Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson
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couple of years ago he was hanging around here, trying to make something happen between us and ELSH. Once it got past the flirting stage, the powers that be here at WABSI realized they needed a programmer in the room, just to make sense of what he was proposing.”
“That surprises me a little,” Corvallis said. “I thought El was all about stuff like ion-beam scanning. The connectome. How to collect the data, how to store it in the cloud.”
“Stuff that’s not my department, you mean.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, he’s looking beyond that,” Ben said, and took a swig of his flat white. “In a way, that’s the part of it he’s least comfortable with, right?”
“Because he’s a bit-basher.”
“Yeah. He had to stretch quite a bit to get his head around the biology.”
“That’s kind of reflected in his whole basic approach, come to think of it,” Corvallis said.
“I know, right? The Ephrata Cryonics guys were all about physical preservation of the body. Bringing that particular piece of meat back to life.” Ben waved his hand, pantomiming El Shepherd trying to wave that idea into oblivion. “Not El’s thing at all. No. Turn it into bits. As soon as possible. Throw the meat away.” He gestured emphatically toward the Logic Mill, a wild look on his face, mocking the kind of person who would look at such a machine and say, Now, there’s a proper brain!
“And then simulate that brain digitally.”
“Yes. You know he’s a Singularity guy.”
“Yeah, I knew that about El.”
“So it all fits together,” Ben said. He was grinning, without a great deal of humor behind it.
“And he wanted to partner up with you guys on that aspect of it.” What to do next, in other words. The re-creation of a brain’s functioning in software. Reincarnating a scanned connectome as a digital soul, living in the cloud.
“I signed an NDA, so I can’t say much,” Ben said. “But I already told you I was in the meetings. You can put two and two together.”
“Nothing came of it.”
“Nah!” Ben scoffed. “Elmo tried to hire me, though. After it all failed to materialize.”
“But you didn’t—” Corvallis began.
Ben cut him off with a gesture that he recognized from many a meeting at Corporation 9592: both hands out, palms facing toward the floor, skating rapidly back and forth. As if scrubbing a bad idea off of an imaginary whiteboard. “C. No. Hear my words. He’s fucking crazy.”
“To me he seemed sane but just, I don’t know, excessively literal minded about what he believes?”
“Same diff. It’s his religion, man. And he uses it like all the worst religious people.”
“As an excuse to just do what he wants, you mean.”
“Yeah!”
“I got that about him.”
“He’s going to fail,” Ben said.
“You sound pretty sure of that.”
“It’s because of Dodge.”
“I don’t follow.”
“That’s how I know, C. That’s how I can tell if any company is going to succeed or fail. It comes down to leadership. At 9592 we had a great leader in Richard Forthrast. Here we’ve got that too in the Waterhouse clan. Oh, they couldn’t be more different from Dodge. But they are fine leaders in their own way. El is not a great leader. So it doesn’t matter how much money he has, how smart his people are. It just doesn’t fucking matter.”
Corvallis nodded. They sat there for a few moments in silence, watching the Logic Mill think. Ben said, “Don’t let the son of a bitch have Dodge’s brain, would be my takeaway.”
A few hours later Corvallis was in Richard’s apartment, perched on a sofa in his friend’s great room and feeling at loose ends as Zula and Alice talked to various medical personnel. The Forthrasts had had a busy day. Once they’d made the decision to move Dodge home, the next few hours had gone by in an ecstasy of logistics: hiring an ambulance to transport the patient, renting a ventilator and other equipment, interviewing home health care practitioners. Corvallis had shown up only about ten minutes after the attendants had moved Dodge from the gurney to the bed in which he had awakened yesterday morning, and in which he would soon be caused to die. Standing around it were a supervisor and a couple of people in nurselike uniforms, though Corvallis didn’t know whether they were technically nurses or some other category of health care professional. Corvallis didn’t like being in there. He had been gradually adjusting to the idea of his friend’s being dead, so it was terrible to see him lying there obviously alive, seeming as if he could open his eyes at any moment and sit up and demand to have the tube yanked out of his throat.
For a couple of decades, Alice had shouldered most of the responsibility for looking after Grandpa Forthrast, the father of Richard, Jake, and Alice’s husband, John, when strokes and other damage had rendered him dependent on machines and health care workers. She was in her element here, relegating Zula to a silent role standing in the corner texting updates to relatives. Corvallis was entirely useless.
Exiled and alone on the sofa, he unzipped Richard’s shoulder bag, thinking he might take an inventory of its contents. Stuffed into the top of it were the headphones—the same ones, of course, shown on the video that the kid had posted. Richard had simply wadded the cable up on top of them. Corvallis pulled them out carefully, wound the cable around them, and set them on the table.
Remaining in the bag were two large-format picture books and an apple. He pulled the books out and set them on the table. They were children’s books, depicting Greek and Norse myths in bright lithographs. He put the apple on the table and looked at it for a while. It was smaller and less perfectly symmetrical than the ones sold in grocery stores. Straight from some orchard. Maybe Dodge had tossed it in there as a snack.
Other than that the bag contained random odds and ends, tucked into various internal pockets: spare batteries, a candy bar, charger cables for electronic devices, a two-month-old copy of the Economist.
He wondered whether the family would take it amiss if he went through the pockets of Richard’s trousers and performed a similar inventory. He decided against it.
His phone vibrated and he saw a message from Stan: Carrot and stick from El. Call me.
“Let’s start with the stick” was how Corvallis started the conversation. “I take it you heard from his lawyers?”
“Yes, I did,” Stan said.
“And they are threatening the court order?”
“Not only that,” Stan said, sounding dryly amused, “they are even making noise about criminal proceedings.”
“Are you shitting me?”
“The statutes contain weird old stuff about mistreatment of bodies. Probably written into the law centuries ago to punish people who used to steal bodies and take them to labs for dissection. Strangely enough, what the Forthrasts want to do in this case is to take the body and dissect it in a particular way—”
“With an ion beam.”
“Yeah. Look, don’t take this too seriously. It’s smoke and mirrors. No one is going to end up in jail over this. You have to think of it tactically. Alice and Zula have to make a decision. They’re already stressed out over Jake and his religious take on it. Now El comes in looking for anything he can