Fall or, Dodge in Hell

He felt shame at having looked in on something that was none of his business. He closed the cover of the book gently and put it back on the table.

Not fifteen minutes later, he heard the front door opening as someone came in from the elevator lobby. Someone who had a key to the apartment, obviously. He tortured himself for a few brief moments with the fantasy that it was Dodge, and that all of this stuff had been some kind of dream or hallucination. But then he heard a high-pitched voice calling, “Uncle Richard? Uncle Richard? Hello! Are you getting better?”

In answer came a much deeper voice, speaking with an Eastern European accent. “Ssh, you mustn’t disturb Uncle Richard, he is sleeping.” This was Csongor, Zula’s husband. “Remember, he is very sick.”

Corvallis understood something suddenly and clearly: this was all a sort of performance that the family was mounting, at great effort and expense, for no one’s benefit but Sophia’s. It was difficult to explain to a girl of her age that her favorite uncle had simply ceased to exist for no apparent reason. A brief, serious illness followed by death: miserable as it was, that was the best story they could come up with. She wasn’t ready to hear the facts of the situation, to understand the idea that a seemingly normal and healthy Uncle Richard was in fact a vegetable with no brain to speak of. They would say that he was sick, that he was sleeping. And in a few days they would break the terrible news to her that he had died. A full explanation of the protocols embedded in the health care directive and the disposition of remains would be many years in coming.

“Hello, Corvallis Kawasaki!” Sophia always addressed him thus, reveling in her ability to pronounce the name. She was a tiny thing, barely coming up to midthigh on her bulky father. Fortunately for her, she was more Zula than Csongor, with glorious curls. The Hungarian blood came through in her eyes, which were pale bluegreen with a vaguely Asiatic slant.

Corvallis could not prevent himself from smiling broadly for the first time since all of this had started. “Hello, Sophia!” he said. “How was school today?”

“Fine,” she said, inevitably.

Corvallis and Csongor exchanged nods.

“There they are!” Sophia hollered. She bolted into the room, vaulted up onto the coffee table, and skidded to a halt where she could gaze down on the covers of the books. “Doe-lair’s Book of Greek Myths,” she said, “and Doe-lair’s Book of Norse Myths. My uncle Richard got them for me.” She turned her head and threw Csongor a reproachful look. “Mom and Dad forgot them!”

“Uncle Richard wanted you to have them,” Corvallis said. “He wrote you a note in this one. And left a surprise.”

She grabbed Greek, spun it around, and flipped the cover open. The sudden movement caused the red leaf to lift off the page and become airborne. This surprised her and she fell back on her bottom with an exclamation, and watched it skid to a stop on the surface of the table.

She looked at Corvallis, all serious. “Is that the surprise?”

“Yes.”

“It’s so pretty!” she said.

“Yes, it is.”

“Did he bring me that apple too?”

Corvallis picked up the apple and looked at Csongor, who nodded approval. “Yes, he did,” Corvallis said. “It’s all yours.”

9

Over the next three years Nubilant expanded, somewhat jerkily, as its CEO leapt from one funding predicament to the next like a video game character being presented with various contrived, dire challenges. With each round of funding its valuation grew and Corvallis’s theoretical net worth became larger. He began to consider whether it might be time to begin having a social life. He was not quite sure how to go about it. Much of his spare time was devoted to his hobby: the painstaking reenactment, in parks and on beaches around the Pacific Northwest, of the activities of a Roman legion of ancient times. It was an almost exclusively male pursuit, which would have been very convenient if (as rumor apparently had it) he were gay, but he was pretty resolutely heterosexual. When he did engage in normal social activities such as going out to dinner, it tended to be with Csongor, Zula, and Sophia, who had become like family to him. Sometimes, unaccompanied females would be present and Corvallis would become tongue-tied and withdrawn as he realized that Zula was trying to set him up with potential dates. He rationalized his failure to have a social life by saying that he was in “startup mode” and when you were in startup mode, normal rules didn’t apply. There would be plenty of time to sort things out after Failure or Exit, which were the two possible end states for a startup.

Exit—in the sense of suddenly becoming more rich—happened when Nubilant was acquired by Lyke, a Bay Area social media company that was much larger. Lyke had cloud computing systems of its own that were much more capable, by most measures, than Nubilant’s. But thanks to some canny decisions that Corvallis had made, Nubilant happened to be especially good at certain things that had turned out to be important to social media companies and so was doubly desirable—both on its own merits as a company and because of the prestige, and the bragging rights, that came from having snatched it away from the competition. Thus did Corvallis Kawasaki, just short of forty years old, become a centimillionaire. He was now the chief research officer at Lyke, which was a major publicly traded company based in Mountain View. He could easily have retired but chose to stay on because he enjoyed his work and because he felt some loyalty to the team he had recruited and nurtured in Seattle. He purchased fractional ownership of a private jet that he used to fly down the coast every week or so.

He had barely settled into his new life when he was awakened early one morning by the ringtone he had associated with the personal number of his new boss: the CEO of Lyke.

In truth, he had been sleeping somewhat raggedly the last hour or so. He had left his phone on the ground next to him with its screen facing up. As notifications filtered in, the device would turn its screen on, creating a series of false, bluish dawns. He’d been wondering whether it was worth the effort to reach out and flip the phone over facedown, but some deep nerd part of his brain was worried about scratching the screen on a rock. For like all of the other legionaries in the tent, he was sleeping directly on the ground, wrapped in his woolen cloak. He had not actually looked at any of the notifications.

He had configured the phone in such a way that it would only ring under certain rare circumstances, such as a personal call from the CEO. His legion was on maneuvers in the Bitterroot Mountains of western Montana, which it was using as a proxy for the Alps. Use of cell phones and other portable electronics was discouraged during the daytime, and while in character, but was tolerated in private tents, in the hours of darkness, as long as you weren’t too loud.

But waking people up with an early-morning call was bad manners everywhere, and so when it rang, he lashed out and silenced it as quickly as he could.

“Salve,” he croaked into the phone, over the grumbles of his tentmates.

“I need you down here,” said his boss. “All hands on deck.” Then he hung up without explanation, leaving Corvallis with the vague feeling that he was missing something.

“What the fuck, Corvus,” complained a legionary in the next tent. “Mutate.” Moo-TAH-tay. This was bastard Latin, using the imperative conjugation to tell him to mute his phone. “Corvus” was the Latinized version of his name. He turned off the phone’s sound so that it wouldn’t continue to make cute little noises as he went on messing with it.

The trail of notifications on his phone told the story. They had originated from various people on various social networks, but they had all been triggered by the same event: the surprising obliteration of the town of Moab, Utah, by what was apparently a tactical nuclear weapon.

It had occurred before daybreak, at about 5:20 A.M. local time. The earliest postings were from insomniacal passengers and crew on coast-to-coast red-eye flights, reporting a sudden flash so bright it dazzled them from hundreds of miles away. This had faded too rapidly for people to snap pictures of it, but descriptions had been tweeted and Facebooked via the planes’ onboard Wi-Fi systems, and retweeted and reposted a millionfold by the time Corvallis saw them.

One Larry Proctor, a blogger who knew his way around the military and intelligence world (or so it seemed, anyway, based on a quick scan of a blog he’d been maintaining ever since his last tour of duty in Qatar), had picked up some traffic that had leaked to the civilian Internet from a .mil site, making a cryptic reference to a possible radiological event in southeastern Utah. Personnel stationed at nearby military bases were reporting that leaves were being canceled and units being mobilized. All of this was probably supposed to be kept under wraps, but nothing could prevent spouses and teenage kids from chattering about it. Someone in DC posted a snapshot of a pizza delivery guy on a Pentagon-bound Metro train, toting a stack of pizzas so high he had to use a two-wheeled dolly. Self-proclaimed experts in the comment thread were climbing all over one another to explain that massive pizza deliveries to the Pentagon were an infallible sign that something big was happening. A fourteen-year-old Texas girl’s emoji-splattered post, featuring grainy driveway footage of her camouflage-decked mom heaving a duffel bag into the back of a pickup truck and burning rubber down the street, went viral and was shown over and over on network news sites for lack of anything more definite from the actual scene of the disaster. Moab was a long way from anywhere, situated at an X made by the Colorado River and a two-lane highway. No Internet or phone traffic was coming out of it.

Corvallis took all of this in while putting on his caligae, the sandal-like marching boots of the Roman legionary, and pulling his kit together as efficiently as was possible while focusing most of his attention on his phone. He had been sleeping in his linen tunic, overwrapped with his wool cloak. It was cold up here in the mountains and so he pulled the latter garment around him before stepping outside the tent. This weekend’s event was an informal, light-duty sort of affair, family friendly. They’d set up their camp in a meadow, but a phalanx of modern RVs was visible a quarter of a mile down the hill, in a parking lot at the road head. Generators were purring and electric lights shining down there. Corvallis stuffed his gear into his bag, slung it over his shoulder, and trudged down the slope. He smelled bacon cooking in one of the RVs. Through its window he saw a television monitor showing live network coverage—the RV had a satellite dish mounted to its roof. He slowed down and looked in through the window. The video feed was from LAX, where the first of those red-eyes had apparently just landed and disgorged its passengers. News crews were waiting to gang-tackle witnesses as they emerged from security. Most of the people on that flight had slept through the event, and many didn’t want to talk, but one alert fellow—a fashionably scruffy actor who had been flying from New York to L.A. for a job—had seen the flash in the corner of his eye while playing a game on his phone, and switched it over to video camera mode in time to capture the roiling orange mushroom cloud. So the first broadcast video of the destruction of Moab was simply a close-up of this man’s phone, held in his shaking hands. And, as far as it went, it sure enough looked like a mushroom cloud.

Corvallis walked across the parking lot to his Tesla, threw his duffel bag into the trunk, and climbed into the driver’s seat. His phone connected to the car’s onboard systems and the big video screen in the middle of the dashboard came alive. He dialed the twenty-four-hour hotline for his jet company and told them he needed emergency transportation from Missoula—the nearest town of consequence—to San Jose. They put him on hold. He did a quick scroll through emails and saw a lot of stuff, but nothing that couldn’t wait; the important thing was for him to get on the plane. So he shifted the Tesla into forward driving mode and began gliding silently across the parking lot, headed for the road that would take him down the mountain.

By the time he had reached the highway, the jet dispatcher had come back on the line and let him know that a pilot was en route to Boeing Field. The jet was being fueled. It would be in the air promptly and would probably get to Missoula before Corvallis did.

During the ensuing hour-long drive down the Bitterroot Valley, he mostly resisted the temptation to look at the screen, and instead listened to the radio. This was jammed with emergency coverage, as alarming as it was vague. One would think it would be an easy matter to simply go to Moab and look at it and report back. But all helicopters within an hour’s flying time of ground zero had already been spoken for by mysterious entities, and pilots were being warned not to fly anywhere near Moab for fear of radioactive contamination. Much of the radio coverage simply consisted of reporters summarizing what was turning up on the Miasma. Pictures of military roadblocks were being massively upvoted on discussion forums. Comment-thread geeks were zooming in on details and pegging various items of equipment: radiation detectors, dosimeters, containers of pills you were supposed to swallow in the event of radiation exposure. From time to time they would cut away to the financial desk for a report on the inevitable stock market crash. Trading on the New York Stock Exchange was already suspended for the day. Foreign leaders were expressing grave concern and offering assistance. A jihadist website had apparently posted a video describing the annihilation of Moab as a warning shot, and making it known that they had another such weapon planted in a major American city.

By the time Corvallis reached the outskirts of Missoula, that passenger at LAX had sold his mushroom cloud footage to the highest-bidding network. While stopped at a red light, Corvallis watched it on the dashboard video. It had been taken from hundreds of miles away, so was pretty small in the original clip; the network had zoomed it in (“blown it up,” in the inartful phrase of an anchorwoman) and enhanced it.

They did not get to savor the exclusive for long. By the time Corvallis had reached the airport, another network had come through with even better imagery from a truck driver’s dashboard camera. Apparently the driver, having witnessed the mushroom cloud from twenty miles outside of Moab, had turned his vehicle around and driven back out to the next town where he could get Internet access.

Security waved Corvallis through to a private parking area, and he sat in his car and watched the trucker’s video while the flight crew took his baggage out of his trunk and stowed it in the jet’s luggage compartment. This footage was a lot better than the cell phone video but still left a certain amount to the imagination. The truck had not been pointed squarely at Moab when the bomb had detonated, and so about half of the mushroom cloud was cropped off the right edge of the frame. But it was very obviously a mushroom cloud and you could see its interaction with various layers of the atmosphere as it rose above Moab, and in otherwise dark parts of the frame you could see how Moab-facing hillsides and mountains were lit up by it.

He handed the Tesla off to one of the ground crew for parking, then walked about fifty feet to the jet. One of the pilots was already in the cockpit doing his piloty things while the other was getting the luggage hatch squared away. A flight attendant, whom Corvallis vaguely recognized as Bonnie, was standing at the top of the steps. He wasn’t sure where the jet company obtained people like Bonnie, but his working hypothesis was that they were fashion models who had turned thirty. They lived in a world that was as disjoint from his world as ancient Egypt, even though it coexisted in the same time and place. In rare moments, such as when Corvallis climbed the steps into his jet and greeted Bonnie or one of her colleagues, his world glanced off of hers, and if he wasn’t too distracted he might sneak a look at her and ponder the sheer differentness of their respective existences.

Today, her passenger just happened to be a tech geek who, while technically not a billionaire, might as well have been one. He happened to be wearing the tunic and cloak of a Roman legionary, but it might as well have been jeans, T-shirt, and hoodie.

Bonnie’s welcoming smile faltered a little when she saw how he was dressed, but she bore up well under the shock and seemed to have recovered her professionally mandated persona by the time his caligae crossed the plane’s threshold. His iron hobnails clacked on the exotic hardwood flooring until he reached the aisle of the main cabin, which was carpeted. He peeled off his woolen cloak and handed it to Bonnie, who ran her hand over it in an evaluative way, then took it forward to the little closet.

Perhaps her eye had been drawn to the embroidery that ran around the edge of the garment: a repeating pattern of crows’ heads. In reenactment groups it was customary for each participant to adopt a persona, or, at a bare minimum, a nickname that wouldn’t sound too jarringly anachronistic when called out in the heat of action. Corvallis had become Corvus, which was just the Latin word for “crow.” It was partly an obvious contraction of his real name and partly a reference to his coloration. One of his parents had been half Japanese, the other South Asian. Noticing this, and calling it out in a nickname, wouldn’t have been polite by modern standards. But there was no getting around the fact that, in a Roman legion, he’d have stood out as some sort of exotic from the Eastern provinces. The other Romans would have slapped some such name on him. Corvus it was. At first he’d been mildly uncomfortable with it, as he’d associated such birds with Edgar Allan Poe and goth culture in general. With time and repetition his thinking had adjusted. He now saw it through a hybrid of Pacific Northwest aboriginal myths and Roman aviomancy. The only birds you saw in Seattle were seagulls, crows, and eagles. Seagulls were ubiquitous, mindless consumers. Eagles were spectacular, huge, badass, but comparatively rare; people would actually stop what they were doing and look up when an eagle flew by. Crows, or ravens (the distinction was unclear), were set apart by their extreme intelligence, memory, and resourcefulness; but no matter how well they embodied those fine traits, no one appreciated them.

Of crows, people tended to predicate the same traits that they did of Asians when they had forgotten politically correct habits of speech, or never acquired them in the first place. Crows were commendably intelligent, and forever busy, but you couldn’t tell them apart and their motives were inscrutable. But living inside of his own head, Corvus well knew his own motives. There was nothing wrong with those motives and he didn’t need to justify them to anyone else.

When Richard Forthrast had been alive, Corvallis’s relationship to him had been like that of a raven to an eagle. Or so he had convinced himself in retrospect; and every time he looked out a window to see an eagle gliding above the lake, being harried by a dive-bombing crow, he thought of himself and Dodge. He’d become comfortable with the nickname Corvus. As he’d gone deeper into the reenactment world, and spent more money on clothing, armor, and weapons, he’d taken the trouble to personalize all of it with raven iconography. He’d found a graphic artist on Craigslist who had produced some convincingly classical-looking line art for him, and he’d found others willing to stitch that artwork onto his clothing or hammer it into his armor. You could get anything on the Miasma, including a whole alternate historical identity.

“Corvus” turned around and sank into his customary position on the front right and buckled the seat belt over his tunic, then pulled his laptop out of its bag and got it booted up as the jet was taxiing to the head of the runway. The laptop fell into a kind of stupor as umpteen different apps tried to synchronize themselves over an overloaded wireless connection. It wasn’t until the jet had taken off and climbed to an altitude where its onboard Wi-Fi system kicked in that Corvallis was able to get proper Internet. On the left side of his screen he set up an ordinary browser window so that he could see the world as other people saw it, and on the right he launched a couple of other apps that were connected directly to Lyke’s internal systems over an encrypted, secure connection. The former was sluggish. The latter showed why: Lyke’s systems were badly bogged down, and the same was presumably true of all the other social media platforms.

Weather forecasters, as a public service, had taken to posting maps based on current and projected wind patterns, showing the area likely to be contaminated by the fallout plume. A traffic jam had formed on I-70 near Grand Junction, Colorado, as residents fled and commenced banging into each other. Another kind of jam-up had materialized on the tarmac at Aspen as every private jet tried to get clearance for takeoff at once. Such images were played over and over again by networks lacking actual footage of Moab.

Suddenly the lidless eye of Breaking News swung around to Las Vegas. What looked like the entire Las Vegas Police Department was evacuating a high-rise casino/hotel, landing choppers on the roof, and (clearly visible to long-lensed cameras on drones, or simply aimed out the windows of surrounding high-rises) conducting a room-to-room search of a penthouse suite using sniffer dogs and Geiger counters. Military experts, watching the raid in real time on television, pointed out that the top of such a tower would be the optimal location to detonate a tactical nuke—much more devastating than a ground burst. By the time the official order went out to evacuate every building within a mile, the streets were jammed anyway with tourists who’d decided not to wait.

From Corvallis’s point of view—watching the feeds in one window while monitoring Lyke’s systems in another—the events in Vegas produced the social media equivalent of a nuclear chain reaction as seemingly everyone there tried to post pictures and videos at the same moment. The result was something approaching a blackout. Lyke’s server farms had been designed to handle huge traffic surges, and the technology they’d acquired from Nubilant had made them even better at doing so. All of that stuff was working. But there were only so many computers and so much bandwidth to go around. When those had all been maxed out, there was nothing to do but wait for things to settle down.

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.