Neal Stephenson - Fall or, Dodge in Hell

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2019

Copyright © Neal Stephenson 2019

Neal Stephenson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Designed by Fritz Metsch

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008168858

Ebook Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008168841

Version: 2019-11-15

‘It keeps you reading, it makes you think, and, by the end, it generates that sense of wonder that is the very lifeblood of science fiction’

Guardian

‘A staggering feat of imagination, intelligence and stamina … The result is a story that touches on society, technology, spirituality and even eschatology, a far-reaching attempt at a grand myth that is breathtaking in scope and ambition … a one-of-a-kind synthesis of daring and originality, unafraid to venture into wild and unmapped conceptual territory’

New York Times

‘One of the great novels of our time’

Wall Street Journal

‘Captivating … The passages set in the real world display all of Stephenson’s usual witty brilliance when it comes to technology and culture’

Washington Post

‘[Stephenson is a] speculative-fiction virtuoso … There are enough futuristic, envelope-pushing ideas here, especially related to AI and digital consciousness, to keep even nonfans and science buffs intrigued. Best-selling Stephenson is cutting-edge and his followers and all readers intrigued by shrewd speculative fiction will queue up’

Booklist Starred Review

‘Elegantly written’

SFX

‘There’s no part of this book that doesn’t chug and hum with that big-brain energy of near-future extrapolation that Stephenson’s fans love him for … Stephenson’s greatest strength as a writer has always been that he sees just a little bit further and a little bit clearer than the rest of us do’

NPR

‘An audacious epic’

Kirkus , Starred Review

‘A feat of mind-blowing adventure powered by deep existential questions’

S late

‘Stephenson is the master of long-scale science fiction … I found myself glued to it all … And weeks after I finished reading, the ideas are burning in my brain. Some chapters have ideas that could seed full novels of their own’

CNET Book Club

‘Gripping … a fantasy-science-fiction adventure story that is closer to reality than you might think’

The Week

‘Stephenson is not merely a fantasist of the future; he is a prophet of our present, a virtual architect of the ideas that define our world … a science fiction writer who is not only determined to entertain, but to make the world a better place – even if it means inventing that future himself’

Reason

To O. L.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Fall or, Dodge in Hell

Dedication

Book 1

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Part 2

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Part 3

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Part 4

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Part 5

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Part 6

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Part 7

Chapter 42

Book 2

Part 8

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Part 9

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Part 10

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Part 11

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Neal Stephenson

About the Publisher

Dodge became conscious. His phone was burbling on the bedside table. Without opening his eyes he found it with his hand, jerked it free of its charging cord, and drew it into bed with him. He tapped it once to invoke its snooze feature. It became silent. He rolled onto his side and slid the phone under his pillow so that, when the alarm resumed in nine minutes, he would be able to put it back into snooze mode with less trouble. It was a small miracle that his brain contained a sufficient 3-D model of his bed and its surroundings that he was able to do what he had just done without opening his eyes. But there was no reason to press his luck.

He felt no particular desire to go back to sleep, for he had been enduring a curiously boring dream whose central plot seemed to be the difficulty of finding coffee. In this dream, he was in the small town in Iowa where he had grown up. Its landscape and its cast of characters were commingled with places he had been and people he had encountered during the decades since he had left it in the rearview mirror of his pickup truck. But the grid street pattern of that town, covering just a few square blocks, and easily mastered by a boy on a bicycle, was, decades later, the spatial lattice on which virtually all of his dreams were constructed. It was the graph paper on which his mind seemed to need to plot things.

In the dream, he had set out to get some coffee, only to find himself thwarted at every turn by any number of incredibly prosaic obstacles. In the story-world of the dream, this was bizarrely frustrating; it was simply unreal how so many contingencies could get in the way of this simple task.