Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson
other. Frank nodded.
“I’ll get on it, boss,” said Lenny.
“Okay. Let me know how it goes. I’m really interested to hear any particulars about how the FAA behaves when you run this by them.”
Corvallis got back to his laptop, and its live Miasmic news feeds, in time to see a big military chopper lifting off from the roof of that casino in Las Vegas. Dangling below it was something that looked heavy. It flew off in the direction of the nearby air force base, which was described as a top secret facility that had once been used for nuclear weapons testing. The all-clear was sounded in Vegas. But immediately it was swamped, on the news feeds, by reports of a precisely similar incident taking shape on the top floor of a skinny residential tower under construction in midtown Manhattan. This had to duel for airtime with shocking new footage just coming in from Moab, where, for the first time since it had all started, we were now seeing photos of horribly burned victims, and shaky video of their being unloaded from medical choppers. From outside the cordon, downwind of Moab, bloggers on horseback and all-terrain vehicles were now reporting elevated radiation levels. The mainstream media were ignoring, or actively suppressing, these reports, presumably because the government had admonished them not to spread panic. But social media were more effective at spreading what passed for news and so it scarcely mattered.
Someone had finally got close enough to Moab to do a flyover with a drone. They couldn’t get too close because of military units that were interdicting travel in the area, and also because they didn’t want to expose themselves to radiation, but they were able to transmit some footage of the ruined town. The low frame rate, the bricky pixels, the compression artifacts in the image, the tendency of the camera to be aimed in the wrong direction as it flew through smoke and dust, all contributed to a feeling of cinema verité that was beginning to strike his increasingly jaded eye as too good to be true.
Keeping an eye on Lyke’s internal email system, Corvallis noticed that Jason Crabb was online. Jason was a systems administrator for Nubilant who had jumped to Lyke in the wake of the acquisition. It had given him a pretext for moving to the Bay Area, which he’d been wanting to do anyway, because of a complicated girlfriend situation. Corvallis clicked on the little video camera icon next to Jason’s name. After a minute or so of user interface fuckery, he found himself looking at a moving image of Jason, who was sitting in his girlfriend’s bed, propped up on a lot of pillows. The upward camera angle of his laptop made Jason’s beard huge and magnificent in a rufous shaft of morning sunlight. He did not greet Corvallis but just stared at him, alert and expectant. On a day such as this one, “C-plus” would not have taken the unusual step of initiating a video call unless it was important.
“Suppose there’s a company in Moab with a website, or some other kind of Internet presence of any kind whatsoever for that matter,” Corvallis began.
“Yeah?”
“It’s off the air now, let’s say.”
“No shit!”
“Okay, but pretend for a moment we don’t actually know why. There are two possible explanations for its being off the air. You need to get all Sherlock and figure out which is the truth.”
“Okay—??”
“Scenario one is that Moab got nuked and the wires, or the optical fibers, don’t even reach into town anymore, they are just dangling from a burning telegraph pole in the desert. Scenario two is that Moab is still there but the ISP that serves it is being crushed under a DDoS attack.” Meaning, as Jason would know, “distributed denial of service.” “Or for that matter any kind of remote hack that would shut it down for a while. Is there a way you could distinguish between those two scenarios without getting out of bed?”
“I have to pee,” Jason said.
“You know what I mean.”
“Probably.”
“Okay, please do that and get back to me,” Corvallis said, and disconnected.
Lots more was happening in Manhattan now, on news and social media sites, on talk radio. The wave had not crested yet. If Corvallis were among the billions who actually believed that Moab had been nuked, he’d have been fully absorbed. As it was he found himself in a weirdly peaceful and calm state.
“I called an audible,” Frank was saying to him.
Corvallis looked up to see the pilot standing in the aisle, looking down at him. His brain slowly caught up. Calling an audible was some kind of sports-based metaphor. It meant that Frank had made a decision on his own—improvised in a way he hoped Corvallis would later approve of.
“I filed a flight plan to El Paso.”
“El Paso?”
“It’ll take us near Moab. Near enough that we can look down on it like you said. But we’ll be at forty thousand feet—above the box.”
“The box?”
“The box of airspace around Moab where the FAA doesn’t want us to go.”
“El Paso’s a lot farther away,” Corvallis pointed out.
Frank nodded. “The only thing that’s a little sketchy about this is that we really don’t have that much fuel. I mean, we could stretch it, but we’d be in the red zone. So we’ll have to land somewhere else, short of El Paso.”
“That’s okay,” Corvallis said, “everything will be different by then.”
“It’s okay for you,” Frank said, “but it makes me look like a fucking idiot for filing a flight plan that doesn’t make sense fuel-wise.”
“Just tell me who I need to talk to. I’ll take responsibility.” Corvallis generally didn’t like looking people in the eye, but from watching Dodge he knew that there were certain times when it was a deal-breaker. So he forced himself to look Frank in the eye. “I will personally take responsibility for this and I will get you off the hook.” Frank shrugged, raised his eyebrows, and went back to the cockpit.
Corvallis had been thinking about a detail that had passed under his gaze while he’d been clicking around learning about Maeve Braden. He had to dig surprisingly deep into his browser history to find it. This was complicated by the fact that he had been checking her out both on the public Miasma and in Lyke’s secure file system. Eventually he tracked it down in the latter. It was the personal data record associated with her account—the result of her having filled out a form, years ago, when she’d joined Lyke, and having clicked the “submit” button. Which, come to think of it, was a pretty strange bit of semantics. But anyway, she had listed several telephone numbers, including one that began with “011,” which was the prefix for dialing international calls from the United States. He had already learned of her Australian background and so upon scanning this for the first time he’d made the obvious assumption that it was an Oz number. But it wouldn’t make any particular sense for her to go to the trouble of entering such a number into her profile unless she was actually spending a lot of time in Australia.
On a second look, the country code was 881, which wasn’t Australia; it was a special code used by satellite phones.
Corvallis wasn’t hugely knowledgeable about sat phones, but he knew a couple of people who owned them, either just because they were geeks or because they did a lot of travel in places with no cell phone coverage. It seemed pretty obvious that Maeve was one of the latter. Her whole job was taking groups of tourists on trips deep into the canyons of the Colorado River, where cell phone use was out of the question. Of course Canyonlands Adventures would own sat phones, and of course they’d issue them to their guides.
Whether she would keep the thing turned on, and within easy reach, was another question. For all he knew, it might have been turned off and buried in a waterproof bag at the bottom of a raft. But then it might get dumped overboard if the raft flipped—which was exactly the kind of situation where you’d need it. It would make more sense for the lead guide to carry it on her person.
It was worth a go, anyway. Corvallis’s