Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  “Depends on what you mean by ‘solvent,’” Corvallis said. “According to the Internet—”

  “Which as we know is never wrong,” Esme put in.

  “Yeah. According to the Internet, the decapitation gambit only bought them three more years. Then they reached a point—”

  “Oh, my god, I remember this now. It was a news story, briefly,” Esme said. “The power company was threatening to shut them off for nonpayment. The company insisted that letting the brains thaw out would be tantamount to murder. It was a standoff.”

  Stan literally slapped his forehead. “Jesus. I can’t believe Dodge got into business with these people.” Which merely drew quizzical looks from both Zula and Corvallis, wordlessly asking, Do you have the first idea of the kinds of people he did get into business with? Oblivious, Stan shook his head. “But at least we’ve answered the question of whether they are solvent.”

  “Depends on what you mean,” Corvallis said. His Googling was still keeping pace with the conversation. “A deal was worked out. One of the original Eutropians swooped in. Elmo Shepherd.”

  “One of those pissed-off Eutropians who had sued them earlier?” Zula asked.

  “You got it. Shepherd was the main instigator of that lawsuit. He claimed that Ephrata Cryonics had laid claim to some IP—some intellectual property—that ought to have been in the public domain—the open-source work of the original Eutropians.”

  “Hang on, I know who El Shepherd is. Hell, I’ve met him,” Stan said. “I think he’s one of our clients in the Silicon Valley office.”

  “He made some money on an IPO and became a venture capitalist,” Corvallis said. “Mostly conventional tech VC stuff, it looks like—but he has maintained a side interest in life extension.”

  “So, what happened when he ‘swooped in’?” Esme asked.

  “He formed a new company called Ephrata Life Sciences and Health,” Corvallis said. He had ceased to be an autonomous participant in the conversation and become a conduit for whatever was on the Miasma. “He funded it with his own money. And he worked out a deal—he acquired Ephrata Cryonics lock, stock, and barrel. Ephrata Cryonics is now a wholly owned subsidiary of ELSH, which is based out of the Presidio, San Francisco, California.”

  “So technically it is solvent?” Zula asked. She had been juggling text messages and ignoring phone calls for several minutes and was losing the battle against electronic distractions.

  “As long as El Shepherd is pouring money into it, it’s difficult to claim otherwise,” Stan said. “But listen, that’s not the only out in this document. Assuming you’re looking for an out. There’s also the question of whether the technology that ELSH is now using is really the best.”

  “In the sole judgment of ELSH?” Esme asked.

  Stan permitted himself a look of mild satisfaction. “Nope. In the boilerplate contract that was signed by the Ephrata Eleven—the people whose heads ended up in the freezer—the word ‘sole’ is used, but Chris Vail, bless his heart, struck that word out in the one that was signed by Dodge.”

  “So we get some say over it,” Zula said.

  Esme looked like she wanted to say something, but thought better of it and crossed her arms.

  “You get lots of say over it,” Stan said, “and I’ll bet we can make an argument that cutting Dodge’s head off and throwing it in a freezer is no longer the best technology—if it ever was in the first place.”

  Zula nodded at this and Corvallis had to swallow a mild feeling of discomfort. Later, he would sit down with Zula and Alice Forthrast and remind them that Argenbright Vail stood to make a lot of money if that case went to court and they had to argue it against El Shepherd’s lawyers. Anyway, his Googling had uncovered more facts that might make it irrelevant. “Turns out,” he announced, “that it’s no longer heads in a freezer. ELSH has moved on.”

  “I’m ready,” Stan said. Again, Corvallis found his tone to be a little off. What really mattered was whether Zula was ready. But he could see where this was going. Stan was gradually asserting control over the situation. By the time Alice got off the plane, he’d be fully in command, ready to introduce himself as the Forthrast family lawyer.

  Zula exchanged an unreadable look with Esme. A women-in-solidarity kind of thing, he guessed.

  Corvallis waited until he had caught Zula’s eye and she had given him the nod. “Now that we have cloud computing,” he said, “storing bits is way cheaper than storing body parts in a freezer. A few years ago, ELSH, in its sole judgment, decided that the only thing that really mattered was the connectome—the pattern of connections among the neurons in the brain. They took each of those eleven brains and scanned them. Reduced them to data structures. Stored the data in the cloud.”

  “And where are those brains now?” Esme asked. Because that shoe was going to drop eventually.

  “The scanning,” Corvallis said, “is a destructive process.” He was reading about it as he spoke. “Destructive” was putting it mildly but he saw no need to be heavy-handed. “By the time it is finished, there is nothing left that could be considered a brain. What is left is, they claim, disposed of in a respectful manner. Cremated. Ashes returned to the next of kin.”

  “And since ELSH went over to this process,” Stan asked, “have there been any more?”

  “Any more what?” Corvallis asked.

  “Any more like Richard,” Zula said.

  Stan nodded. “People who had signed a contract with Ephrata Cryonics and then died after the company got into difficulty.”

  “If so,” Corvallis said, “no one is talking about it on the Internet.” He scrolled back. “One of these articles does say that ELSH refunded money to some clients, at their request, and canceled the contracts.”

  “But not Richard,” Zula said.

  “I would have no way of knowing,” said Corvallis.

  Zula was staring at him. “C-plus. Come on. This is Richard. Do you really think he would have bothered?”

  “No,” Corvallis said. “Dodge wouldn’t have bothered. If he even remembered signing the contract.”

  “So, I have some action items,” Stan announced. “If it’s okay with the family, I can reach out to ELSH and find out whether that contract is still in force. Then it’ll be up to you all to decide how you would like to proceed. My recommendation is that we do a little background research on this—what do you call it? The connection thing?”

  “Connect—connectomics,” Corvallis said, stumbling over the word in a way that drew puzzled looks from the others. Because some part of his brain had put up an oh shit flag while he was saying it.

  “Everything okay, C-plus?” Zula asked. Giving him a mild feeling of shame that she, of all people, was concerned for his state of mind at such a moment.

  “Umm, sorry. There’s a weird connection. Pardon the pun.”

  “Connection to what?” Esme asked. Her primary reason for remaining in the room had long since become sheer intellectual curiosity.

  “I should explain,” Corvallis said, “that I work for—I am the CTO of—a cloud computing company here in Seattle. And one of our clients is—well—”

  “Don’t tell me,” Zula said. “Ephrata Life Sciences and Health.”

  “Not quite. But Elmo Shepherd has a stable of companies that he runs out of the Presidio. Some for profit. Others are more like think tanks, research institutes, and the like. He’s really interested in the Singularity, which is—”

  “I know what it is,” Zula said.

  “I don’t. Would you indulge me?” Esme said. She had, in some nonverbal way, bonded with Zula.

  Zula nodded and said, “It’s a kind of belief system that in the future we are going to upload our brains into computers and live forever digitally.”

  “How do you get ‘Singularity’ out of that?”

  “You add in Moore’s Law,” Corvallis said.

  “That’s the one that says computers keep getting faster?”

  “Exponentially. Extra
polate it out, and it suggests that the souls that have been uploaded to silicon will become super fast, super powerful, and render living, biological brains irrelevant.”

  “I still don’t see how ‘Singularity’ describes that—isn’t that a word for a black hole?”

  “It’ll happen in a flash, is the idea,” Zula explained.

  “And El Shepherd believes in this,” Esme said.

  Stan was just sitting there with his hands cupped around his eyes. When is this day going to stop getting weirder?

  “Some of his other companies exist to support research on different aspects of phenomena relating to the Singularity. One of those is the connectome of the brain. There’s a whole stable of them. Look, I’m on thin ice here because I can’t breach the confidentiality of Nubilant’s relationship with its customers.”

  “But it’s obvious,” Stan said, “from the look on your face that El Shepherd is storing the connectomes of the Ephrata Eleven on your company’s servers.”

  “If you haven’t gotten sick of everything being ironic yet,” Corvallis said, “you might enjoy knowing that our biggest server farm is out in eastern Washington State. Not far from Ephrata.”

  “Where power is cheap, and cooling water is plentiful,” Zula said. She had majored in geology.

  “I feel like I’m losing the thread of this conversation,” Esme admitted.

  “This is either really good or really bad, in terms of my ability to be useful,” Corvallis said. “I’ll ask around and see if I can get through to some of Elmo Shepherd’s people in the Presidio.”

  “Or El himself,” Stan said. “This warrants his attention, I think.”

  4

  The conversation petered out as it became clear to them that they were not going to pull the plug on Dodge right away. Dr. Trinh left the room to attend to patients who weren’t beyond helping. Esme distributed business cards and swapped cell phone numbers, then excused herself. Other patients’ families needed to use the room and so Stan, Zula, and Corvallis shifted to the hospital cafeteria. From there they went their separate ways: Stan to his office to bone up on the documents, Zula to her home, Corvallis to his office.

  The conversation paused for an afternoon. The pause grew to encompass the evening and the night that followed. Twenty-four hours elapsed before it resumed. Corvallis spent it in a kind of limbo. Until there was a death certificate, Dodge wasn’t legally dead, and so there was no need for an executor. Executor—or, in the more modern gender-neutral usage, “personal representative”—was to be Corvallis’s role. He devoted a little bit of effort to learning how the job worked, but it was mostly legalese of the sort that made his head hurt. He had responsibilities at work.

  And at about ten in the evening, word somehow leaked to the Miasma that Richard Forthrast was in the ICU with serious medical problems. Then his world exploded for about six hours and ruled out getting very much sleep. The Miasma behaved, sometimes, as if it expected every man, woman, and child on earth to have a social media and PR staff on twenty-four-hour call. It would have been impossible even if Corvallis had been at liberty to say anything.

  When next they got together, it was in a suite in an old but well-maintained luxury hotel a couple of blocks from the hospital. Corvallis knew Alice Forthrast a little—well enough to guess that she hadn’t chosen this place. Zula had done it for her. Alice would have made a sort of performance of her frugality and her lack of interest in the ways of big coastal cities by staying in the cheapest available motel near the airport. Zula had preempted all of that by making other arrangements and simply driving her here and dropping her off last night. The place was within walking distance of where Zula, Csongor, and Sophia lived. The relatives back home would wonder why Alice didn’t just sleep on Zula’s couch, or in Richard’s now-vacant apartment for that matter. But Corvallis followed Zula’s thinking. The family would need a command center near the hospital, some neutral ground from which they could operate. A conference room at Argenbright Vail would have put them too much in the law firm’s pocket. The kitchen table at Zula and Csongor’s condo would have made certain conversations awkward, if Sophia were underfoot asking to have everything explained. So the hotel suite it was.

  By the time Corvallis got there with Jake Forthrast—Richard’s younger brother—in tow, Zula had already stocked its fridge with milk, yogurt, and a few other staples so that Alice wouldn’t have to go on making outraged Facebook posts over the cost of room service. Csongor had taken a few days of leave and was at home on full-time Sophia duty so that Zula could focus everything on this. Corvallis had warned people at Nubilant that he would be out of pocket for a few days—almost unnecessary given that most people there had awakened this morning to gales of social media coverage of the Forthrast tragedy. Number one on Reddit was a brief video that some random kid had shot yesterday of himself standing next to Dodge outside of the medical building where, only a few minutes later, Dodge had been stricken. Corvallis had forcibly ignored it for a few times and then just broken down and watched the damned thing. Dodge was being reasonably cheerful about being waylaid by his young fanboy; he’d pulled his headphones down around his neck so that he could hear what the kid was saying, and tinny music could be heard from them when cars weren’t shusshing past on the wet street. Corvallis had expected that the video would wreck him, but instead he found it weirdly comforting, and watched it several times. Reminding himself of who Dodge was, and getting ready for the post-Dodge world.

  Corvallis had, a few minutes ago, picked Jake Forthrast up at the train station downtown. He was in his late forties—a straggler, much younger than the other three Forthrast siblings. He lived in northern Idaho, in a remote community of like-minded people, which was to say extreme libertarians with a religious bent. He had a wife and a brood of kids there. Outside of his little area, he couldn’t drive, because he didn’t have a driver’s license, because he did not believe that the government had the authority to issue them. Yesterday, upon hearing the news, he had somehow made his way to the train station in Coeur d’Alene and boarded a westbound Amtrak that was running seven hours late. He and Corvallis had crossed paths before and were more comfortable around each other than might have been expected based on the differences in their backgrounds and their political and religious thinking. The drive from the train station to the valet parking in front of the hotel had not lasted much more than five minutes and so Corvallis had not been able to tell him much, other than that Richard’s condition was unchanged. Jake had a somewhat scruffy beard, auburn turning gray, and had gone mostly bald. He was wearing the sensible flannel-lined work clothes that he wore day in and day out at his job, which was building log cabins and rustic furniture. He gazed around at the lobby’s opulent furnishings with an expression Corvallis did not know how to read. The elevator, which was paneled with finely wrought hardwood, gave him something to focus on.

  Alice Forthrast was the widow of Richard’s older brother, John, and the matriarch of the extended family, operating from a farmhouse in northwest Iowa. She was in her seventies but could have passed for younger. She hadn’t bothered with trying to color her hair, which was thoroughly gray now, and cut short. When Corvallis first saw her she was smiling at Zula, showing real teeth, somewhat the worse for wear. They had been remembering something funny that Richard had done. But when Corvallis and Jake came in they sobered up, as if they’d been caught out misbehaving. Jake greeted Zula with a long, warm hug and Alice with a more perfunctory one; she did not fully rise out of her chair, but she did smile at him, lips pressed together, eyes slitted against tears.

  Corvallis and Alice had met before, but Zula reintroduced them just in case Alice had forgotten his name. Maybe Alice’s short-term memory was a little leaky, or maybe it was one of those all-Asians-look-the-same deals. Anyway Alice nodded and said, “Of course, I remember Dodge talking about you and your Rome activities.” Referring to an eccentric hobby.

  “But he’s also—” Zula put in.

 
; “Of course, I know that there’s much more to C-plus than just that,” Alice said, then turned to Corvallis. “Otherwise I don’t think that Dodge would have entrusted you with being the executor of his will, would he?”

  Good. So someone had laid that on her.

  Alice continued, “I want you to know that Richard, whatever some people might say about him, was a fine judge of men, and if he trusted you, then we trust you. And I can see all kinds of intelligent reasons to have the executor be someone outside the family—an impartial person.”

  “Well, I’m just sorry that we are re-meeting under these circumstances,” Corvallis said. This was a bit of dialogue he had concocted ahead of time, and it sounded that way. So he improvised, “Thanks for your statement that you just made.” Zula and Alice kept looking at him as if they were expecting more. “It means a lot to me,” he tried. Both women seemed to find this acceptable as a termination of whatever it was he’d been trying to gasp out. “I’ll do my best,” he tacked on, unable to stop himself, and they began to look a little unnerved.

  He was saved by the timely arrival of Stan, who showed up with a younger lawyer in tow.

  The summit conference had now attained a sort of quorum. Alice, Zula, and Jake were the closest Richard had to next of kin: to put it bluntly, enough critical mass to pull the plug on Richard’s ventilator. Corvallis was there in his role as executor, which had not formally commenced yet, and the lawyers were in the house, and on the clock. Insensitive to the ways of lawyers and their hourly rates, Alice insisted on making coffee and small talk, racking up, in Corvallis’s loose estimation, about a thousand dollars’ worth of billable hours before allowing the conversation to spiral around to matters that might be considered business. Distracted by the meter running in his head, Corvallis sipped his coffee—which was terrible—and looked around at the room, which was finished like the abode of a wealthy old lady. Of course, Alice Forthrast was, in fact, a wealthy old lady, but he suspected that her house was finished in an altogether different style.