay on because he enjoyed his work and because he felt some loyalty to the team he had recruited and nurtured in Seattle. He purchased fractional ownership of a private jet that he used to fly down the coast every week or so.

He had barely settled into his new life when he was awakened early one morning by the ringtone he had associated with the personal number of his new boss: the CEO of Lyke.

In truth, he had been sleeping somewhat raggedly the last hour or so. He had left his phone on the ground next to him with its screen facing up. As notifications filtered in, the device would turn its screen on, creating a series of false, bluish dawns. He’d been wondering whether it was worth the effort to reach out and flip the phone over facedown, but some deep nerd part of his brain was worried about scratching the screen on a rock. For like all of the other legionaries in the tent, he was sleeping directly on the ground, wrapped in his woolen cloak. He had not actually looked at any of the notifications.

He had configured the phone in such a way that it would only ring under certain rare circumstances, such as a personal call from the CEO. His legion was on maneuvers in the Bitterroot Mountains of western Montana, which it was using as a proxy for the Alps. Use of cell phones and other portable electronics was discouraged during the daytime, and while in character, but was tolerated in private tents, in the hours of darkness, as long as you weren’t too loud.