Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson
“Umm, sorry. There’s a weird connection. Pardon the pun.”
“Connection to what?” Esme asked. Her primary reason for remaining in the room had long since become sheer intellectual curiosity.
“I should explain,” Corvallis said, “that I work for—I am the CTO of—a cloud computing company here in Seattle. And one of our clients is—well—”
“Don’t tell me,” Zula said. “Ephrata Life Sciences and Health.”
“Not quite. But Elmo Shepherd has a stable of companies that he runs out of the Presidio. Some for profit. Others are more like think tanks, research institutes, and the like. He’s really interested in the Singularity, which is—”
“I know what it is,” Zula said.
“I don’t. Would you indulge me?” Esme said. She had, in some nonverbal way, bonded with Zula.
Zula nodded and said, “It’s a kind of belief system that in the future we are going to upload our brains into computers and live forever digitally.”
“How do you get ‘Singularity’ out of that?”
“You add in Moore’s Law,” Corvallis said.
“That’s the one that says computers keep getting faster?”
“Exponentially. Extrapolate it out, and it suggests that the souls that have been uploaded to silicon will become super fast, super powerful, and render living, biological brains irrelevant.”
“I still don’t see how ‘Singularity’ describes that—isn’t that a word for a black hole?”
“It’ll happen in a flash, is the idea,” Zula explained.
“And El Shepherd believes in this,” Esme said.
Stan was just sitting there with his hands cupped around his eyes. When is this day going to stop getting weirder?
“Some of his other companies exist to support research on different aspects of phenomena relating to the Singularity. One of those is the connectome of the brain. There’s a whole stable of them. Look, I’m on thin ice here because I can’t breach the confidentiality of Nubilant’s relationship with its customers.”
“But it’s obvious,” Stan said, “from the look on your face that El Shepherd is storing the connectomes of the Ephrata Eleven on your company’s servers.”
“If you haven’t gotten sick of everything being ironic yet,” Corvallis said, “you might enjoy knowing that our biggest server farm is out in eastern Washington State. Not far from Ephrata.”
“Where power is cheap, and cooling water is plentiful,” Zula said. She had majored in geology.
“I feel like I’m losing the thread of this conversation,” Esme admitted.
“This is either really good or really bad, in terms of my ability to be useful,” Corvallis said. “I’ll ask around and see if I can get through to some of Elmo Shepherd’s people in the Presidio.”
“Or El himself,” Stan said. “This warrants his attention, I think.”
The conversation petered out as it became clear to them that they were not going to pull the plug on Dodge right away. Dr. Trinh left the room to attend to patients who weren’t beyond helping. Esme distributed business cards and swapped cell phone numbers, then excused herself. Other patients’ families needed to use the room and so Stan, Zula, and Corvallis shifted to the hospital cafeteria. From there they went their separate ways: Stan to his office to bone up on the documents, Zula to her home, Corvallis to his office.
The conversation paused for an afternoon. The pause grew to encompass the evening and the night that followed. Twenty-four hours elapsed before it resumed. Corvallis spent it in a kind of limbo. Until there was a death certificate, Dodge wasn’t legally dead, and so there was no need for an executor. Executor—or, in the more modern gender-neutral usage, “personal representative”—was to be Corvallis’s role. He devoted a little bit of effort to learning how the job worked, but it was mostly legalese of the sort that made his head hurt. He had responsibilities at work.
And at about ten in the evening, word somehow leaked to the Miasma that Richard Forthrast was in the ICU with serious medical problems. Then his world exploded for about six hours and ruled out getting very much sleep. The Miasma behaved, sometimes, as if it expected every man, woman, and child on earth to have a social media and PR staff on twenty-four-hour call. It would have been impossible even if Corvallis had been at liberty to say anything.
When next they got together, it was in a suite in an old but well-maintained luxury hotel a couple of blocks from the hospital. Corvallis knew Alice Forthrast a little—well enough to guess that she hadn’t chosen this place. Zula had done it for her. Alice would have made a sort of performance of her frugality and her lack of interest in the ways of big coastal cities by staying in the cheapest available motel near the airport. Zula had preempted all of that by making other arrangements and simply driving her here and dropping her off last night. The place was within walking distance of where Zula, Csongor, and Sophia lived. The relatives back home would wonder why Alice didn’t just sleep on Zula’s couch, or in Richard’s now-vacant apartment for that matter. But Corvallis followed Zula’s thinking. The family would need a command center near the hospital, some neutral ground from which they could operate. A conference room at Argenbright Vail would have put them too much in the law firm’s pocket. The kitchen table at Zula and Csongor’s condo would have made certain conversations awkward, if Sophia were underfoot asking to have everything explained. So the hotel suite it was.
By the time Corvallis got there with Jake Forthrast—Richard’s younger brother—in tow, Zula had already stocked its fridge with milk, yogurt, and a few other staples so that Alice wouldn’t have to go on making outraged Facebook posts over the cost of room service. Csongor had taken a few days of leave and was at home on full-time Sophia duty so that Zula could focus everything on this. Corvallis had warned people at Nubilant that he would be out of pocket for a few days—almost unnecessary given that most people there had awakened this morning to gales of social media coverage of the Forthrast tragedy. Number one on Reddit was a brief video that some random kid had shot yesterday of himself standing next to Dodge outside of the medical building where, only a few minutes later, Dodge had been stricken. Corvallis had forcibly ignored it for a few times and then just broken down and watched the damned thing. Dodge was being reasonably cheerful about being waylaid by his young fanboy; he’d pulled his headphones down around his neck so that he could hear what the kid was saying, and tinny music could be heard from them when cars weren’t shusshing past on the wet street. Corvallis had expected that the video would wreck him, but instead he found it weirdly comforting, and watched it several times. Reminding himself of who Dodge was, and getting ready for the post-Dodge world.
Corvallis had, a few minutes ago, picked Jake Forthrast up at the train station downtown. He was in his late forties—a straggler, much younger than the other three Forthrast siblings. He lived in northern Idaho, in a remote community of like-minded people, which was to say extreme libertarians with a religious bent. He had a wife and a brood of kids there. Outside of his little area, he couldn’t drive, because he didn’t have a driver’s license, because he did not believe that the government had the authority to issue them. Yesterday, upon hearing the news, he had somehow made his way to the train station in Coeur d’Alene and boarded a westbound Amtrak that was running seven hours late. He and Corvallis had crossed paths before and were more comfortable around each other than might have been expected based on the differences in their backgrounds and their political and religious thinking. The drive from the train station to the valet parking in front of the hotel had not lasted much more than five minutes and so Corvallis had not been able to tell him much, other than that Richard’s condition was