Title Page

Fall; or Dodge in Hell

by
Neal Stephenson

Contents

Contents

Cover Title Page Dedication
Book 1 Part 1 Chapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8 Part 2 Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11 Part 3 Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Chapter 15Chapter 16 Part 4 Chapter 17Chapter 18Chapter 19Chapter 20Chapter 21Chapter 22Chapter 23Chapter 24 Part 5 Chapter 25Chapter 26Chapter 27Chapter 28Chapter 29Chapter 30Chapter 31Chapter 32 Part 6 Chapter 33Chapter 34Chapter 35Chapter 36Chapter 37Chapter 38Chapter 39Chapter 40Chapter 41 Part 7 Chapter 42 Book 2 Part 8 Chapter 43Chapter 44 Part 9 Chapter 45Chapter 46Chapter 47 Part 10 Chapter 48Chapter 49 Part 11 Chapter 50Chapter 51Chapter 52Chapter 53Chapter 54Chapter 55Chapter 56 Map of The Land Acknowledgments About The Author Also By Neal Stephenson Copyright

Dedication

Dedication

to O. L.

Book 1

Book 1

Part 1

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Dodge became conscious. His phone was burbling on the bedside table. Without opening his eyes he found it with his hand, jerked it free of its charging cord, and drew it into bed with him. He tapped it once to invoke its snooze feature. It became silent. He rolled onto his side and slid the phone under his pillow so that, when the alarm resumed in nine minutes, he would be able to put it back into snooze mode with less trouble. It was a small miracle that his brain contained a sufficient 3-D model of his bed and its surroundings that he was able to do what he had just done without opening his eyes. But there was no reason to press his luck.

He felt no particular desire to go back to sleep, for he had been enduring a curiously boring dream whose central plot seemed to be the difficulty of finding coffee. In this dream, he was in the small town in Iowa where he had grown up. Its landscape and its cast of characters were commingled with places he had been and people he had encountered during the decades since he had left it in the rearview mirror of his pickup truck. But the grid street pattern of that town, covering just a few square blocks, and easily mastered by a boy on a bicycle, was, decades later, the spatial lattice on which virtually all of his dreams were constructed. It was the graph paper on which his mind seemed to need to plot things.

In the dream, he had set out to get some coffee, only to find himself thwarted at every turn by any number of incredibly prosaic obstacles. In the story-world of the dream, this was bizarrely frustrating; it was simply unreal how so many contingencies could get in the way of this simple task.

But from the point of view of the awake, or at least snoozing, Dodge, it all had a clear explanation: it was, in fact, very difficult to obtain coffee while lying in bed with one’s eyes closed.