Нил Стивенсон - Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“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. Extrapolate 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.”

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.