Fall or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson

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lull. By closing the door, silencing his electronics, unrolling the mat, lying down, and letting sleep take him for twenty minutes, he was able to refresh himself to a degree that would then keep him working alertly for several hours more.

      The amount of time spent asleep didn’t really matter. He had decided that the key to it all—the one thing that determined whether the nap would actually refresh him—was the breaking of the thread of consciousness: that moment when he ceased to think in a coherent, sequential, self-aware way and went adrift. Often, this was connected with a jolt of an arm or a leg as he stepped over the threshold from conscious thinking into a dream where he was obliged to reach out and catch a ball or open a door or something. If the jolt didn’t wake him up, then it meant he had snipped the thread of consciousness and that the nap had thereby achieved its only real purpose. Even if he woke up ten seconds later, he would be as refreshed—possibly more so—as if he’d slumbered deeply for an hour.

      He had studied the jolt. On those increasingly rare occasions when he slept with a woman, he would sometimes will himself to stay awake as she fell into slumber, listening to her breathing and feeling her body go soft against his until, just at the moment when she drifted away, she would convulsively move a limb.

      His business activities (he was the founder and chairman of a large video game company) sometimes involved flying in a private jet to the Isle of Man, eight time zones away, where a longtime business associate—an independently wealthy writer—dwelled in a renovated castle. The writer would put him up in a bedchamber in one of the towers: a round room decorated with medieval bric-a-brac and warmed by burning wood in a fireplace built into the wall. The bed was a four-poster with a heavy canopy. A couple of years ago, after climbing into that bed and lying there sleepless for a while, Richard—for that was Dodge’s real name—had finally drifted off and fallen into a nightmare involving a very dangerous and unpleasant character he had tangled with some years earlier. He had awakened to the hallucinatory awareness that this man was standing next to his bed looking down at him. Which was impossible, since the man was dead—but Richard had been in a half-dreaming state where logic did not hold sway, and all he knew was what he saw. He tried to sit up. Nothing happened. He tried to raise his arms. They did not move even the tiniest amount. He tried to draw breath and scream, but his body did not respond to the command from his brain. He was perfectly helpless, lacking even a bound captive’s power to struggle against his bonds. All he could do was experience the terror of it, and the horror of his complete lack of agency, until somehow he drowsed off again.

      Moments later, he had awoken with a start, and sat up convulsively. His body worked again. He threw off the heavy duvet and swung his feet off the bed, turning to face the dying fire a few feet away. No one else was in the chamber. The massive fortress-style door was still bolted. The nightmare impression, which had been so convincing a minute ago, now seemed ridiculous. Lying back down experimentally, he looked up and saw that the lamp on his bedside table was casting a firelight shadow onto the canopy above him, and that the shadow moved about as the fire flickered and the logs settled. He must have half-opened his eyes while sleeping and interpreted this as the shadow of a man.

      So the nightmare had an explanation. Still mysterious, though, was the absolute paralysis that had trapped him in that bad dream. Later, Richard had learned that this was a well-recognized and scientifically verified phenomenon known as sleep paralysis. Primitive cultures identified it as some form of enchantment, or made up stories about eldritch night-stalking creatures that would sit on your chest and pin you to your bed and suck the air from your lungs and the screams from your throat.

      But there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for it. When you were awake, your brain could of course control your body. When you slept, however, you tended to dream. And in your dreams you could run, fight, and talk. But if the body continued to answer commands from the brain, you’d be thrashing all over the bed, vocalizing, and so on. So a mechanism had evolved whereby, at the moment that the thread of consciousness was severed, the link between brain and body was cut, like throwing a switch. And at the moment you woke up, the switch was thrown back to the “on” position and you went back to moving around as you always did. Normally the system worked with an amazing degree of perfection, so most people lived their whole lives not even knowing that it existed. But every system had glitches. The jolt you sometimes made while drifting off to sleep was one such—it happened when the switch was a fraction of a second late going off. Another, much more impressive and terrifying sort of glitch happened every so often, especially to people who—as in Richard’s case on the Isle of Man—were sleeping off of their accustomed schedule. You would wake up, but the switch would not be thrown to “on” and so you would remain as perfectly paralyzed as you had been a moment ago while sound asleep. Just like a person who, while seeming to slumber and breathe peacefully, is in fact having a terrible nightmare, you would lie there with eyes open in perfect, inescapable repose, unable to do anything about the imaginary monster on your chest, the intruder next to your bed, the fire consuming your house.

      In any case, the only lasting consequences for Dodge had been more desultory browsing about how sleep worked and further introspection about his own napping practices. This was how he had developed his theory—which was unsupported by any scientific evidence whatsoever—that the one and only key to a successful nap was to break the thread of consciousness just long enough for the switch to be thrown to “off.” When it got thrown to “on” again, even if it was only a few minutes later, the brain–body system rebooted itself, like a fucked-up computer that just needs to be unplugged from the wall for ten seconds and restarted in order to come back to life in clean working order.

      This notion around thread cutting was what finally brought him awake, since a connection had somehow been made in his mind, and now it was going to keep him awake. He had reached the point in his life where very few things could really compel him to get out of bed, but one of the calls to which he would readily answer was that of his own stray musings and thoughts, his mind’s desire to make connections.

      It did not, however, actually get him out of bed. Ringing in the ears did that. His tinnitus was especially annoying today—the world’s way of telling him he needed to get up and make a little noise. He’d long suffered from a mild case, the result of too many guns fired and nails pounded in his youth, too many nights in British Columbia biker bars. Then, a few years ago, he had been exposed to a lot of close-up gunfire without appropriate hearing precautions. Without precautions of any kind whatsoever, for that matter. Ever since, he had rarely been without some amount of ringing in the ears—sometimes a high-pitched tone, sometimes a hiss. The cause of the condition was somewhat mysterious. It seemed to be some sort of well-meaning attempt by the brain to make sense of a loss of valid signals from ears that were no longer in perfect working order. Tending to confirm this idea was that it was at its worst when things were quiet; the environment wasn’t giving his auditory system any good data to lock on to. The solution was to get up and make noise. Not necessarily a lot. Just the normal sounds of footsteps and faucet running that reassured his brain that there was a coherent world out there and gave it a few simple clues as to what was actually what.

      He got up, pulled on pajama bottoms, urinated, took the pills he was supposed to take before breakfast, and went out to the so-called great room of his penthouse, which was on the top of a thirty-two-story building in downtown Seattle. It was a very expensive piece of real estate that, in the manner typical of Northwest tech industrialists, was built out and decorated in a manner so simple, bare-bones, and informal as to be actually kind of ostentatious. Glass doors made up much of its western exterior wall, and he had left these open all night, doubling the size of the living area by joining it to the terrace. The terrace had a glass roof with infrared heaters like the ones suspended above the cash registers at Home Depot to keep the Somalian and Filipino checkout clerks from succumbing to hypothermia. These made it comfortable even when it was fifty degrees Fahrenheit and raining, which was about half of the year. In late summer and (as now) early autumn, the heaters weren’t needed, and so the terrace just served as an extension of the great room, which flowed into it without interruption. It faced toward Elliott Bay and the Olympic Mountains beyond.

      Anomalous splashes of pink and purple flared against the wood, leather, and stone. Richard had a grandniece, Sophia, who for all intents and purposes was his granddaughter, and she came over frequently.

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