Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson

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СКАЧАТЬ I sat across the table from him.”

       “What!?”

      “No shit. While we were talking in the hotel, he flew up from San Rafael. With his security detail in tow.”

      “Jesus. And threatened to get a court order?”

      “Yeah, is that even possible legally?”

      “It’s rare. Rare enough that I’ll need to do some research,” Stan said. “But in principle, yeah. If the family is about to take some step that directly violates the health care directive, then the attorney general can take an interest in it, go to a judge, get a court order.”

      “And then—?”

      “And then if the family, or the doctors, violate the court order, they’re in contempt of court. So that is definitely a club he can wave over Zula and Alice. But I find it shocking he would even consider it.”

      “He’s protecting his brand, he says.”

      “Fine way to do it.”

      The organization known to Alice as the Weird Cyber Bank had bought a great big old building from an old-school, non-weird, non-cyber bank that, around the turn of the millennium, had gone belly-up in a financial downturn and pursuant imbroglio.

      During the 1930s, this building had probably been considered tall and futuristic. Now it was medium-sized and retro-quaint. The new owners had done all of the structural upgrades needed to keep it from collapsing into a huge mound of bricks during the next earthquake and then they had parceled it out into chunks for use by various of their subentities.

      The Weird Cyber Bank per se—the for-profit financial institution that had been spawned out of an earlier startup called Epiphyte, and been joined by diverse more or less murky coconspirators—occupied the upper two-thirds of the building. The lower floors were for the Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation and its offshoot, WABSI.

      It was on a steep downtown slope. On the downhill side you walked into the first floor, but on the uphill side, the pedestrian entrance was on the fourth story. In between was a wedge of space that was difficult for spatially challenged visitors and so the architects had made the probably wise decision to leave it mostly deconstructed, exposing all the massive new structural steelwork that was now knitting together the gingerbready brick-and-marble confection on top of it. There was security, befitting a bank with supposed connections to all kinds of mysterious and maybe nefarious clients. But the internal partitions were mostly glass, and so you could at least see all of the places you weren’t being allowed to go.

      It was out of the question that Corvallis Kawasaki would just stroll in on short notice and sign the boilerplate NDA that the security guard would present to him. Therefore it went without saying that he was going to be issued a mere sticker, not a badge, and that he’d have to be accompanied by Ben at all times. They’d be restricted to visitor-friendly zones on the building’s lower levels. There were a few meeting rooms for just such occasions, but a glance through their glass walls proved that those were all spoken for at the moment. Therefore Ben and C-plus, having nowhere else to go, began to wander through a permanent museum exhibit that occupied the interior of the first three stories.

      This looked expensive. It had not just been thrown together by interns. One sensed that serious people had come over from London and worked on it for years. It was intended to be here for a long time. Wordy plaques, etched in mysterious corrosion-proof metal, explained deep background that struck C-plus as very interesting; he’d have to come back later and actually read them. But the quick visual takeaway, absorbed by some background process in his brain as he ambled around and made small talk with Ben, was that the deep history of this institution reached all the way back to some era of history when men wore large periwigs—not the white-powdered George Washington kind, but normal hair colors—and that there were connections, on the math-and-science side, to Pascal and Leibniz, and on the money side to an old banking dynasty called the Hacklhebers, and politically to—could that really be Peter the Great? Somehow that had come together in an institution called the Leibniz-Archiv, in Hanover, which frankly hadn’t done a heck of a lot for a few hundred years.

      The designers of this exhibit had cleverly filled in that awkward gap with some material about early mechanical computers, including a working replica of Babbage’s difference engine (built in a fit of nerd energy, and later contributed to this museum, by a different local tech magnate). There was the obligatory shrine to Ada Lovelace and then a fast-forward to the mid-twentieth century and a black-and-white photo of the young Alan Turing, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, and Rudolf von Hacklheber on a bicycling expedition. This was where C-plus began to feel he was losing the thread, since the last mention of any Hacklhebers he’d seen was from 250 years earlier—but apparently this Rudolf was one of those hyperprivileged white guys who actually turned out to have legit mathematical talent. Anyway it kicked off a whole wing of the exhibit featuring an offbeat mix of stuff C-plus had seen in twenty other museums (Enigma machine, photograph of Turing bombe) with unique exhibits such as a computer that Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse had apparently made out of organ pipes and mercury-filled U-tubes.

      There was a big map of the world festooned with swooping trails of LEDs and flat-panel monitors, trying to convey some elaborate chain of events in which the contents of the Leibniz-Archiv had been removed from Hanover, either to keep these priceless relics safe from Allied bombing raids or because Göring wanted to melt it all down, and somehow made their way, via U-boat, to the Philippines—only to be sunk, and later recovered by Waterhouses and Shaftoes.

      The point being that the hoard consisted of gold plates with holes punched in them, like an early version of IBM punch cards, and they were meant to be used in a mechanical computer called the Logic Mill. The Logic Mill had been much talked about, by various savants, since the era of Oliver Cromwell, but had never really been constructed and made to work properly until Randy Waterhouse—one of the founders of the Weird Cyber Bank—had plowed some of his windfall into actually building a working replica. This had taken more than a decade because, to make a long story short, the eighteenth-century design made very little sense on a mechanical engineering level and required a lot of humans to move things around. And yet they had made it work using the actual, original plates from the Leibniz-Archiv.

      And it was this detail that finally afforded Ben and C-plus a bit of privacy in which to have a real conversation. For an inner layer of even higher security surrounded the chamber housing the Logic Mill. Casual museum strollers could view it at a distance through a heavy glass window, but if you actually wanted to go in and see the thing working you had to check your bag and your coat and go through a metal detector and a pat-down. And that was enough of a barrier that most visitors were content just to look at it through the glass. Ben and Corvallis, however, went through and found themselves alone in a sunken vault (they sealed it up at night) with a contraption that slowly but inexorably shuffled gold plates around and probed them with metal pins.

      “It’s on the Internet!” Ben said, indicating a flat-panel screen suspended on a jointed arm. Lines of text were marching up it so slowly that the display appeared to be frozen most of the time. Corvallis recognized them as low-level Internet codes.

      “Of course it is,” he said numbly.

      “In their retirement some of the OG Epiphyte geeks figured out how to program the Logic Mill to speak TCP, and gave it its own IP address—you can ping it if you have a lot of time on your hands.”

      They stood there for a minute or two, watching the Logic Mill work, deriving a kind of calm satisfaction from the way the metal prods engaged the cards. When it seemed the time was right, C-plus said: “So. Elmo Shepherd.”

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