Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson

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      So he waited, along with a billion other Miasma users staring at frozen screens. His mind went back to poor Moab. Remote, difficult to reach, cut off by roadblocks, radioactive, probably reduced to cinders, it had become something of an afterthought. He had been there, a few years ago, on a rafting trip, and thought it a nice little town, a Mecca for young, strenuous, happy-go-lucky dudes in cargo shorts and girls with sports bras and pigtails.

      It occurred to him that this would be the best time to change out of his Roman legionary clothes and into the normal-guy clothing he’d brought with him. Yesterday, when he’d reached the site of the camp, he’d changed in the backseat of his Tesla and stashed the modern garb in a duffel bag in the trunk of his car. But that duffel bag was now in the plane’s luggage compartment, unreachable until they landed.

      A meme cropped up claiming that Moab had actually gone off the grid two days earlier as most of its residents had fallen victim to an explosively contagious plague that had presumably escaped from a nearby bioweapons facility, and that the president had made the decision to sterilize the whole town with a nuke. The roadblocks on the surrounding highways weren’t there to prevent curiosity-seekers from getting in. They were to stop any infected survivors’ getting out. The call went out for all armed citizens living anywhere near Moab to set up watch posts on hills and rooftops and to report, or shoot, escaping zombies. This and other alternative versions of reality were shouted down by stentorian typists even as they were being embellished on fringe talk radio programs and fervently taken up by upstart networks of true believers.

      The president, who’d been on a state visit to the Far East, made an appeal for calm, then canceled his engagements and boarded Air Force One, bound for home—though a leaked document, widely reblogged and reposted, showed a flight plan terminating at the U.S. nuclear command bunker in Colorado Springs.

      Temporarily at a loss for anything useful to do, Corvallis reckoned that he could at least make some headway debunking the zombie hypothesis. Over the VPN that connected him to Lyke’s servers, he could search the colossal database in which was recorded every scrap of social media activity that had occurred since the company had first gone online. This was the sort of thing he had got rather good at during his tenure at Corporation 9592, where tracking the actions taken by the game’s millions of players had been essential to making it fun, successful, and profitable. Compared to that, it was a simple matter to run a query that would list all Lyke activity originating from users in Moab, Utah, during the last week.

      Of course, Corvallis didn’t believe for a moment that a bioweapon plague had actually struck the town. This was clearly the work of trolls. The only open question was whether they were nihilistic trolls who just liked to see the world burn, or motivated trolls with some vested interest in gulling credulous millions into clicking on this or that link. But one of the Miasma’s perversities was that it made otherwise sane people like him—people who had better things they could have been doing—devote energy to arguing with completely random fuckwits, many of whom probably didn’t even believe in their own arguments, some of whom weren’t even humans. By making this database query, Corvallis was marshaling evidence for use in one of those pointless debates. If it really was the case that Moabites had suddenly begun getting sick in large numbers, they’d have posted complaints on social media. They’d have called in sick, canceled social engagements, sympathized with one another, exchanged harebrained home remedies, and searched for certain keywords like “high fever and rash” or what have you. Even if a government conspiracy had later severed the town’s links to the outside world, all prior activity would remain archived in Lyke’s servers, where it could be collated and analyzed by someone like Corvallis who had the requisite privileges.

      Not surprisingly, the result of the query was a week’s worth of utterly normal social media traffic from the good people of Moab. Nothing whatsoever about mysterious deadly plagues. So the bioweapon narrative was easy to quash, at least if you were among the small minority of Miasma users who actually cared about logic and evidence.

      Less out of curiosity than a mindless, OCD-ish compulsion to organize things, he sorted the results of his search by their time stamps, arranging them so that the most recent postings were at the top of the list. Now he could see every jot and tittle of social media traffic that had come out of Moab, Utah, in the days and hours leading up to the detonation.

      Most of the entries now visible on his screen had come in last night, petering off into the wee hours as people went to bed. There was a drunken selfie from a party at 3:12 A.M., then nothing for almost two hours.

      The item at the very top of the list—in other words, the last social media post to have made it out of Moab, Utah, before it had been nuked—was from an account owned by a company called Canyonland Adventures. Their profile indicated that they were based in Moab and that they were in the business of running white-water rafting trips down the Colorado River. Historically, their postings had comprised promotions, tidbits of news (the cat in their office had been in an altercation with a dog), photos of happy rafters in beautiful settings, and logistical updates for their customers.

      The final pre-nuke posting was apparently one of the latter. It was text only, with no pictures or links. It read, “Jones party: your friendly guide Maeve here, up at the crack of dawn, chuffed for today’s adventure—looking forward to seeing y’allz at the sandbar at 6 am sharp—posting this from my phone since my wifi just went down! If you need to reach me, use my cell. And remember: SUNSCREEN AND HATS!!!”

      The attached metadata indicated that the post had indeed been made from the mobile app using the SMS, or text messaging, system. The time stamp was 5:05 A.M. local, so about fifteen minutes before the nuke had detonated.

       10

      A few years earlier, Corvallis had been in a moderately serious car accident in stop-and-go traffic. He’d slowed down. The car behind him hadn’t—its driver was texting—and had rearended him hard enough to total Corvallis’s vehicle. Looking back on it later, the weird thing about it was how long it had taken for his brain to assemble anything like a correct picture of events. The first thing that had happened, as far as Corvallis’s mind-body system was concerned, was that his car’s headrest had struck him in the back of the skull hard enough that he could feel the little rivets in its frame. Then a bunch of other stuff had happened and he had been distracted for a while, but it wasn’t until maybe an hour later that he’d noticed his head hurting and reached up to find a bump on the back of his skull.

      This was kind of like that. Reading the time stamp on Maeve’s message and her words my wifi just went down were the blow to the base of his skull, but it was a while before he really focused on it.

      It was easy to find Maeve’s last name (Braden) and look up her address. She lived right in the middle of Moab, just a few blocks away from the offices of Canyonland Adventures. Whether she’d sent that text from her home or from the office, she’d probably been within a few hundred yards of ground zero.

      He spent a while aimlessly clicking through Maeve’s various social media activities. On Lyke and other social media platforms, she had registered using variant spellings of her first name (Mab, Mabh, Madbh) and her last (Bradan, O Bradain). Apparently both names were Gaelic and so the spelling was all over the place. This was a common subterfuge used by people who didn’t want to sign up for social media accounts under their real names, but who understood that the fake name had to be convincing enough to pass an elementary screen by an algorithm somewhere; “Mickey Mouse” or “X Y” would be rejected, but “Mabh O Bradain” was fine. “Mab” was only one letter different from “Moab” and he wondered if Maeve had used it for that reason, as a sort of pun on her adopted home.

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