Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson
manner. He just wanted Zula to understand that the full resources of Argenbright Vail, up to and including drone strikes and private rocket ships, were at her and the family’s disposal.
“Alice is on a plane,” Zula told him. “She’ll be here late tonight.”
Stan looked a little nonplussed.
“Richard’s sister-in-law,” Zula explained.
“She’ll be the executor?”
Zula shook her head no and glanced at the will. “She’s just the most senior next of kin, I guess you would say. I don’t know how it works. If we’re going to do something—to pull the plug or whatever—she would want to be in on it.” Her face screwed up and she went into a little cry.
“I’m sorry,” Stan said. In addition to nonplussed, he seemed a bit of a mess emotionally. It was evident that he too had cried, and done it recently enough that he had a lingering case of the sniffles. He had probably looked at Richard on his way in. “Who is named as the executor?”
Zula looked up, sniffled, controlled it. Then her eyes turned to Corvallis.
“Sorry, I haven’t read the will,” Corvallis began.
Zula interrupted him. “I have. You’re the executor, C-plus.”
“Oh.” Corvallis said. “Holy shit.”
“You and I have a lot to talk about then,” Stan said.
“But he’s not technically dead yet, right?” Corvallis said. “So, the will doesn’t kick in. Not until—”
“Not until there is a death certificate,” Stan said with a nod. His eyes strayed toward the health care directive. He sniffled once more and nodded at it. “That was drawn up personally by Christopher Vail Jr.,” he said. Seeing that this meant nothing to the others, he elaborated: “The cofounder of our firm. He took early retirement about five years ago. Early-onset Alzheimer’s. He’s in a special hospice now. He’s feeling no pain. But he won’t be able to help us with these documents.”
“Have you read them?” Corvallis asked.
“In the Uber, on the way here.” Stan raised his eyebrows in a mute commentary on what he had seen on those pages, and Corvallis was unable to hold back a faint smile.
“I took the liberty of running a diff,” Corvallis said.
“I’ll guess that is some kind of technical term?”
“I ran a text analysis program that compared these documents with the ones on the Internet that they were obviously adapted from.”
“How did you obtain an electronic copy? These are paper,” Stan pointed out.
“I took a picture of it with my phone and OCRed it,” Corvallis said.
Stan seemed to find it all a bit irregular. “What did you learn from ‘running a diff’?”
“Christopher Vail Jr. didn’t just blindly copy the boilerplate language,” Corvallis said. “He made changes.”
“I would certainly hope so!” said Stan.
“Not to the technical instructions, of course—that’s all the same, word for word. But in the language around it he added some other provisions.”
“C-plus, you’ll have to forgive me for being, frankly, a little unprepared for all this,” Stan said, and sighed. “I will admit I hadn’t looked at Richard’s will or these other documents. If I had been aware of their unusual contents, I might have spoken to him, at some point, about refreshing them, doing a little routine maintenance. As it is, I am in all honesty running a little behind. Perhaps you could just tell me what it is that you think you have found and I can give you my word that by the time Alice arrives I will be fully on top of all of this.”
“It looks to me like the original language from Ephrata was written by nerds.”
“Ephrata? Sounds biblical.”
“It is. But in this case I’m talking about Ephrata Cryonics Inc. The cold storage place in the town of the same name. It’s in the desert east of the mountains. Or it was.”
It took a moment for that last word to sink into Stan’s brain. “Oh, shit.”
“It’s okay,” Corvallis said. “See, this is where Christopher Vail earned his fee. The founders of Ephrata were true believers. They believed they had come up with the ideal way to preserve human remains. And they believed that Ephrata Cryonics Inc. was going to be around forever.”
“Because so many people were going to sign up for the service …,” Zula said.
“That they’d have a fat bank account, economies of scale, the whole bit,” said Corvallis.
“Well, as one who knew Chris Vail well when his faculties were intact, I’m guessing he took neither of those presumptions for granted,” Stan said.
Corvallis nodded. “If you read this, I think what you’ll see is him basically saying: look, if Ephrata Cryonics is actually still in business when Richard Forthrast dies, and if they are solvent, and if no better technology has been invented in the meantime to preserve the remains, then go ahead and follow these instructions and ship Dodge off to the big freezer in Ephrata.”
“But if any of those is not true …,” Stan said.
“Well, then it gets complicated,” Corvallis said.
“Like it was all so simple before,” Zula muttered.
Corvallis pulled the disposition of remains over to him and flipped through to the last few pages, which were all in the standardissue justified Palatino of Argenbright Vail. “Complicated in a way that makes my brain hurt—but I’ll bet you can make sense of it.”
“At your service, sir,” Stan said.
Fortuitously, they were joined a moment later by a woman who introduced herself as the hospital’s general counsel. It was easy enough to infer that she’d been alerted to the presence of a patient’s attorney in the ICU department and was coming down to find out what was up. That the patient was a famous billionaire and the lawyer a senior partner at Argenbright Vail had presumably put some spring in her step. She was younger and less heavily groomed than might be expected; a Catholic feminist soccer mom with a Brown degree, according to the Miasma. Esme Hurlbut, believe it or not. Enjoyed knitting and free climbing. A few minutes were lost in making introductions and bringing Esme up to speed; Dr. Trinh repeated what the others already knew of Dodge’s condition. Corvallis spent the time rifling the Miasma for more information about Ephrata Cryonics Inc.
When the conversation resumed, he was in a position to say more: “Ephrata took in a bunch of money from people like Dodge. They froze a few bodies almost immediately—which probably seemed like progress at the time—but it forced them to keep the freezers running forever after that. They got hit with a lawsuit from some pissed-off Eutropians that depleted their reserves. They never really hit their targets financially. The bottom fell out after the dot-com crash. In 2003 they did a reorg. Their first step was to cut the heads off and burn the bodies.”
“I’m sorry, could you say that again?” Stan asked.
Esme Hurlbut, who had clearly been apprehensive when she had entered the room, was now more fascinated.
“They had eleven bodies in cryostorage at that point,” Corvallis said, flicking his gaze down at his laptop to verify the stats. “The contract that all eleven of those people had signed, while they were alive, when they gave Ephrata Cryonics their money, contained an out. It said that the remains were to be preserved in cryogenic storage—or through whatever means, in the judgment of Ephrata Cryonics, were best suited to the desired goal of eventually bringing the deceased back to life.”
Esme raised her hand like the smart girl in the front row. “Judgment? Or sole judgment?”