Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson
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“Actually,” Julian said, “I kinda think her job is to do whatever my mom and dad—who pay her to edit for our whole family—want her to do.”
Phil shook his head. “You might as well save some money and just subscribe to an edit stream if that’s how it is.”
Julian was exasperated. “As long as Mom and Dad are paying for my hookup—”
“See, this is why you have to get your own editor.”
The two women exchanged a look, the meaning of which was that Sophia gave Anne-Solenne permission to yell at Sophia’s boyfriend. She did so: “Wake up! Not everyone can afford a cool hipster editor in New York.” She delivered this with the sweet/blunt blend that had caused Sophia to fall platonically in love with her during their freshman year. Together, Sophia and Anne-Solenne were token holders on three different collective PURDAHs, which was a way of saying that their identities had become commingled in ways that could never be undone. Software written by one of those had led to Anne-Solenne’s summer internship in San Francisco. Getting her there was the nominal purpose of the road trip that they were now planning.
“That’s not what I’m suggesting,” Phil said. “Manila, Calcutta, Lagos, all teeming with totally cool native-English-speaking eds who’ll cost less than what you spend on coffee.”
“It’s a sore subject in my family,” Julian said. “There’s a whole subtree of cousins who went off the rails because they went in together on a bad editor who ended up mainlining Byelorussian propaganda into their feeds. We lost a whole branch of the family, basically. So my mom in particular is super sensitive about this.”
This actually shut Phil up long enough for Sophia to lunge forward and put her thumb down on Des Moines. “Assume we solve the problem of getting our families not to lose their shit over the fact that we are venturing off-interstate for two whole days,” she said. “Like I said, we hop out of Phil’s car here, just take overnight bags, leave most of the luggage in it, and tell it to meet us in Sioux City.” For the benefit of those who did not know their Iowa geography, she pointed at same, and Anne-Solenne helpfully positioned her espresso cup on it, near where Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota came together. Phil pulled his glasses back down over his eyes so that he could see.
“It’ll get there in just a few hours,” Sophia went on. “After that it can drive around Sioux City at random or hang out in a parking space until we catch up with it. Meanwhile we switch to a rental vehicle that is better suited for local conditions.”
A pause as all imagined local conditions.
“And—what I will euphemistically call local guides?”
“I really don’t think that they are necessary. Not where we’re going. But the rental company won’t let us do a one-way without them.”
It’s like any place else,” Phil confirmed, three weeks later, as they watched his car drive out of the lot and pull into traffic on Fleur Drive. A pair of driverless trucks politely adjusted their speed to give it a gap to merge into. The four of them were sweating in the greenhouse summer of central Iowa. Overnight bags were suspended from index fingers instead of slung over shoulders. They jockeyed languidly to catch stray breezes. Planes whined overhead coming in to land. This was not the shaded and air-conditioned comfort of the airport’s car rental center, but an outlying lot catering to basically anyone who intended to venture more than a couple of miles from an interstate highway.
“You can set your bags down and they will be as safe as if they were locked up in a bank vault,” said Larry, the manager on duty, using a thumb to shift the strap on his shoulder and expose a sweat-darkened stripe of T-shirt. Dangling from the strap was an assault rifle, poised in such a way that its muzzle was usually aimed at the ground. Which seemed dangerous; but Larry for his part was aghast at his four young customers’ unwillingness to let their bags out of their grasp and clearly imagined that wherever they came from, no property was safe.
Sophia had her glasses up on her forehead. She was tempted to flip them down and see if they could face-rec this Larry and if so find out who his editor was—or more likely what edit stream he subscribed to and what particular flavor of post-reality it was pumping into his mind. But Larry didn’t have his glasses down and so it would have been somewhat impolite.
He turned away and led them across heat-softened asphalt toward an old vehicle that Sophia recognized vaguely as a Land Cruiser or Land Rover or one of those: boxy, upright, of a general design that was four or five decades old. But it was clean, well cared for, beaded with rinse water from the car wash. It had been modded in various ways that Larry wanted them to notice and to appreciate. He stepped up onto a running board, carefully adjusting the angle of his assault rifle so it wouldn’t bang into the side of the vehicle, and patted the roof, which was covered in bright yellow composite.
“Kevlar,” he announced. “Now. Contrary to the scare propaganda you have probably been fed, celebratory fire is overrated as far as danger. A descending round has lost most of its energy. Terminal velocity is much less than muzzle velocity. So you don’t need full armor on the roof. This will do you fine.”
“Is there a lot of celebratory fire where we are going?” Julian asked.
“No. Iowans are stoic,” Phil answered in the unduly confident tones of one who was just reading about it.
“That’s not the point Larry’s making,” said Sophia. “The point is, why spend money armoring against a nonexistent threat?”
Larry nodded. “Doors and windows, of course, that’s a different story, but those are full.”
“Full?” Julian asked.
“Fully armored. As a precaution. In case of stray rounds, accidental discharges. Wouldn’t do you much good in an engagement. But that’s what Tom and Kevin are for.” Larry hooked his thumb back over his shoulder at a pickup truck idling at the edge of the lot. Tom and Kevin were seated in the cab, luxuriating in the A/C. Mounted in the pickup’s open bed was a tripod, currently vacant. A steel locker running athwart the bed, triple padlocked, contained the machine gun that they would take out and mount to the tripod when venturing into regions where an impressive show of force was deemed prudent. Sprawling across the roof of the cab was a streamlined shape that might be mistaken for the world’s most aerodynamic cargo rack until you realized it was actually a fixed-wing drone.
Larry stepped down and opened the driver’s-side door. “Now,” he said, “which one of y’all claims to be able to drive a car?”
Sophia raised her hand as the other three sidled backward. Larry gave a little nod.
“Where are you from?” Sophia asked.
Larry looked a bit startled. “I’m from here.”
“But how far back?”
“As far back as you wanna look. Great-greats came over from Holland. Why do you ask?”
“You