Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but I don’t think so. Want me to go check?”

  “Hang on,” Corvallis said, “I think I can spare you the trouble.” He had brought up the photo application on his laptop. He had thousands of pictures archived on this thing. Organizing them into albums was one of those tasks he never seemed to have time for. But the application did have a built-in ability to recognize faces, and automatically to produce collections of pictures that included a particular face. During stretches of bored downtime on airplanes, Corvallis had taught it to recognize a few faces that were important to him, including that of Richard Forthrast. He clicked on “Dodge” in the interface. The application cogitated for a few moments and then populated the window with thumbnails of pictures featuring Dodge, or people who, according to its algorithm, resembled him. With another click Corvallis sorted them according to date, then began to page through them from the beginning. His earliest personal photograph of Dodge was from about eight years ago, but he had a few older photos, taken before he had even met the man, that had found their way onto his drive as the result of being attached to emails or what have you. Some of these showed a very young man: the long-haired 1970s draft-dodging edition of Richard Forthrast, hanging out in wild places along the Idaho–British Columbia border, and depicted in the flamboyant hues of scanned Kodachrome. No bracelets for him. Hitting the right-arrow key, he worked up through the years until he stumbled into a series of pictures taken around the time of Corporation 9592’s initial public offering. In one of those, Dodge was gripping a magnum of champagne in both hands, bracing it against his penis, holding a thumb over the mouth of the bottle to make it spray foam at Pluto. The photo was harshly lit by a flash and it showed both of his arms clearly. On his left wrist, competing for space with a cheap digital wristwatch, was a medical alert bracelet: a metal plaque about the size of a large postage stamp, held on with a chain, blazoned with a red caduceus, otherwise covered with print too fine to read. Way more metallic real estate than what would have been needed for “I am allergic to penicillin.”

  Corvallis didn’t need to read it because he knew exactly what it was. Just to be sure, he checked the date of the photo and verified that it had been taken within a couple of months of the signing of the will.

  He opened up a new browser window and clicked in the search box. He turned his attention to the health care directive and skimmed through one of those Monaco-font sections until he found an unusual series of words. He typed those in and hit the Enter key and was immediately presented with a screen full of exact matches. The same text had been copied and pasted in many places on the Internet. For his purposes, most of them would be red herrings. Corvallis scanned through the search results until finally he saw the word that he had, this entire time, been trying to dredge up from his memory.

  He went back to the search box and typed “Eutropians.” A memory from the early days of the Internet, the 1990s tech boom.

  The primary website had not been updated for more than ten years. The organization, if it even still existed, seemed to have gone dark in 2002, in the black years after the implosion of the tech bubble and 9/11.

  The Wikipedia entry was bracketed in multiple layers of warnings; people had been fighting over it.

  Some of the basic facts, however, seemed indisputable. The Eutropians were a movement that had taken shape during the early 1990s, when all things had seemed possible through technology. It was just an informal discussion group in Berkeley, with a branch around Stanford. They had adopted the World Wide Web early and created what at the time was an unusually sophisticated website. Now, of course, it was as dated as black-and-white TV. A nonprofit had been founded, later obtained 501(c)(3) status, and ceased to exist in 2004. More than one for-profit company had emerged from the movement. The Wikipedia entry was littered with question marks and complaints from various editors. Corvallis didn’t have to check its history to know that it had been the battleground of many flame wars. The details didn’t matter.

  “If I can get Dr. Trinh in here,” Corvallis said, “can I then have a few minutes of your time?”

  Actually he didn’t say it; he texted it to Zula, who was across the table from him, trying to calm someone down over the phone. She glanced at the screen of her phone, then looked up at him and nodded.

  Corvallis had a bit of a hard time convincing the nurse at the front desk that what he had to tell Dr. Trinh was really more important than what he was doing at the moment, but when he used the words “health care directive” and “legal” it got her attention. A few minutes later, the doctor was in the room again with Corvallis and Zula.

  “There was this group of geeks in the Bay Area in the 1990s who thought they saw a path to immortality through technology,” Corvallis began. “They became known as Eutropians. It is a quasi-technical name. If entropy is the tendency of things to become disorganized over time, then eutropy is a statement of optimism. Not only can we defeat entropy, but the universe, in a way, wants us to use our powers as conscious beings to make things better. And part of that is defeating death.”

  “How’d that work out for them?” Zula asked, deadpan.

  “These guys were smart,” Corvallis said. “Not flakes. There was nothing they didn’t know, or couldn’t learn, about the science. They knew perfectly well that it was going to be a long time—decades at least—before practical life-extension technology became available. They knew that in the meantime they could die at any point in a car accident or whatever. So, they instituted a stopgap. Based on the best science at the time, they designed a protocol for preserving human remains and keeping them on ice indefinitely.”

  “So that, down the road—” Zula began.

  “Down the road,” Corvallis said, “when it did become technologically possible, they could be brought back to life.”

  “Like Walt Disney,” said Dr. Trinh.

  “Apparently that’s an urban myth,” Corvallis said, “but yeah, it’s the same idea. Cryonics. It’s a big long hairy story. The idea has been around since the 1960s and it’s come and gone in waves. Well, what you both need to know is that Richard got caught up in one of those waves for a little while.”

  “It doesn’t seem like him,” Zula said.

  “Yes and no. Sure, he is—was—skeptical. A fatalist. But he was also open-minded. Willing to take calculated risks.”

  “I’ll give you that.”

  “Around the time that his company became a big deal, he was making a lot of contacts in the tech world, going to conferences, hanging out with VCs. One of the VCs who had backed Corporation 9592 also had some money in a startup that had been founded by an offshoot of the Eutropians. To make a long story short, it was a cryonics company. They constructed a facility in eastern Washington State. Electrical power is cheap there because of the Grand Coulee Dam.”

  “And that was their biggest expense,” Dr. Trinh surmised. “Power to keep the freezers running.”

  “Exactly. They approached a lot of people who had new tech money and offered them a Pascal’s Wager kind of deal.”

  “Pascal’s Wager?” asked Dr. Trinh.

  “Pascal once said that you should believe in God because, if you turned out to be wrong, you weren’t losing anything, and if you turned out to be right, the reward was infinite,” Corvallis said.

  Zula nodded. “It was the same exact deal here.”

  “Exactly,” Corvallis said. “If cryonics turned out to be worthless, and it was impossible to save your frozen body, who cares? You’re dead anyway. But if it actually did work, you might be able to live forever.”

  “I can totally see Richard going for that,” Zula said, nodding. “After a few drinks.”

  “He did go for it, and he followed all of their recommended procedures,” Corvallis said. “For a little while, he wore a special medical bracelet giving instructions on how to freeze his body.” He spun his laptop around and let them see the photograph. “Around the same time, he updated his will. And
most of it, I’m guessing, is just an ordinary will.” Corvallis rested his hand on the thickest of the three documents. “But the health care directive and the disposition of remains consist mostly of boilerplate instructions that had been developed by the Eutropians. And basically what it says is that after his body has been chilled down, it’s supposed to be shipped to this facility out in eastern Washington, where a team of medical technicians will take over and prepare him for the full cryonic-preservation thing.”

  “I’ve never seen that bracelet on him,” Zula remarked.

  “Because he stopped wearing it before you came out to Seattle,” Corvallis said. “He told me this story once, a long time ago. About the Eutropians and the VC and all the rest. I had kind of forgotten it. Dodge had a lot of stories and this wasn’t the most interesting of them.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Zula confirmed, with a slow shake of the head.

  “It was pretty clear from the way he told the story that he had decided the whole thing was ridiculous. Like when he went out and bought that Escalade and then wrecked it.”

  “One of those silly things that boys do when they suddenly get a lot of money,” Zula said.

  “Exactly. It’s long forgotten. But”—and Corvallis now rested his hand on the health care directive—“he never updated his will.”

  “That is still legally binding?” Zula asked sharply, nodding at the documents.

  “I’m not a lawyer,” Corvallis said.

  They both looked at Dr. Trinh, who held his hands up as if under arrest and shook his head.

  Stan Peterson—who was, in fact, a lawyer—was there half an hour later. He had canceled all of his appointments, he wanted it known. He did not announce this in a self-congratulatory manner. He just wanted Zula to understand that the full resources of Argenbright Vail, up to and including drone strikes and private rocket ships, were at her and the family’s disposal.

  “Alice is on a plane,” Zula told him. “She’ll be here late tonight.”

  Stan looked a little nonplussed.

  “Richard’s sister-in-law,” Zula explained.

  “She’ll be the executor?”

  Zula shook her head no and glanced at the will. “She’s just the most senior next of kin, I guess you would say. I don’t know how it works. If we’re going to do something—to pull the plug or whatever—she would want to be in on it.” Her face screwed up and she went into a little cry.

  “I’m sorry,” Stan said. In addition to nonplussed, he seemed a bit of a mess emotionally. It was evident that he too had cried, and done it recently enough that he had a lingering case of the sniffles. He had probably looked at Richard on his way in. “Who is named as the executor?”

  Zula looked up, sniffled, controlled it. Then her eyes turned to Corvallis.

  “Sorry, I haven’t read the will,” Corvallis began.

  Zula interrupted him. “I have. You’re the executor, C-plus.”

  “Oh.” Corvallis said. “Holy shit.”

  “You and I have a lot to talk about then,” Stan said.

  “But he’s not technically dead yet, right?” Corvallis said. “So, the will doesn’t kick in. Not until—”

  “Not until there is a death certificate,” Stan said with a nod. His eyes strayed toward the health care directive. He sniffled once more and nodded at it. “That was drawn up personally by Christopher Vail Jr.,” he said. Seeing that this meant nothing to the others, he elaborated: “The cofounder of our firm. He took early retirement about five years ago. Early-onset Alzheimer’s. He’s in a special hospice now. He’s feeling no pain. But he won’t be able to help us with these documents.”

  “Have you read them?” Corvallis asked.

  “In the Uber, on the way here.” Stan raised his eyebrows in a mute commentary on what he had seen on those pages, and Corvallis was unable to hold back a faint smile.

  “I took the liberty of running a diff,” Corvallis said.

  “I’ll guess that is some kind of technical term?”

  “I ran a text analysis program that compared these documents with the ones on the Internet that they were obviously adapted from.”

  “How did you obtain an electronic copy? These are paper,” Stan pointed out.

  “I took a picture of it with my phone and OCRed it,” Corvallis said.

  Stan seemed to find it all a bit irregular. “What did you learn from ‘running a diff’?”

  “Christopher Vail Jr. didn’t just blindly copy the boilerplate language,” Corvallis said. “He made changes.”

  “I would certainly hope so!” said Stan.

  “Not to the technical instructions, of course—that’s all the same, word for word. But in the language around it he added some other provisions.”

  “C-plus, you’ll have to forgive me for being, frankly, a little unprepared for all this,” Stan said, and sighed. “I will admit I hadn’t looked at Richard’s will or these other documents. If I had been aware of their unusual contents, I might have spoken to him, at some point, about refreshing them, doing a little routine maintenance. As it is, I am in all honesty running a little behind. Perhaps you could just tell me what it is that you think you have found and I can give you my word that by the time Alice arrives I will be fully on top of all of this.”

  “It looks to me like the original language from Ephrata was written by nerds.”

  “Ephrata? Sounds biblical.”

  “It is. But in this case I’m talking about Ephrata Cryonics Inc. The cold storage place in the town of the same name. It’s in the desert east of the mountains. Or it was.”

  It took a moment for that last word to sink into Stan’s brain. “Oh, shit.”

  “It’s okay,” Corvallis said. “See, this is where Christopher Vail earned his fee. The founders of Ephrata were true believers. They believed they had come up with the ideal way to preserve human remains. And they believed that Ephrata Cryonics Inc. was going to be around forever.”

  “Because so many people were going to sign up for the service . . . ,” Zula said.

  “That they’d have a fat bank account, economies of scale, the whole bit,” said Corvallis.

  “Well, as one who knew Chris Vail well when his faculties were intact, I’m guessing he took neither of those presumptions for granted,” Stan said.

  Corvallis nodded. “If you read this, I think what you’ll see is him basically saying: look, if Ephrata Cryonics is actually still in business when Richard Forthrast dies, and if they are solvent, and if no better technology has been invented in the meantime to preserve the remains, then go ahead and follow these instructions and ship Dodge off to the big freezer in Ephrata.”

  “But if any of those is not true . . . ,” Stan said.

  “Well, then it gets complicated,” Corvallis said.

  “Like it was all so simple before,” Zula muttered.

  Corvallis pulled the disposition of remains over to him and flipped through to the last few pages, which were all in the standard-issue justified Palatino of Argenbright Vail. “Complicated in a way that makes my brain hurt—but I’ll bet you can make sense of it.”

  “At your service, sir,” Stan said.

  Fortuitously, they were joined a moment later by a woman who introduced herself as the hospital’s general counsel. It was easy enough to infer that she’d been alerted to the presence of a patient’s attorney in the ICU department and was coming down to find out what was up. That the patient was a famous billionaire and the lawyer a senior partner at Argenbright Vail had presumably put some spring in her step. She was younger and less heavily groomed than might be expected; a Catholic feminist soccer mom with a Brown degree, according to the Miasma. Esme Hurlbut, believe it or not. Enjoyed knitting and free climbing. A few minutes were lost in making introductions and bringing Esme up to speed; Dr. Trinh repeated what the others already knew of Dodge’s condition. Corvallis spent the time rifling the Miasma for more information about Ephrata Cryonics Inc.

  When the conversation re
sumed, he was in a position to say more: “Ephrata took in a bunch of money from people like Dodge. They froze a few bodies almost immediately—which probably seemed like progress at the time—but it forced them to keep the freezers running forever after that. They got hit with a lawsuit from some pissed-off Eutropians that depleted their reserves. They never really hit their targets financially. The bottom fell out after the dot-com crash. In 2003 they did a reorg. Their first step was to cut the heads off and burn the bodies.”

  “I’m sorry, could you say that again?” Stan asked.

  Esme Hurlbut, who had clearly been apprehensive when she had entered the room, was now more fascinated.

  “They had eleven bodies in cryostorage at that point,” Corvallis said, flicking his gaze down at his laptop to verify the stats. “The contract that all eleven of those people had signed, while they were alive, when they gave Ephrata Cryonics their money, contained an out. It said that the remains were to be preserved in cryogenic storage—or through whatever means, in the judgment of Ephrata Cryonics, were best suited to the desired goal of eventually bringing the deceased back to life.”

  Esme raised her hand like the smart girl in the front row. “Judgment? Or sole judgment?” she asked.

  “Sole judgment,” Corvallis answered after scanning the words on his screen. In his peripheral vision he saw Esme and Stan exchanging a fraught glance.

  “And based on that,” Corvallis continued, “the argument that Ephrata Cryonics now made was that the only thing that mattered was the head. Or, when you get right down to it, the brain. The body was basically disposable. Any future society that had enough technology to bring a frozen brain back to full conscious functioning would be able to grow a new body from DNA. So, to save money, Ephrata Cryonics decapitated the eleven frozen bodies and packed the heads into a much smaller freezer.”

  “Cut their operating expenses to the bone!” Stan proclaimed approvingly. Momentarily losing track, perhaps, of whose side he was on.

  “What does this mean for us today?” Zula asked.

  Stan pulled the health care directive over to himself and began scanning it. He seemed to be focusing on the part of it that had been contributed by his former colleague Christopher Vail. As he did so, he spoke in a somewhat distracted manner: “I think that is going to depend, Zula, on the questions we talked about a minute ago . . . whether the company is solvent . . . what the current state of the technology is. . . .”