Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson
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Much more sophisticated techniques have been developed. Night and day.”
“Then why isn’t ELSH using them?” Alice asked.
“Well, it looks like I could just hit redial on my phone and ask El Shepherd,” Corvallis said, “but the answer is probably that they have never been used on human brains before. Only mice.”
“Only mice,” Alice repeated.
The Forthrasts’ reactions were varied. Alice was incredulous, perhaps wondering why Corvallis had bothered mentioning it if that was the case. Jake shook his head in utter disdain at the foolishness of these rodent-brain-scanning humanists. But Zula got it.
“How many years?” Zula asked.
“What?” Alice asked.
“How many years out? Before they can make one big enough to do a human?”
“That,” Corvallis said, “is what I am trying to find out. I have a call in to—”
“Years? What good does that do us?” Alice demanded. “We have to make a decision now. Richard’s lying in a bed across the street on a ventilator.”
“We could freeze him now,” Corvallis said.
“Who’s ‘we’?” Jake demanded.
“Sorry,” Corvallis said. “Point taken. You, the family, could freeze him now.”
“I’ll have no part of it,” Jake reminded him.
“Jake, stop interrupting,” Alice said. “Go on, please, C-plus.”
“If he were frozen now, using the latest version of the Eutropian protocol—which supposedly preserves the connectome, the pattern of connections among the neurons—and if he were kept frozen for a few years, then, when this new scanning technology did become available, his brain could be scanned that way.”
“But I was told that the company that freezes people was out of business,” Alice said.
“Richard’s net worth is something like three billion dollars,” Corvallis pointed out.
“Enough to buy a freezer, you’re saying.”
“I’m saying it’s an option.”
“Then do we hire someone to stand by the freezer for a few years and make sure it keeps running?” Jake demanded.
“I don’t know,” Corvallis said, “I haven’t thought it through yet.”
Marcus, the junior lawyer, had been silent ever since blundering into Alice’s trap. He spoke up now. “Our law firm has done some work for the Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation—the primary funder of WABSI, the Waterhouse Brain Sciences Institute,” he announced.
“Of course it has,” Alice said. “Argenbright Vail works for everyone.”
Marcus held up a hand to stay her. “It’s a big firm,” he said, “and we are very careful to avoid conflicts of interest. We have to be. All I’m saying is that, around here, such foundations are pretty common. A lot of people have made a lot of money in tech. When they reach a certain point in their lives, they start giving it away, and that’s how these foundations get established. They interlock”—he laced his fingers together—“in complicated ways. Now, as soon as a death certificate is issued for Richard Forthrast, according to his last will and testament, a new one of those is going to be brought into existence.”
“The Forthrast Family Foundation,” Alice said, “inevitably.”
“You don’t have to buy your own freezer, is my point. I think the odds are that if you go and talk to Wabsy—”
“Wabsy?”
“WABSI, which, as Corvallis points out, is less than a mile away, you can work something out in which Richard’s brain is donated to science.”
“But then they could do anything they like with it!”
Marcus shook his head. “You can write up any contract you want. Be as specific as you like about what is to be done with it.”
“Why would they sign such a contract?” Alice asked.
“Because the Forthrast Family Foundation is going to give them a shit-ton of money,” Zula predicted, “and money talks.”
“I’m just the lawyer here,” Stan said, “but I like this. We cannot make a reasonable argument that Ephrata Cryonics is insolvent, because it is being supported by El Shepherd out of his own seemingly bottomless funds. So. If the family’s preference is that Dodge’s brain not be prematurely subjected to the same destructive scanning process that ELSH is pushing, then, according to the terms of the health care directive, we simply need to make an argument that there is some better process available. And if there’s anything to what Corvallis is saying, that’s going to be easy.”
“Easy enough to satisfy Elmo Shepherd?”
“We don’t have to satisfy him,” Stan said. “We just have to be able to look him in the eye when we’re telling him to fuck off.”
Corvallis felt his phone buzzing in his shirt pocket and peeked at the screen. It was a local number that he did not recognize. It ended in two zeroes, suggesting the call was originating from a main switchboard. He excused himself, arose from the table, and walked into the foyer of the suite before answering it.
A minute later he was back in the dining room. In his absence, chairs had been pushed back, dishes collected, laptops slipped back into bags. Zula caught his eye. “El Shepherd still hassling you?”
“It was the place,” Corvallis said. Fully aware of how inarticulate he was being, he blinked, shook his head, and circled around for another try. “The medical office where Dodge was yesterday. Where he was, uh, ‘stricken’ I guess is the word.”
“The people who killed him?” Alice asked. “What did they want?”
“I’m on record as his emergency contact—I was there when it happened,” Corvallis said. “They were just calling to let me know that they have his bag. With his stuff. And his clothes and his wallet and so on. All of that was left behind when the firemen came and grabbed him. So, I guess I’ll walk over there and pick all of that stuff up.” The Forthrasts were all just staring at him. “If, you know, that makes things easier.”
“Please,” Alice said.
“I’ll walk you down,” Stan announced, placing a companionable hand on Corvallis’s shoulder.
In the elevator, Corvallis asked him, “Did I miss anything?”
“Zula is going to talk to a couple of vent farms,” Stan said.
“What’s a vent farm?”
“Horrible term. When you have a patient like Richard, who is fundamentally stable but who can’t be taken off the ventilator, there’s no need to keep him in the ICU. It is overkill. It’s expensive and it takes up bed space that the hospital could use for people who really need intensive care. There are businesses that exist to serve this market. Think of it like a nursing home, except all of the people who live there are …”
“Are like Richard?”
“Yeah. There’s a politically correct term for it, but doctors call it a vent farm.”
“So we’re thinking of moving Dodge to a vent farm?”
“Alice is vehemently opposed,” Marcus said. He managed to say it in a manner that, while utterly deadpan, still conveyed some sense of the vivid impressions he had taken in, during the conversation just concluded, of Alice Forthrast.