Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson

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      “Yeah. Better than sunscreen.” She sighed. “I was studying design,” she admitted, as if it were a failing of some significance. “Hit a rough patch. Took a summer job paddling rafts. Got sidetracked.”

      “It’s pretty normal to take a gap year. Or two.”

      “I failed,” she announced.

      “As in, flunked out of design school or—”

      “Dropped out. To do a startup. Which failed.” She sighed. “I’m one of the losers in the war you won.”

      “What happened?”

      “It was my sister, Verna, and me. We got some angel money. Burned through it amazingly fast just getting our heads out of our arses. She got sick.”

      “Well, that alone would be enough to kill a lot of angel-funded startups.”

      Maeve shook her head. “It wasn’t that. I mean, it didn’t help. But what killed it was an awareness that came to me in the middle of the night.”

      “Awareness of what?”

      “That I’d been going about it wrong. That I hadn’t been thinking big enough.”

      “Scale is tricky.”

      “And that if I were to start thinking big enough, it would require much more capital than I could ever hope to raise. So I was stuck. And am still.” She pulled her sunglasses down so that she could look him in the eye. “Which is not me cracking on to you.”

      “I beg your pardon?”

      “I’m not asking you for money.”

      “I didn’t think you were.”

      “Just wanted to be clear.”

      “Okay. Noted. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, can you talk about what you were doing in a way that is a little less abstract?”

      “Then you’ll get interested in it, and you’ll come up with ideas for how to make it work, and it’ll circle around to money.”

      “It’s a long ride to Moab, we have to talk about something.”

      “Well, I’ll just say that my idea of clothing as prosthetics, when I pursued it to the end of the line, led me out of my comfort zone. Because what we wear now is more than just material objects. We wear information. My avatar, my profile on social media, those do in cyberspace what clothing does in the world. And now you have blended situations—physical clothing with embedded electronics. I don’t know anything about those technologies.”

      “Other people do. You could find programmers, engineers—”

      “But then why me?”

      Corvallis didn’t have an answer.

      Maeve went on, “It’s as if I were a carpenter who had come up with an idea for a wooden boat. I started designing the boat and got halfway through and realized that it would be much better if it were made out of aluminium. Knowing fuck-all about aluminium, I would have to find a metalworker at that point. Whereupon, I would have to explain to my investors why it made sense for them to pay me to pay a metalworker.”

      Corvallis nodded. “You had thought yourself right out of a job.”

      “Yeah.”

      He shrugged. “It happens. That’s what angels are actually doing, you know. Paying people like you to try a bunch of stuff. To see what works. You can always move on.”

      She grimaced. “Not if you don’t actually have the technical know-how.”

      “You’re too honest for your own good. If you were more of a BS artist you could talk your way through an investor pitch pretty easily.”

      “Thanks, I guess.” She looked away, disgusted. Relegated to the back of the truck, splayed out on other people’s luggage with her legs off—literally dismembered—a million miles away from Silicon Valley, left for dead, along with the rest of Moab, by the whole Miasma—stymied to perfect exasperation—she was the archetype of the failed entrepreneur.

      He was almost offended by the ease with which they drove into Moab. The roadblocks—supposing that they actually existed—would be on the state highway that ran through town and that provided its only link to places far away. Because their point was to stop outsiders from getting in. Most of Moab’s streets dead-ended at the foot of the stony pink hills that confined the town against the river, or trailed off into weedy ruts as they neared the watercourse. But at least one of them connected to a battered two-lane road that edged up the east bank of the Colorado, draining a maze of ranch tracks farther south. Since no connection could be made from there to the outside world, no one had put a roadblock on it. The river itself was being patrolled by a lone sheriff in a motorboat, but when he recognized Bob’s truck he just lifted one hand from the wheel to greet Bob. Bob responded by lifting two fingers from his own steering wheel, and with that they penetrated the world-famous cordon of military security that had enshrouded the smoking ruins of Moab and turned away from the river to follow a small tributary about a mile into town.

      A festive atmosphere prevailed along Main Street, which was what they called the part of the state highway that ran through the town’s business district. This had been turned into a temporary pedestrian mall by the closure of the road. Locals had taken advantage of it to park RVs and pickup trucks wherever they felt like it, and to erect pop-up shelters against the sun, which by now had burned through the cloud cover. Restaurants and bars were serving al fresco. A convoy of National Guard vehicles, mostly just Humvees, had drawn up in the middle of the street. Young men in hand-me-down Iraq War camo were standing around aiming their assault rifles at the pavement and wordlessly soaking up the admiration of an increasingly inebriated populace. A tourist hotel on the main drag had set up an outdoor television screen showing live network coverage from a satellite dish. By this point, all of the networks had scrambled their art departments and produced screens and banners to flash up when they cut back from commercial breaks. A typical example was NUCLEAR TERROR IN THE HEARTLAND, in a scary-looking typeface, superimposed on a montage comprising a mushroom cloud and a map of the United States with a red crosshairs centered on southeastern Utah. Corvallis wondered if the wording had been run by the networks’ lawyers. To call it a “nuclear strike” or “nuclear disaster” would be to suggest that it had actually happened. “Nuclear terror” only meant that some people were terrified. The network was hedging its bets. Because at some level, the people in charge must have figured out by now that it was a hoax. To come out and say as much would be to lose all of their viewers to competitors who were still acting as if it had really happened. Calling it “terror,” on the other hand, was no lie, and enabled them to keep pumping shit onto the air.

      Bob, now overwhelmingly under the emotional sway of the half-dozen Joneses with whom he was sharing the cab, drove straight to the office of the rafting company, which was only a block off of Main Street. The Joneses piled out of the cab. Their patriarch waddled over to the family vehicle, a beige Suburban that they’d left in the parking lot. He contemplated it for a while, as if looking for bubbled paint, melted tires, or other evidence of its having survived a nuclear detonation. Maeve had strapped her legs back on as they entered town and now stood up in the back of the truck to toss luggage down to the other Joneses. An internal family schism developed as to whether a bucket brigade should СКАЧАТЬ