Fall or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson

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open by a team of three firemen. Waiting for them was a woman in scrubs. She had made eye contact with the firemen before they even reached the door. As they burst in, she turned on her heel and ran into the back, and they understood that they should follow her. They were carrying not axes and hoses, but large boxes emblazoned with red crosses.

      The initial reaction of Corvallis was, some would say, curiously detached and unemotional. Evidently, someone in the back of this medical practice had been taken ill. Perhaps an elderly doctor had suffered a heart attack, or something. One would think that a medical practice, sited in a building full, from top to bottom, of medical offices, in a neighborhood entirely given over to the medical industry, would have some special procedure to follow in such a case. But, if Corvallis Kawasaki understood correctly what he was seeing, this was not the case. When there was a problem, the people here dialed 911, just like anyone else. The call was routed to the nearest fire station and the EMTs were dispatched. This was mildly surprising, but the technology executive in him found it actually to be quite reasonable and, in a way, comforting. The EMTs in the fire stations were the best at what they did, the quickest to respond. The system was working.

      Now that his focus on the screen of his laptop had been broken, he sat up straight and began to take in further details. A woman in pink scrubs was standing where he could see her, hands clasped together in front of pursed lips, staring down a hallway. Her eyes began to glisten. The EMTs were firing off tight bursts of words. The receptionists had stopped doing their work entirely and were just sitting frozen at their workstations, gripping the edges of their desks, like officers on the bridge of a starship getting ready to be hit by photon torpedoes. The voices of the EMTs became louder and clearer. While continuing to do their work, they were, it seemed, wheeling the patient out of a room, down the hallway, toward the exit. The woman in pink scrubs sprang out of the way. One of the receptionists, who had a better angle than Corvallis, scrambled up, ran across the lobby to the door, and hauled it open.

      The EMTs wheeled Richard Forthrast out on a gurney and maneuvered him at reckless speed out the door and in the direction of the elevator bank. He was only visible to Corvallis for one, perhaps two seconds, and so it took a little while for Corvallis to process what he had seen. Richard was shirtless, the open-back hospital gown stripped away from him, and electrodes had been stuck to his torso. A tube had been inserted between his teeth and, presumably, down into his windpipe. One of the EMTs was holding a sort of rubber bag, squeezing it in a slow steady rhythm to force air into Richard’s chest.

      Corvallis Kawasaki’s first, absurd instinct was to pull his phone out of his pocket and dial Richard’s number. Because what was going on here was obviously weird, obviously a crisis. On both of these counts it was very much a Richard sort of problem. For much of his postcollege life, Corvallis had been in the comfortable habit of knowing that any such matter could automatically be handed off to Dodge, who would be not merely willing but eager to take it on. Why, Dodge would be offended if weird crises were not instantly dumped into his lap. This was now at odds with the intellectual awareness that Dodge was dying or dead.

      He closed his laptop, slid it into his bag, stood up, and followed a debris trail of medical wrappers to the elevator lobby, which he reached just in time to glimpse Richard’s gray face and wired-up torso as a pair of doors glided shut on it. He punched the “down” button and waited for the next lift in a very odd state of mind. Nothing was certain yet. Word had not yet gone out on what Dodge referred to as the Miasma. Corporation 9592’s stock had not begun to slide. Standing there alone in that lobby, he could convince himself that he had just imagined it, suffered a kind of waking nightmare. If Dodge was about to die, should the world not have been crumbling all about him? Should the streets not have been full of wailing gamers? And yet the elevator lobby was just an elevator lobby, changeless as the stars.

      When he reached the ground floor he was able to follow a trail of shocked bystanders—security guards, incoming patients, scrub-wearing medics waiting in line for their lattes—to an exit of the building just in time to see an ambulance peel out. A moment later it turned on its lights and its siren.

      Corvallis broke into a run. He was able to keep pace with the ambulance for about a block as it negotiated some turns, slowing to honk in righteous fury at a dim-witted motorist, then cutting across six lanes of traffic. Presently it went around a corner and disappeared from view behind a vast hospital, but Corvallis was able to track it by sound, and compare those findings with red signs pointing the way to EMERGENCY. Dodge’s ambulance ride had been all of about three blocks long. They could almost have rolled him there on the gurney.

      Corvallis resisted an urge to just run out into traffic, the way characters did in movies. He whacked buttons and waited in law-abiding fashion for pedestrian signals, then ran when he could. He reached the emergency room perhaps sixty seconds after the ambulance had pulled in. Dodge had already been wheeled in past the reception barrier. Here the receptionists were shielded behind thick walls of glass, like inner-city liquor store clerks, and watched over by ceiling-mounted cameras in black glass bubbles, as well as an actual human security guard who seemed a little distracted by what had just blown by him. Corvallis found himself on the outside of the glass barricade, sharing a waiting room with a Hispanic construction worker who had damaged his left hand and a stocky black woman who was texting. The nurse behind the glass wall asked Corvallis whether she could help him. He sensed that she was sizing him up, putting her training to use as she evaluated him for signs of trauma or mental illness. He was wearing khaki trousers and an old T-shirt with a black raincoat. He approached the glass wall and explained that he was with the man who had just been wheeled in from the ambulance.

      He didn’t make it past the barrier. It was some kind of policy issue regarding Corvallis’s actual relationship to the patient. He and Richard had not come in together. Richard had not formally designated Corvallis as his wingman. Corvallis could have been anyone. For all they knew, he was a mentally ill person who had just followed the ambulance in. Or perhaps Richard and Corvallis were lovers, and it was a domestic violence situation. The nurse at the front desk had no way of knowing. She had made some remark about “next of kin.” This shut him up and sent him to the nearest waiting room chair. Partly because it was a disturbing turn of phrase and partly because, yes, of course, that was his highest responsibility at this moment: to get in touch with Zula Forthrast and let her know that she needed to come to the hospital.

      She was there twenty minutes later, breathing hard. She had simply run from her condo, which was less than a mile away in the adjoining hilltop neighborhood. She worked part-time now, mostly from home, which was within walking distance of Sophia’s preschool. The Forthrast family had adopted her, at the age of seven, from an orphanage in Eritrea, and raised her in a farm town in Iowa. Her adoptive mother had died in an accident and she had become a ward of the whole extended family. Corvallis wasn’t certain who her parents were according to the letter of the law, but she’d become very close to her uncle Richard. Corvallis saw her running down the sidewalk, puffs of steam coming from her mouth. To have come here on foot was an unusual choice, but just the sort of calculation that Zula would make; the distance was such that she could cover it this way faster than it would take to summon an Uber. She slowed to a fast walk as she approached the building. The glass doors opened for her automatically. She was wearing a sweater and jeans and toting the knapsack she often used in lieu of a purse; she hadn’t bothered with a hat or a raincoat. Her uncontained hair had drawn humidity from the air and was a bedewed, corkscrewy glory. As she came in she recognized Corvallis, who had stood up. She took a step in his direction before correcting her course to the nurses’ station. “Zula Forthrast,” she announced, reaching for her wallet. “Here to see my uncle Richard Forthrast.” She slid her driver’s license across the counter. “I was told he was here.” And only then did she look up and meet Corvallis’s eye. She looked alert and interested. After some of the things she had lived through, nothing much could make her distraught. Not that she didn’t have feelings, but she’d learned how to wall them off. The events of a few years ago had thrust her into the public spotlight for a while, forced her to develop the knack that all famous people had of maintaining a certain persona while exposed to the gaze of strangers. It was serving her well now. She had a kind of distracted air about her, and Corvallis couldn’t tell whether she was dazed by the news or being wry. How many things could go wrong in her life?

      “Nothing

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