Fall or, Dodge in Hell

“I thought you techies wore hoodies and T-shirts,” she said.

“What?”

“You said you had a blazer and a dress shirt.”

“It’s what I wore to work the day I left Seattle. I had a board meeting.”

“Why didn’t you wear a T-shirt to your board meeting? Isn’t that what you do?”

“Yeah, but this wasn’t for a tech company. This is a private foundation. I serve on the board. It’s just a somewhat more conservative vibe. You’re in the room with lawyers and money people.”

“What kind of foundation?”

“A friend of mine died. He was rich. He’d made billions in the game industry. Some of his fortune went to this foundation.”

“Was it an untimely death?”

“Definitely.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“Thanks. Anyway, the foundation looks for ways to put gamerelated technology to use in solving various social problems.”

They jounced over a calamitous pothole and she reached out to keep her artificial legs from jumping out of the truck.

Corvallis was straining to remember some advice Zula had given him a couple of years ago after a date had gone bad.

“You’ve asked a number of questions relating to clothing,” he pointed out. “Is that an interest of yours?”

“All clothing is prosthetics,” she said. “That’s how I think about it. From this”—she plucked at her silver garment—“to this”—she patted a carbon-fiber leg—“is a matter of degree.”

“The shirt is some kind of anti-sun thing?”

“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 be established to move all of the bags to the Suburban, or individuals should just carry the bags a few at a time. Corvallis, an only child, found the spectacle inexplicably depressing. He cadged a key from Maeve, then vaulted out and went into the office. His careful attention to the all-important matter of rehydration, combined with the bouncing of the truck, had left him needing to take a vicious piss. The better to enjoy it, he locked himself in the restroom, pulled his tunic up around his waist, and sat down on the toilet. Stand-up peeing in a long flowing garment could lead to various mishaps.

When he was done he stood in front of the sink for a few moments splashing water on his head and neck and arms, just to get the dust off. It occurred to him that he had now finally reached a location in which it would be convenient to change into his normal-person clothes, so he went out in search of his duffel bag. The Joneses’ Suburban was long gone. Bob and Maeve had entered the office and were sitting in its little waiting area drinking beverages from the office fridge and watching television coverage. A nurse from a burn unit in some unidentified hospital was being interviewed. Journalists had pounced on her when she had gone out on a Starbucks run. She was looking suitably traumatized, but not so much that she couldn’t deliver an eloquent and moving description of the suffering being endured by children who had been standing in the open when the flash of the bomb had burned all the skin on one side of their body. For according to the story these patients had been rescued from some kind of camp on the outskirts of town. Maeve and Bob were agreeing with each other that no such camp existed, and wanted Corvallis to know it too. But he’d long since come to terms with the sophistication and sheer ballsiness of the hoax.

Corvallis went out to Bob’s truck and looked in the back, which was empty. Then he checked the cab.

He went back inside. “Did you by any chance give the Joneses a blue duffel bag about yay long?” he asked Maeve, holding his hands out in front of him.

“More than one, probably,” she answered. “Why?”

“Never mind. Is there a place on Main Street where I could buy some clothes?”

“Yeah. If they’re open.”

“Belay that. I just remembered. My wallet was in the duffel bag.”

She gazed at him sidelong while tipping a beer bottle into her mouth. “C’mon back,” she said.

Bob sat up alertly. “I could go try to track ’em down if you like.”

“Do you know which way they’re going?”

“Not really.”

“Sounds like Maeve is going to set me up with something,” Corvallis said. “Thanks though.”

Bob was now perhaps sensing a change in the emotional tone, akin to the plunge in barometric pressure preceding a cloudburst, which was not directly measurable by any of the five human senses but which could be detected, in some people’s arthritic joints, as a certain kind of discomfort. And perhaps you could make the case that people who suffered from the sort of emotional arthritis that was endemic among those of Northern European descent who lived on farms and ranches felt that discomfort more acutely, and were therefore the most sensitive barometers. “I do believe I’ll be on my way anyhow,” he said, “unless you need me for anything?”

“Well, at some point I’ll need to go back out and collect my plane,” Corvallis said, “but …” And he glanced at Maeve, who nodded.

“I can give you a ride out there,” she said. “Have to go collect Tom and the rafts anyway.”

So Bob said his goodbyes and went out to his truck. Maeve unlocked a door behind the front desk and beckoned Corvallis back.

Things tended to be spacious in Moab, and this building was no exception—it was an older commercial property that showed signs of having served, in previous incarnations, as a bar, a clothing shop, and a real estate office. Only about a quarter of its ground-floor space was used as an office. The rest of it was storage for outdoor gear of various kinds, the ideal place to raid if civilization collapsed. The stuff was crammed onto a shantytown of shelves that had been made in a hurry by someone with a chop saw and a nail gun. “This is all heavy stuff we don’t like to carry up and down the stairs,” Maeve explained, leading him back to the actual stairs in question: wooden steps leading down into a cool cellar. “Lightweight stuff—like clothing—is down here.”

It seemed on one level like the opening scene of a horror movie in which Corvallis would never make it out of the basement, but having got this far, he followed her down. She took the stairs at a good pace but with certain precautions, one hand on each banister, pitching from side to side a bit more than a person with normal legs, and through her silver spandex garment he could see her back muscles and her triceps working. They reached the concrete floor of the basement, which seemed to have been poured by various drunk or indifferent people on different occasions. Light poured in from windows high in the walls, so she felt no need to turn the lights on. “Watch your step,” she admonished him, which he found curiously touching given that he had legs and feet.

Cardboard boxes of different sizes and vintages had been stacked around the place according to some scheme that wasn’t obvious to him. Some of these were open. They were full of T-shirts, not folded, but thrown in willy-nilly. Most of these were printed with Canyonland Adventures logos, or other tourist-related insignia having to do with Moab, Utah, or the Colorado River. In one corner a rug had been laid out on the floor. On it was a huge pile of shirts all mixed up. The place had the clean smell of new textiles.

“What’s Sthetix?” Corvallis asked, holding up a black T-shirt with a completely different sort of logo—not in any way, shape, or form touristy.

“My dead company. See, if you take ‘prosthetics’ or ‘aesthetics’ and chop off the first bit …”

“Got it.”

“It’s from a Greek word meaning ‘strength,’” she insisted, as if he had been disputing it. “‘Prosthetics’ means ‘to add strength.’”

He nodded. “Cool! It’s a cool name.”

She held the compliment at arm’s length for a moment, then slapped it away. “Hard to pronounce. Every. Single. Fucking. Conversation we had was about how to say it, or how to spell it.”

“It’s a good code name,” he said. “When you’re ready to go to market you hire a naming company to come up with a crowd-pleaser.” This appeared to settle her down. “Can I have one of these?” he asked, holding up a Sthetix shirt.

“Why?”

He thought better of explaining to Maeve that collecting swag from obscure, dead companies was a tech industry fetish.

“I like the name, and what it means. And it’s a memento of this day.”

She snorted. “The day Moab got nuked?”

He said nothing for a moment, intimidated by her sardonic force. Everything felt awkward. There was a sense of being on a perfectly good road in a perfectly sound car that was, however, veering into a ditch.

A thing happened where he simultaneously channeled both Forthrasts, Richard and Zula. “No,” he said, hearing his own voice strangely through blood-engorged ears. “The day I rode in the back of a truck with you.”

She actually took a step back, and raised her eyebrows. “You can have one. Make sure it fits.”

“Okay. No peeking.” He pulled his tunic up over his head and tossed it aside.

“Fair’s fair,” she returned. He heard a clank and a thud followed by a hissing, slithering sound. He turned just in time to see her peeling her sun shirt off. This had necessitated shrugging off her red suspenders, so her cargo shorts had impacted the pavement a moment earlier. Now she was down to a garment that he identified, vaguely, as a sports bra, and a pair of granny panties.

“Oh, excuse me,” he blurted.

“You looked?” she returned, mock outraged. “It’s all right. Nothing you wouldn’t see at the beach, right?”

He had turned his back on her and was pretending to sort through T-shirts. “Still … I didn’t mean to.”

He could hear bionic footsteps. “Would you like me to help you with that?”

“I’m good, thanks.”

She came up very close behind him, reached around his body, and plucked out a T-shirt. “You’d look smashing in this. Turn around and we’ll check the size.”

He turned to face her. She held the shirt up in front of him, pinning it against his shoulders with her thumbs, and looked him up and down. “It’s not long enough to hide your doodle,” she observed.

He made a reasonable guess as to the meaning of the term. “Doodle containment’s an issue,” he admitted, “with boxers.”

“One of these containers has some Sthetix men’s briefs,” she said. “Nice and tight.” She pulled the shirt away and tossed it into the box.

They stood there for a few moments looking at each other from rather close. When she’d pulled the hood off, her hair had come loose and tumbled messily down her back. A bit of gentle tugging and head-shaking would have worked wonders, but she didn’t give a shit.

Corvallis reached out slowly and put his hands on her hips.

“After my friend died,” he said, “and I got over the shock, you know what happened? Like, around the time of the funeral?”

“You got inappropriately horny and felt like fucking everything that moved?”

“Yeah, has that ever happened to you?”

“Yeah. When my dad died. When my company died. And now,” she said. “Even though no one died in this case.” She took a step forward, leaving maybe a quarter of an inch of clearance between her belly and the tip of his boxer-tented doodle. “It comes from thinking about mortality, right? Leads to a ‘life is short—let’s go’ mentality.”

He pulled her into him and mashed his doodle, bolt upright, against her stomach. She wrapped her arms around his neck for purchase and mashed back. They went on to perform sexual intercourse on the big pile of T-shirts on the rug. These could be grabbed in bunches and wadded up and jammed under body parts to facilitate various positions. She wasn’t talking much, but he got the idea that she wanted to be able to touch herself while also looking him in the face. Fair enough. They found a way to make it happen by what would have been described, in a PowerPoint presentation, as agile deployment to leverage the T-shirts’ structural modularity. He came first, perhaps inevitably given that he hadn’t had sex with anyone in three years. But he stayed in while she finished up, staring at him the whole time through half-closed eyes.

Somewhat later, at her suggestion, he gave her a piggyback ride up the stairs to the bathroom and deposited her in the shower stall, then went back and fetched her legs. While she showered, he attempted to clean up. As if blindly following its sole imperative, his semen had ended up all over the place, distributing itself over the maximum conceivable number of T-shirts as well as locations on the rug. There was a washing machine in the corner of the basement; he stuffed it full. He started the machine and, through the white noise of the plumbing above, heard Maeve denouncing him as some kind of fucker or other. He switched the cycle to cold.

For a while now, the part of Corvallis that was a responsible executive had, as it were, been bound and gagged in a closet, trying to get his attention by banging his forehead on the floor in Morse code. Considering what the rest of him had been up to, this was pretty hopeless, but now that Corvallis was alone in the office in a Sthetix T-shirt and a pair of tight Sthetix undies, drinking a postcoital beer and listening to Maeve wash her hair, he began to hear a few of those distant thumps and to consider the larger context of the day. Laurynas wanted him to save the company, or something.

He settled in behind the office computer and found the password yellow-noted on the underside of the keyboard. He made various efforts to use the Internet and satisfied himself that Moab’s sole ISP was still utterly screwed. His phone was showing three bars, but it still wouldn’t actually do anything. He reckoned that the best he could do was to document his presence in the city and squirt it out to the Internet when he could.

Maeve emerged, fully reassembled and impossibly distracting. He studied her, partly because he could and partly for cues as to how lovey-dovey he was supposed to be at this moment. She seemed all business, though she did take the liberty of slapping him on the ass as he headed for the shower. So, mixed messages. By the time he emerged, she had pulled the company van around and hitched on a trailer that was pretty clearly designed to carry inflated rafts.

She drove him to Main Street. He sat in the van in his underwear while she went into a store and came back with a pair of jams that would fit him. These were designed to appeal to a man half his age, which he assumed was her sense of humor at work. She took some photos of him partying with Moabites and talking in a really serious way to National Guardsmen and mugging with local kids, all composed to show as much authentic Moab background scenery as possible. Then a panorama of the whole street scene.

They drove to Angel Rock Ranch to check on the jet and its crew. Bonnie had found refuge at the ranch lodge; the pilots were camped out in the plane, awaiting a delivery of jet fuel. Next stop was the lodge itself, where Corvallis was able to get through to Laurynas on a landline. Laurynas was desperate for the photos, so they split up for a couple of hours; Maeve drove down to the sandbar to fetch Tom and the rafts while Bob drove Corvallis up to the top of a mesa from which he predicted—correctly—that it would be possible to get cell phone coverage from another town, many miles from Moab and unaffected by the DDoS attack. From there Corvallis was able to transmit the photos, though it was slow. By the time all of those pictures had seeped down the pipe and Bob had driven him back to the landing strip, Maeve was back with Tom and the rafts, waiting for him.

Maeve: Corvallis’s girlfriend. During this little excursion he had suddenly remembered this a few times and been delighted by the newness of it.

A couple of years ago he had broken a bone in his hand during weapons practice and been obliged to wear a cast for some time. During the first few days, he’d forget it was there, and then be surprised by some new limitation as he would discover that he couldn’t hit the Return key on his keyboard or operate the shift lever on his car. Suddenly having a girlfriend was the opposite thing, with all of the discoveries, so far, being good ones. Enhancements, not limitations. Prosthetics.

As they were driving back into Moab, Tom—who had been relegated to a back seat—said, “Fuck me,” while looking significantly out a window on the left side of the vehicle. Maeve said, “Holy shit.” Corvallis nearly had to put his head into her lap to see what they were looking at: a blue-nosed 747 banking into its final approach for landing, a few miles to the northwest.

“Air Force fucking One,” Tom said.

This time, they actually were stopped on the outskirts of town, but once Maeve had explained herself, and the Secret Service guys had checked IDs and given the van and the trailer a once-over, they were allowed through. She ditched the vehicle, and Tom, in the parking lot of Canyonland Adventures, and then walked with Corvallis to Main Street.

By the time the president had rolled into town and his press secretary and staff had finished arranging things and the media had set up their equipment, the day was in its last hour. Which might have been calculated, since the light was magical, and lit up the red rocks east of town perfectly while making everyone seem ten years younger and twice as good-looking. They found a place where the president could look into that light, with mountains and a big sign that said MOAB in the background of the shot. They set up the presidential lectern and handpicked people to stand to the left, and to the right, and behind it: uniformed National Guardsmen; Native Americans; salt-of-the-earth farmers; outdoorsy types with frizzy, sun-bleached hair; a minister; and an Asian-American tech executive with a disabled girlfriend. The president came online and announced to the world that Moab, the states of Utah and Colorado, the United States of America, and indeed the entire world had been the victims of a hoax that had been perpetrated almost entirely on the Internet. Nothing had happened here, save for a denial-of-service attack, originating overseas, that had shut down its Internet service and its cell phone towers. There had never been a bright flash of light; this was just a pattern of fake social media posts. The young actor at LAX was just that—a performer who had been hired to play a role, under the pretext that it was some kind of reality television show. Local police departments had been conned into setting up roadblocks by telephone calls that had originated overseas but been digitally tweaked to look as if they were local. A similar call had summoned the SWAT team in Las Vegas. They’d found nothing more than an empty suite that had been booked and paid for online. No one had ever checked in, but a package had arrived from overseas and been delivered to the suite by hotel staff. It turned out to be some old radium-dial watches in a scary-looking box: enough to make the cops’ Geiger counters click but not in any way dangerous. A similar gambit had been used in Manhattan. All of the confirmatory posts that had hit the Internet in the next hours—the burn victims, the fallout samples, the Los Alamos press conference—had been faked and injected onto the Internet via social media accounts and domains controlled through untraceable overseas shell companies.