Neal Stephenson - Fall or, Dodge in Hell

Because of the weird light, his reflection in the mirror took on a strange new aspect. He turned his head this way and that, checking for new moles. Richard, who was ruddy and freckle prone, had for decades been psyching himself up for a climactic battle with melanoma, which, according to dark prophecies uttered by multiple dermatologists, loomed as a near certainty in his future. Early on he had performed his monthly skin checks with anxiety bordering on clinical paranoia. But then years had flown by with no action. He was now actually beginning to feel somewhat crestfallen that this terrible foe, against whom he had so girded himself, looked to be passing him over.

Presently he fell to shaving, for he had noticed a few days’ reddish growth. Medical personnel would soon be handling his body while he was unconscious. They would be able to stare at him all they wanted, to notice all the ways he wasn’t looking after himself. He was semifamous and ought to be mindful of such things. Maybe it would affect his company’s stock price or something.

He had assumed that the strange light would be a short-lived phenomenon, so was pleasantly surprised that it was getting stronger by the minute. The weird pallor was ripening into something warmer, like fire. A shaft of it was coming in through the window and illuminating the little sink and its backsplash. Richard had shaved, as was his habit, using a bar of soap—a specific type that he bought from a company in southern France. It had a pleasant fragrance, not perfumey and not too persistent. He had just put the soap back in its dish a moment ago and so it had bubbles on it. In a few minutes these would dry out and pop, but just now they were capturing the light being bounced off the windows of the office tower after its passage through ninety-three million miles of space from the vast thermonuclear inferno at the center of the solar system. Each bubble was producing an intensely brilliant spark of light, not white, but iridescent, as some kind of prismlike phenomenon inside the soap film (he was a little weak on the details) fractured the light into pure brilliant colors. A beautiful but perfectly commonplace phenomenon that would not have given him much food for thought were it not for the fact that his video game company had put a lot of money and engineer-years into the problem of trying to more perfectly depict an imaginary world using computer code, and this was exactly one of those things that was most difficult to capture. Oh, there were various ways of faking it; e.g., by applying special computational shaders to bars of soap during the sixty seconds after they had been used and were therefore covered with lather. But they were all just hacks. Actually simulating the physics of soap, bubbles, air, water, etc., was ludicrously expensive and would never be achieved in his lifetime.

It was hard even if you simplified matters by treating each bubble not as a small miracle of fluid dynamics, but as a simple reflecting sphere. At one point, some years previously, one of the engineers at Corporation 9592—a classic liberal-arts-major-turned-coder-so-he-could-make-a-decent-living—had identified this as the Hand met Spiegelende Bol Problem, and had discomfited many of the more hard-core engineers, during a meeting, by flashing up a graphic of the Escher lithograph of the same name. It was a self-portrait depicting the artist reflected in a mirrored sphere supported in his left hand. Escher’s face was in the middle, but a geometrically distorted rendering of his office could be seen around it. In the background of that was a window. This, of course, was gathering in light from at least ninety-three million miles away. The point being that in order to make a faithful 3-D computer graphics rendering of an object as simple as a shiny ball, you would, in theory, have to take into account every object in the universe. The engineer—a new hire named Corvallis Kawasaki—had footnoted his own remarks by mentioning that the mirrored-ball problem reached at least as far back as the German genius and polymath G. W. Leibniz, who had written of it as a way of thinking about monads. At this point in the meeting, the more well-established engineers had shouted him down and Dodge had made a mental note to yank the boy out of whatever branch of the org chart he’d landed in and employ him in Weird Stuff, which was Dodge’s personal department. In any case, the point, in this instance, was that every single bubble on the surface of the bar of soap was at least as complicated as Escher’s ball. Rendering such a scene realistically was completely out of the question. Far from being a source of frustration, this comforted him, and made him happy—perhaps even a little smug—that he lived in a universe whose complexity defied algorithmic simulation.

He closed his eyes while splashing water on his face and then looked back up at the mirror. Now there was a little spot in the middle where he had been dazzled by the brilliant sparks of light from the bubbles. Soon enough the dazzled patch would shrink and be replaced by a correct view of what was really there.

Except that it did not in this case. When Richard closed his eyes again to towel his face, he could still see a little patch of nothing in his visual field. This was a different sort of nothing from the field of red-tinged black that his eyes were seeing simply by virtue of the fact that his lids had closed over them. He knew what this was. The flash of reflected sun, a minute ago, had triggered a thing in his brain called an optical migraine. It was painless and harmless. He got them a few times a year. It was a visual display—“Aura”—caused by a temporary disruption of blood flow to the visual cortex. It always started thus, with a tiny dazzled region that refused to go away. Over the next half hour it would get bigger, making it impossible for him to read. Then it would gradually migrate rightward and mess with his peripheral vision on that side for a little while before disappearing without a trace.

The affected region—the spot where he was absolutely blind—was not black, as you might imagine. This could be proved simply by closing his eyes so that he actually was seeing just black. The blind spot then showed up as a region of vaguely defined yellow and black stripes, like the patterns painted on factory floors to limn danger zones, except that these flashed and fluctuated like an old-time television with its vertical hold out of whack.

Even as he drew these connections he was erecting defenses against a likely flanking attack from Polycultia, one of the Furious Muses, who was always pointing out that everything Richard could possibly think of was culturally relative. In this instance she might expect tactical support from Cerebra, an unintentionally offensive FM who had a knack for pointing out that any idea Richard came up with that he thought was clever was, in fact, but an imperfect rendering of a smarter idea that had occurred to her a long time ago. The projected line of attack from the Polycultia–Cerebra axis went something like this: Okay, because part of Richard’s visual cortex was on the blink, he was seeing “nothing” in that region. His brain was in the business of constructing, from moment to moment, the sort of three-dimensional model of the universe that, for example, enabled him to grab his phone from his bedside table without opening his eyes. As such, it couldn’t tolerate seeing a patch of “nothing” in the middle of an otherwise coherent reality. So it tried to fill in the nothing with something. It was simply the visual equivalent of tinnitus.

But why this particular something? He construed it as black and yellow danger stripes, on-the-fritz TV sets, etc., but that was only because he was a white guy of a certain age from Iowa. A Maori midwife or a gay Roman centurion or an eleventh-century Shinto Buddhist, in the grip of the same underlying neurological phenomenon, would fill in the “nothing” with some other kind of hobgoblin derived from their own set of cultural referents—e.g., the wall of cold magical flames surrounding Gymir’s realm in Jotunheim (according to Norse ).