Fall or, Dodge in Hell

“And, down the road? Maybe that of those angry family members too. A million years from now they are thanking me for having taken the steps that were necessary.”

“Just wow.”

“You can maybe see why I wanted to talk to you. Not the family. It could get personal with those people.”

“It’s personal with me.”

“But different, right? Even while you’re hating me, you can see where I’m coming from on the technical level.”

Corvallis thought it perhaps best not to say anything. El Shepherd, undeterred, circled around to probe from another angle. “You said a minute ago that you had taken a look at ion-beam scanning as an option.”

He was right. Corvallis had said that. Perhaps that had been a mistake.

“I take it, then, that you have decided to investigate alternatives to the services being offered by Ephrata Life Sciences and Health.”

Yes, definitely a mistake. “Where is this going?”

“You’re probably looking at the line inserted into the agreement that states the family can go to a non-ELSH option if they decide that there’s something better available.”

“Given that you just threatened to take us to court,” Corvallis said, “why would I even—”

“Speaking as one technically sophisticated man to another,” El said, “allow me to assure you that no such alternative exists. ELSH is second to none in this field. And I intend to be very active in stating our case. Making sure that there are no misunderstandings. Protecting our brand.”

“I wish you all the best of luck with your brand,” Corvallis said, sliding out of the booth, reaching out, almost as an afterthought, to throw an arm over Dodge’s messenger bag and the sack full of his effects. He turned without shaking El Shepherd’s hand and stalked away. His exit route took him right along the line of bar stools. Four of these were supporting humans. For midday drinkers, they seemed curiously fit. Maybe it was because they were all drinking water. They raised their heads and tracked him in their peripheral vision. One then glanced back at El. “It’s okay,” El called, “let him go.”

The sign hanging in the front door said OPEN to Corvallis, which meant that it showed as CLOSED to people on the sidewalk.

So, El had rented out the whole bar just for this conversation, and staffed it with his private security detail.

Let him go. Those were the words that stuck with Corvallis as he strode to his car. Was it a serious possibility that they wouldn’t? Were they thinking of detaining him?

It was unlikely, Corvallis decided, as he shifted his car into gear and began heading north on Airport Way. They might have been goons, but they were probably professional goons. They had no legal power to detain anyone, and they knew it. Inwardly, they had to be thinking about what a dickhead their boss was to even say something like that.

Or maybe he was just trying to settle himself down by telling a comforting story.

7

He had intended to go straight to the hotel to drop off Dodge’s things, but Zula waved him off via text message, letting him know that they were going to be busy with “the transfer” for a couple of hours. Then she added another message: C U @ Richard’s in a couple hours.

So. No vent farm for Dodge. He was going to die in his own bed.

He pulled over into a legit parking space and texted Stan: Can El get a court order? Is that a real thing?

Then he dialed Ben Compton’s number. Of the game programmers who had defected from Corporation 9592 to the Waterhouse Brain Sciences Institute, Ben had been the first to go, and the ringleader. Later, some of them had drifted back to the world of conventional game programming, but Ben had stuck around.

“C-plus.” Ben’s voice was flat. He had, of course, heard the news. His voice was coming out of the car’s sound system, Bluetoothed to the phone.

“Ben. You know about it.”

“Yeah. Of all the fucking horrible things. I don’t know what to say. Almost didn’t come in to work today.”

“Maybe it’s good you did.”

“Anything I can do to help?”

“Reserve a conference room in half an hour.”

“Will attempt. Food?”

“Sure. I just had a really unsatisfactory lunch.”

“What’d you have?”

“Half of a beer.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad. Except for the half part.”

“It was more the company I was keeping.”

“Lawyers?”

On cue, Corvallis’s phone began vibrating down in the cupholder. He glanced at it. Stan was calling from his work number. “Gotta take this. See you in a few.”

He tapped the screen and switched over to Stan. Then he pulled out into a gap in traffic and began heading north toward downtown.

“You took El’s call,” Stan said. “I’d rather you hadn’t.”

“Hell, I sat across the table from him.”

“What!?”

“No shit. While we were talking in the hotel, he flew up from San Rafael. With his security detail in tow.”

“Jesus. And threatened to get a court order?”

“Yeah, is that even possible legally?”

“It’s rare. Rare enough that I’ll need to do some research,” Stan said. “But in principle, yeah. If the family is about to take some step that directly violates the health care directive, then the attorney general can take an interest in it, go to a judge, get a court order.”

“And then—?”

“And then if the family, or the doctors, violate the court order, they’re in contempt of court. So that is definitely a club he can wave over Zula and Alice. But I find it shocking he would even consider it.”

“He’s protecting his brand, he says.”

“Fine way to do it.”

The organization known to Alice as the Weird Cyber Bank had bought a great big old building from an old-school, non-weird, non-cyber bank that, around the turn of the millennium, had gone belly-up in a financial downturn and pursuant imbroglio.

During the 1930s, this building had probably been considered tall and futuristic. Now it was medium-sized and retro-quaint. The new owners had done all of the structural upgrades needed to keep it from collapsing into a huge mound of bricks during the next earthquake and then they had parceled it out into chunks for use by various of their subentities.

The Weird Cyber Bank per se—the for-profit financial institution that had been spawned out of an earlier startup called Epiphyte, and been joined by diverse more or less murky coconspirators—occupied the upper two-thirds of the building. The lower floors were for the Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation and its offshoot, WABSI.

It was on a steep downtown slope. On the downhill side you walked into the first floor, but on the uphill side, the pedestrian entrance was on the fourth story. In between was a wedge of space that was difficult for spatially challenged visitors and so the architects had made the probably wise decision to leave it mostly deconstructed, exposing all the massive new structural steelwork that was now knitting together the gingerbready brick-and-marble confection on top of it. There was security, befitting a bank with supposed connections to all kinds of mysterious and maybe nefarious clients. But the internal partitions were mostly glass, and so you could at least see all of the places you weren’t being allowed to go.

It was out of the question that Corvallis Kawasaki would just stroll in on short notice and sign the boilerplate NDA that the security guard would present to him. Therefore it went without saying that he was going to be issued a mere sticker, not a badge, and that he’d have to be accompanied by Ben at all times. They’d be restricted to visitor-friendly zones on the building’s lower levels. There were a few meeting rooms for just such occasions, but a glance through their glass walls proved that those were all spoken for at the moment. Therefore Ben and C-plus, having nowhere else to go, began to wander through a permanent museum exhibit that occupied the interior of the first three stories.

This looked expensive. It had not just been thrown together by interns. One sensed that serious people had come over from London and worked on it for years. It was intended to be here for a long time. Wordy plaques, etched in mysterious corrosion-proof metal, explained deep background that struck C-plus as very interesting; he’d have to come back later and actually read them. But the quick visual takeaway, absorbed by some background process in his brain as he ambled around and made small talk with Ben, was that the deep history of this institution reached all the way back to some era of history when men wore large periwigs—not the white-powdered George Washington kind, but normal hair colors—and that there were connections, on the math-and-science side, to Pascal and Leibniz, and on the money side to an old banking dynasty called the Hacklhebers, and politically to—could that really be Peter the Great? Somehow that had come together in an institution called the Leibniz-Archiv, in Hanover, which frankly hadn’t done a heck of a lot for a few hundred years.

The designers of this exhibit had cleverly filled in that awkward gap with some material about early mechanical computers, including a working replica of Babbage’s difference engine (built in a fit of nerd energy, and later contributed to this museum, by a different local tech magnate). There was the obligatory shrine to Ada Lovelace and then a fast-forward to the mid-twentieth century and a black-and-white photo of the young Alan Turing, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, and Rudolf von Hacklheber on a bicycling expedition. This was where C-plus began to feel he was losing the thread, since the last mention of any Hacklhebers he’d seen was from 250 years earlier—but apparently this Rudolf was one of those hyperprivileged white guys who actually turned out to have legit mathematical talent. Anyway it kicked off a whole wing of the exhibit featuring an offbeat mix of stuff C-plus had seen in twenty other museums (Enigma machine, photograph of Turing bombe) with unique exhibits such as a computer that Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse had apparently made out of organ pipes and mercury-filled U-tubes.

There was a big map of the world festooned with swooping trails of LEDs and flat-panel monitors, trying to convey some elaborate chain of events in which the contents of the Leibniz-Archiv had been removed from Hanover, either to keep these priceless relics safe from Allied bombing raids or because Göring wanted to melt it all down, and somehow made their way, via U-boat, to the Philippines—only to be sunk, and later recovered by Waterhouses and Shaftoes.

The point being that the hoard consisted of gold plates with holes punched in them, like an early version of IBM punch cards, and they were meant to be used in a mechanical computer called the Logic Mill. The Logic Mill had been much talked about, by various savants, since the era of Oliver Cromwell, but had never really been constructed and made to work properly until Randy Waterhouse—one of the founders of the Weird Cyber Bank—had plowed some of his windfall into actually building a working replica. This had taken more than a decade because, to make a long story short, the eighteenth-century design made very little sense on a mechanical engineering level and required a lot of humans to move things around. And yet they had made it work using the actual, original plates from the Leibniz-Archiv.

And it was this detail that finally afforded Ben and C-plus a bit of privacy in which to have a real conversation. For an inner layer of even higher security surrounded the chamber housing the Logic Mill. Casual museum strollers could view it at a distance through a heavy glass window, but if you actually wanted to go in and see the thing working you had to check your bag and your coat and go through a metal detector and a pat-down. And that was enough of a barrier that most visitors were content just to look at it through the glass. Ben and Corvallis, however, went through and found themselves alone in a sunken vault (they sealed it up at night) with a contraption that slowly but inexorably shuffled gold plates around and probed them with metal pins.

“It’s on the Internet!” Ben said, indicating a flat-panel screen suspended on a jointed arm. Lines of text were marching up it so slowly that the display appeared to be frozen most of the time. Corvallis recognized them as low-level Internet codes.

“Of course it is,” he said numbly.

“In their retirement some of the OG Epiphyte geeks figured out how to program the Logic Mill to speak TCP, and gave it its own IP address—you can ping it if you have a lot of time on your hands.”

They stood there for a minute or two, watching the Logic Mill work, deriving a kind of calm satisfaction from the way the metal prods engaged the cards. When it seemed the time was right, C-plus said: “So. Elmo Shepherd.”

“El’s a true believer,” Ben replied.

Ben was in a T-shirt: swag from an early release of T’Rain, well worn in, with a dime-sized moth hole above his right nipple. Corvallis did not have to ask to understand that Ben had made a conscious choice to put it on this morning as a way of remembering Richard Forthrast, who’d given Ben his first job after Ben had been thrown out of Princeton. Ben had a round face, curly brown hair, hadn’t shaved in a while.

“You’ve met El?”

“Sat in on a bunch of meetings with him.”

“Why?”

“A 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.”

8

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 do to get them further stressed out. Talking about court orders and even filing a criminal complaint. It’s all bullshit.”

“But it works as a stick.”

“Yes. Which brings me to the carrot.”

“Okay. What are they holding out?”

“So far it’s just vague, conciliatory noises. But the point has been raised that it’s all just bits.”

“Once Dodge’s brain has been scanned, you mean.”

“Yeah. The output of that process is some smoke going up the chimney and some data stored in a file. They want a copy of the data.”

“Just a copy.”

“Yes. A nonexclusive license. The Forthrast Family Foundation would be able to keep its own copy and do with it as they please.”

“And then they’ll shut up and leave us alone.”

“If I am reading their strategy correctly, yes.”

“Why is El even bothering with this?” Corvallis asked. “Why doesn’t he use some other brain? Lots of people die, right?”

“Lots of people die,” Stan agreed, “but most of them don’t sign legal documents ordering that their brains should be preserved.”

“But he could find one.”

“Sure. But it’s hard to find one whose estate is rich enough to afford this kind of process.”

“So it’s all about money? Can’t El afford—”

“Remember, the ion-beam scanning facility doesn’t exist yet,” Stan said.

“WABSI only has it working on mouse brains.”

“Yeah, and only in a primitive form. Making the right kind of scanner, capable of doing a whole human brain, is going to cost billions. Not even Elmo Shepherd can afford it. But the combined resources of ELSH, WABSI, and the Forthrast Family Foundation might be able to swing it. And he doesn’t want to be frozen out of that coalition.”

“He has a funny way of showing it.”

“Like it or not,” Stan said, “some people actually do business this way. Like I said: carrot and stick.”

“What do you suggest we do now?”

“Exactly what you are doing,” Stan said. “Remember, the scanner won’t exist for a long time. So that’s plenty of time to consider options, make a decision.”

“Obviously, I’m not going to mention this to the Forthrasts.”

“No. Let them grieve. But do give me a call if they suddenly decide to have him cremated.”

During the phone call, Corvallis’s eyes had been wandering. He had noticed an oddity about the Greek myth book. It looked brand new, but it was defective. Seen edge-on, some of the pages in the front were warped, as if they’d been exposed to moisture. He pulled it toward him. D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths it was called. He opened the front cover and noticed two things. First of all, it had been inscribed.

Sophia,

I hope you’ll enjoy these stories as much as I did when I was your age! If you ever want me to read one to you, just tell your mom to call me.

Love,

Uncle Dodge

Second, there was a leaf—a big maple leaf, fire-engine red—flattened between the front cover and the first page. It was still damp and flexible. Dodge must have put it in there sopping wet, because the surrounding pages had soaked up enough water to pick up the sinusoidal warping that Corvallis had noticed a minute ago. It was obvious to him what had happened: Dodge had picked it up off the sidewalk outside of the medical building just before he had gone in there for the procedure. As a way of preserving it for his niece, he had slipped it under the cover of the book.