Fall or, Dodge in Hell

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 cell phone wouldn’t work on the plane, but he had pretty good Internet and he could make voice calls through his laptop. He plugged in his headphones for better audio, booted up the relevant app, and typed in the number. There was a long wait—much longer than for conventional calls.

“Hell-low!?” said a woman. She sounded Australian, and pissed off that someone would call her. In the background it was possible to hear other people chattering and laughing. Corvallis visualized them on the raft, in a quiet stretch of the Colorado. He heard a splash and a kerplunk. Someone had jumped in for a swim.

Just from this, Corvallis had already learned what he needed to know: that Moab had not been nuked. But it seemed only polite to explain himself. “Maeve, I’m sorry to bother you but this is important. You don’t know me. My name is Corvallis Kawasaki.”

“As in the town of Corvallis? Oregon?”

“Yes. You can Google me when you get home, I’m an executive at Lyke. The social media company.”

“You work for Lyke?”

“Yes.”

“Is there something going wrong with my account? Did I get hacked or something?” He liked the way she asked it. Her tone wasn’t apprehensive. It was more as if she would find it wryly amusing to have been hacked.

“No. Your account is fine. Everything is fine where you’re concerned.”

She laughed. “Then why are you calling me? To ask me out on a bloody date?”

“That would be a violation of our confidentiality policies,” Corvallis responded. “This is about something else that you should probably be aware of.” And he went on to explain, as best as he could without taking all day, what had been happening. During this time, Maeve didn’t say much. It was a lot to take in. And for all of its complexity, for all of the millions of people on the Miasma who sincerely believed in its reality, it must have seemed ridiculous and dreamlike to her, gliding down the Colorado with her sun hat pulled down over her head and her paddle on her lap, looking at the ancient rocks, watching the Jones family gambol in the cool water.

“At about five twenty this morning, you were still in or near Moab, right?”

“I was at the office,” she said, “loading up the van.”

“In downtown Moab.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you see anything like a bright flash in the sky?” He already knew the answer, but he had to ask.

“No. There was no such thing.”

“But the Internet had gone down.”

“I’d got up at four thirty and it worked. Half an hour later it had crashed. Nothing.”

“Did you try to use your cell phone at all?”

“The Joneses did. They tried to ring me at five thirty, five forty, something like that. Nothing worked.”

“Why’d they want to call you?”

“To tell me they’d be late.”

“But you met at the sandbar and got off without anything unusual happening.”

“Yeah.”

“And the sandbar is, what, only a couple of miles outside of Moab?”

“That’s right. Hang on.” The phone went shuffly/muffly. Corvallis heard enough snatches of Maeve’s voice to guess that she was trying to explain matters to her clients, who had overheard enough to be curious.

“I’m here,” she assured him.

“Maeve? There’s a lot more we could say to each other,” Corvallis said, “but I’m betting that the Joneses have friends and family who know they were in Moab this morning and who are frantic with worry right now. You should probably hang up and call them.”

“Why haven’t they called already, I wonder?”

“They probably don’t have the sat phone number. To get the sat phone number, they’d have to reach your main office, and …”

“And all the comms are down, yeah. All right. How can I call you back, Corvallis?”

He gave her his number, and she recited it back to him, using the quasi-military “niner” in place of “nine,” which he found unaccountably confidence inspiring. Then she hung up without formalities.

While all of this had been going on, Jason Crabb had emailed him back to tell him what he already knew, namely that the communications blackout in Moab appeared to be the result of a conventional DDoS attack.

Corvallis called Laurynas, his boss, the fifty-ninth-richest man in the world, who answered the phone with “Don’t sell any of your stock.”

“Huh?”

“After the stock market reopens, that is. Legal’s sending out a company-wide blast.”

It took Corvallis a few seconds to catch up with the logic. “You know the Moab event is a hoax.”

“Yeah. It is becoming increasingly obvious.”

“You’re worried it’s going to be a bloodbath for our stock. Because so much of it is happening on our network. We look negligent. People will sue us.”

“But for now that is insider knowledge, C, and if you sell any of your stock, you are insider trading.”

“Got it.”

“Where are you, man? Other than on a plane.”

“Headed for Moab.”

Laurynas laughed. Corvallis had the sense it was the first time he had laughed all day. “No shit?”

“When I got suspicious I asked the pilots to plot a new course.”

“That is awesome.” Laurynas was ten years younger than him. “You going to try to land at Moab?”