Jay Garner wore khakis and open-collared shirts in Iraq, while L. Paul Bremer was known for his combat boots and tailored suits; Alberto Gonzales called himself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror; Mark Zuckerberg fenced; Nathan Myhrvold dreamt of helium balloons over the North Pole; and Charles Graner was accused of putting a razor blade in the food of an inmate (though the alleged incident took place in the United States, not Iraq, and in any case, apart from this note, his name goes unmentioned here …).
Real-world people and events appear in The Infernal, but—to use the legal phrase, which also happens to be true—this is a work of fiction, and all incidents and characters are either fictional or used fictitiously. Where characters and events can be matched in one way or another to real-world counterparts, they have been deformed, reimagined, made into weird composite animals, and/or rendered insane, with invented conversations, thoughts, feelings, backstories, geographies, gestures, verbal tics, sunsets, and blood ties sprayed everywhere, helter-skelter.
In a 1945 Atlantic article, “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush described his memex, a hypothetical, early precursor to hypertext and the World Wide Web. Though he appears here as a villain, he is widely (and rightly) admired as one of the twentieth century’s most important figures in the fields of science and technology. As for Jimmy Wales, well … Wikipedia is one of the great human things of recent years, but my Jimmy Wales is someone else, who invents things that are different and kills people who get in his way and lives a very long time. The only accusations of villainy that The Infernal credibly supports are those connecting “Mark Doten” (pages 160–78 and 266–80) with the author.