Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson
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last night, she had blown fifteen bucks on wireless Internet service and apparently spent the whole three hours researching Chris Vail’s background and career and found no evidence at all that he knew anything about wills. “Yesterday I had Zula send a scanned copy of Richard’s will to our family lawyer back home,” she announced, “who may be a small-town lawyer but I can tell you that he has made out a lot of wills, as it is a major part of his practice, and he found three things wrong with it on the first page. Rookie mistakes, he called them.” She shook her head.
Stan had put his phone away and was sitting there red faced. Marcus was agog.
“Do you know what it looks like to me? It looks like this Chris Vail character got a call from Dodge that Dodge wanted a last will and testament drawn up, and he said to himself, ‘I don’t want to lose my billionaire, I do believe I’m just going to take care of it myself. How hard could it be to draw up a will?’ And he wrote the first and probably the last document of that type of his career, and I’m sure he was well-intentioned, but he botched it.”
“Alice—” Stan began.
“Malpractice, is what some would call it,” Alice said.
This woman was a cobra. Corvallis made a note of it.
Wishing he were elsewhere, he let his gaze stray to Zula, who was looking back at him deadpan. Welcome to the family, C-plus.
“Well, it’s all water under the bridge,” Alice sighed. “The will is written the way it’s written and Dodge signed it because he was too busy to care and there is nothing we can do about it now. The man who did it has moved on to a different place and there is no sense in bedeviling him with recriminations and threats. But I am not Dodge. I am paying attention and I will hold Argenbright Vail to a higher standard as far as competence and billing are concerned.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Stan said. But the moment was ruined by the ringing of a phone: Corvallis’s. Stan, perhaps feeling that he had just been saved by the bell, heaved a sigh and looked over at him.
“Sorry,” Corvallis said, and lifted the phone from his shirt pocket. He did a double take at the name on the screen, then held it up so that the others could read it: El Shepherd.
“I would recommend not taking that call just now,” Stan snapped. Then he looked to Alice, as if seeking her approval. She glanced away demurely, which seemed to settle Stan down. “Have you talked to Mr. Shepherd yet?” Stan asked.
“No,” Corvallis said, “just some of his minions.”
“What was the general tenor?”
“Intense focus on the situation,” Corvallis said. “Not a whole lot of what you would call warmth. A sense of lawyers silently gesticulating.”
“Well,” Stan said, “now that we have gotten to know each other a little bit, this gives a segue into the matter at hand. If I may.”
“Please, be my guest,” said Alice.
“Before I get into it, what do we hear from the doctors?”
“No change,” Zula said. “We have to assume that he is braindead and not coming back.”
As she spoke the last few words she glanced over at Jake, who noticed it, and raised his hand momentarily. “I’ve already communicated my views on this,” he said. “Only God can take a life. In Him all things are possible—including a full recovery for Dodge. As long as his soul remains united with his body, Richard is as alive as anyone at this table.”
Stan allowed a few moments to pass in silence before nodding and saying, in his best lawyerly baritone, “Thank you, Jacob. Zula had mentioned to me that you might take that view of it. I want to proceed in a way that is respectful of your beliefs.”
“I appreciate that, sir,” Jake said.
“My job is the law,” Stan went on, “and as I’m sure Alice’s lawyer back in Iowa would be the first to tell you, the health care directive—what some people refer to as the living will—doesn’t necessarily take the beliefs and opinions of family members into account.”
“I am aware of it,” Jake said. “I know I’m in the minority here anyway.” He looked across the table at Alice and Zula, who looked right back at him.
“Under the terms of the health care directive that your brother signed,” Stan said, “life support is now to be withdrawn without further delay. But this is to be done according to a specific technical protocol whose purpose is to preserve the brain. And because of the additional provisions that Chris Vail very carefully worked into the document”—and here he favored Alice with a significant look, which she disdained to notice—“if Ephrata Cryonics is insolvent, or if some better technology has come along in the meantime, there is an out.”
Alice nodded. “And according to my lawyer, one of the problems with this document is that it doesn’t actually specify the nature of the out. It’s open-ended.”
“It is difficult,” Stan said delicately, “to specify the exact nature of an alternative brain preservation technique that hasn’t yet been invented, or even conceived of. The only way to write such a directive is to make the signer’s—Richard’s—intent primary. And his intent, apparently, was to make sure that if there existed, at the time of his death, some plausible technology that might later bring him back to life, then that technology should be invoked. And if more than one such technology existed, he quite reasonably wanted the best—not just whatever Ephrata Cryonics happened to be peddling on that particular day.”
“But who decides that?” Zula asked.
“Ultimately, you—the next of kin—make that decision. No one can gainsay it. There’s no penalty for getting it wrong.”
Jake sat forward. “But you just finished saying a minute ago that the living will doesn’t take the beliefs of family members into account.”
“You can’t just countermand the will,” Stan said, “but as long as you are making an effort in good faith to carry out Richard’s underlying intent, you are allowed some discretion.”
“I guess my point is that we are not experts on neuroscience,” Zula said.
“Then you can go find someone who is,” Stan said. “Seattle is full of high-powered—”
Corvallis interrupted him. “Done.”
Everyone looked at him.
“I mean, it’s still in progress,” Corvallis explained. “But some of the really high-level coders from Corporation 9592 ended up getting hired away, a couple of years ago, by the Waterhouse Brain Sciences Institute. I took the liberty of getting in touch with one of them, Ben Compton, whom I have stayed friends with.”
“Is this the Waterhouse from the weird cyber bank?” Alice asked. “That Waterhouse?” She was referring to one of the local tech philanthropists, an entrepreneur who had been involved in an early cryptocurrency venture that had somehow managed to grow into a serious financial institution.
“The same.”
“Forgive me for asking a dumb question, but why would a brain institute hire video game programmers?”
“Gamification,” Zula said.
“Yes,” Corvallis said, “it’s kind of a long story and I would be happy to fill you in. But the bottom line is that scientists have identified certain problems that are very difficult for computers to solve but easy for humans. If you can turn those problems into a fun game, then you can get lots of people on the Internet solving them for free. The Waterhouse Brain Sciences people stumbled on one of those problems and decided to gamify it—then they came after our best game programmers.”
Alice rolled her eyes. “Anyway. You have friends who work at this high-powered brain institute. Here in town, I assume.”
Corvallis nodded. “Less than a mile from