Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson

it up as a sort of affidavit that his ride would be here long before he was needed. On went the inevitable plastic bracelet. They led him back and had him change into the obligatory gown. An unseemly fuss was made over his wallet, phone, and other valuables, for which they wanted it understood they could not be responsible. Dodge once again scented lawyers with too much time on their hands. He heard C-plus’s voice outside, and thought of calling out a greeting, but didn’t really want to be seen or communicated with in the bracelet and gown—these made him seem sick, which he wasn’t. The pace of preparations was accelerating almost exponentially. Dodge got a clear sense of the proceduralist doctor as a cash cow of such fiscal immensity that his time and movements had to be scheduled and accounted for as carefully as an airline did with each 737. Dodge’s slot was next. They invited him onto a gurney and wheeled him into the procedure environment. An IV was started and taped to his arm. Sensors were clamped to his fingertips and Velcroed around his bicep; machines came alive to him and began to display information about his vitals. He knew where this was going. They were about to render him unconscious with amazing pharmaceuticals. In a minute, Atropos would snip the thread of his consciousness and he would, for all practical purposes, be dead. But when the procedure was finished Clotho would resume spinning his thread and he would come back to life as if it had never happened. It was weird stuff from that deeper and older stratum of myth, pre-Greek, pre-Norse, definitely nothing he would share with Sophia later, when he showed up at her house with the books.

      A man came in, presumably the doctor since he didn’t introduce himself and seemed to expect that Richard would know who he was. He mentioned that he had a character in T’Rain and began to ask questions about a certain technicality in the rules of the game. Richard was already getting a little foggy, but he understood that this wasn’t a real conversation. The doctor just wanted to know when the patient had lost consciousness. They must have injected the drug into his IV line. New qualia: a mask over his nose, cold dry gas flooding his nostrils, a hiss. Atropos snipped his thread.

       3

      Corvallis Kawasaki had, in a funny way, been looking forward to the day’s activities, or lack thereof. His job was to show up in the waiting room of a certain medical specialist, wait for Dodge to come out all groggy, get him into a car, and then take him to some combination of movie and lunch. Compared to what he normally did for a living, it was simple. It was also physical. Not as physical as skiing or welding, but much more physical than his job, which consisted of moving pixels around on screens in certain ways that were projected to be highly lucrative.

      There was some professional guilt entailed in taking the day off. He assuaged it in the waiting room by opening up his laptop, connecting to the building’s guest network, establishing a secure link to his company’s network, and writing a number of emails. These were all more or less calculated to hurl tasks into colleagues’ laps, which he reckoned might keep them off balance long enough that they wouldn’t miss him while he was taking in some kind of stupid action movie with Dodge. As he always did while working, he went into a sort of flow state that must have lasted for about half an hour. At the beginning of it he was conscious of his surroundings: patients biding their time, receptionists checking people in, medical personnel in scrubs striding to and fro on their sensible shoes. And, just for a moment, Dodge’s voice heard dimly from the back, making a crack as he was wheeled to the procedure room. Nothing that needed concern him at the moment. Into the universe of email he went, and abided for a time.

      He was vaguely aware that people were, all of a sudden, distressed about something. This almost pulled him out of his reverie. But he knew that, whatever was going on, there was nothing he could do about it. People got stressed out at work all the time. It was not his problem.

      He did raise his head and look when the front door of the office suite was punched open by a team of three firemen. Waiting for them was a woman in scrubs. She had made eye contact with the firemen before they even reached the door. As they burst in, she turned on her heel and ran into the back, and they understood that they should follow her. They were carrying not axes and hoses, but large boxes emblazoned with red crosses.

      The initial reaction of Corvallis was, some would say, curiously detached and unemotional. Evidently, someone in the back of this medical practice had been taken ill. Perhaps an elderly doctor had suffered a heart attack, or something. One would think that a medical practice, sited in a building full, from top to bottom, of medical offices, in a neighborhood entirely given over to the medical industry, would have some special procedure to follow in such a case. But, if Corvallis Kawasaki understood correctly what he was seeing, this was not the case. When there was a problem, the people here dialed 911, just like anyone else. The call was routed to the nearest fire station and the EMTs were dispatched. This was mildly surprising, but the technology executive in him found it actually to be quite reasonable and, in a way, comforting. The EMTs in the fire stations were the best at what they did, the quickest to respond. The system was working.

      Now that his focus on the screen of his laptop had been broken, he sat up straight and began to take in further details. A woman in pink scrubs was standing where he could see her, hands clasped together in front of pursed lips, staring down a hallway. Her eyes began to glisten. The EMTs were firing off tight bursts of words. The receptionists had stopped doing their work entirely and were just sitting frozen at their workstations, gripping the edges of their desks, like officers on the bridge of a starship getting ready to be hit by photon torpedoes. The voices of the EMTs became louder and clearer. While continuing to do their work, they were, it seemed, wheeling the patient out of a room, down the hallway, toward the exit. The woman in pink scrubs sprang out of the way. One of the receptionists, who had a better angle than Corvallis, scrambled up, ran across the lobby to the door, and hauled it open.

      The EMTs wheeled Richard Forthrast out on a gurney and maneuvered him at reckless speed out the door and in the direction of the elevator bank. He was only visible to Corvallis for one, perhaps two seconds, and so it took a little while for Corvallis to process what he had seen. Richard was shirtless, the open-back hospital gown stripped away from him, and electrodes had been stuck to his torso. A tube had been inserted between his teeth and, presumably, down into his windpipe. One of the EMTs was holding a sort of rubber bag, squeezing it in a slow steady rhythm to force air into Richard’s chest.

      Corvallis Kawasaki’s first, absurd instinct was to pull his phone out of his pocket and dial Richard’s number. Because what was going on here was obviously weird, obviously a crisis. On both of these counts it was very much a Richard sort of problem. For much of his postcollege life, Corvallis had been in the comfortable habit of knowing that any such matter could automatically be handed off to Dodge, who would be not merely willing but eager to take it on. Why, Dodge would be offended if weird crises were not instantly dumped into his lap. This was now at odds with the intellectual awareness that Dodge was dying or dead.

      He closed his laptop, slid it into his bag, stood up, and followed a debris trail of medical wrappers to the elevator lobby, which he reached just in time to glimpse Richard’s gray face and wired-up torso as a pair of doors glided shut on it. He punched the “down” button and waited for the next lift in a very odd state of mind. Nothing was certain yet. Word had not yet gone out on what Dodge referred to as the Miasma. Corporation 9592’s stock had not begun to slide. Standing there alone in that lobby, he could convince himself that he had just imagined it, suffered a kind of waking nightmare. If Dodge was about to die, should the world not have been crumbling all about him? Should the streets not have been full of wailing gamers? And yet the elevator lobby was just an elevator lobby, changeless as the stars.

      When he reached the ground floor he was able to follow a trail of shocked bystanders—security guards, incoming patients, scrub-wearing medics waiting in line for their lattes—to an exit of the building just in time to see an ambulance peel out. A moment later it turned on its lights and its siren.

      Corvallis broke into a run. He was able to keep pace with the ambulance for about a block as it negotiated some turns, slowing to honk in righteous fury at a dim-witted motorist, then cutting across six lanes of traffic. Presently it went around a corner