Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson
a steady low-level exposure to christenings, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals. While in middle school Corvallis had started to become aware that he was not much good, compared to other people, at situations where he was called upon to express his emotions. Like the early warning signs of a dread disease, this had first surfaced when he had found himself at a party and discovered that he couldn’t dance. Movement per se he was good at—he already had a brown belt in tae kwon do—but movement expressive of feelings was impossible for him. Since then the condition had only become more pronounced.
This lack of surefootedness extended to simple matters such as talking to strangers on the telephone and complimenting female friends on their new haircuts—two things, among many, that he would cross the street to avoid doing. The mere thought of all the telephone calls that Zula was about to have to make, the crying, the hugging, the writing of notes, tear-soaked airport pickups, long wrenching heart-to-hearts with third cousins twice removed—merely being in proximity to it, with no real expectations or responsibilities at all, was nearly enough to send Corvallis into a panic attack.
But there was always a way out. Corvallis’s dad was the designated photographer at family reunions. He was not a hugger, but he did a dynamite job of taking pictures of people hugging; no hug could escape the sleepless gaze of his bleeding-edge Nikon. Corvallis was enormously relieved now to have a specific task in which expressing emotions was not merely unnecessary but actually somewhat counterproductive. He opened his laptop. He figured out how to get on the hospital’s guest Wi-Fi network. He forced himself to ignore all of the email that had piled up during the hour or so since he had last checked it and went to the website for Argenbright Vail. This was a Seattle-based law firm with branches in San Jose and a few other centers of the tech economy. Formerly a small, white-shoe sort of practice, it had, during the decades since Microsoft had taken root in this area, grown to the point where it now had something like a thousand lawyers. Argenbright Vail had helped Dodge form Corporation 9592, accepting payment in the form of an envelope of twenty-dollar bills, and had represented both him personally and his company ever since. Corvallis didn’t know whether Dodge even had a will, or, if he did, where it might be found, but this was an obvious place to start looking.
Argenbright Vail occupied ten floors of an office tower that was directly visible out the window of this very room. When Corvallis dialed the extension of Stan Peterson, the partner there whom he deemed most likely to know the answer to his question, he could almost imagine that Stan was visible through one of those windows, the white French cuff of his shirt flashing as he reached out to pick up his handset. For once, the telephone gods were smiling upon Corvallis, and he was able to get through on the second ring. It probably helped that he was the CTO of a hot startup, his name, title, and photograph enshrined in Argenbright Vail’s awesome high-tech phone system and displayed on the screen of Stan’s computer at the same time the phone rang.
“Corvallis Kawasaki, as I live and breathe!” Stan called cheerfully.
“Stan, are you in your office? Someplace private?”
“Yeah, let me just close the door.” Corvallis heard Stan doing so. “What’s up? Should I get Laura?” He was referring to another partner there who handled the account of Nubilant—the company Corvallis now worked for. Stan, on the other hand, was Dodge’s personal lawyer. Perhaps he was assuming that Corvallis was confused and had dialed the wrong extension. Happened all the time.
“No, this is about Dodge.”
“Is he in trouble again?” Stan asked with feigned exasperation that was meant to be humorous, and would have been, if Dodge hadn’t been brain-dead.
Corvallis gave him an explanation of what was happening. Or had happened was truer, but more painful, as it captured the reality that it was not going to un-happen. Every so often, he paused in case Stan wanted to jump in with a question. But Stan was utterly silent, except for some breathing, which sounded a little faster and heavier than normal.
“Of course!” he blurted out, when Corvallis had finally got around to asking about the will. “I mean, yes! We drew up his will. Years ago. It’s got the thing you’re asking for.”
“A living will?”
“Health care directive,” Stan corrected him. “Same thing. But, C-plus, are you sure …”
“Sure of what?”
“That his condition is really at the point where—where we need to be reading that document?”
“You mean the document that states what Dodge wanted to happen in the case where he was brain-dead, and on life support?” Corvallis asked.
After a long pause, Stan said, “Yeah.”
“The doctor didn’t pull any punches. He’s with Zula now. When he comes back I’ll double-check. But in the meantime I think you had better get it over here.”
Stan was slow to respond. Corvallis tried, “Worst case is that it’s a false alarm and we have a laugh over it.”
This was a lie, but it worked. “I’ll do it,” Stan said immediately.
Dodge’s will arrived twenty minutes later, delivered by a bicycle messenger who pulled it out of a rain-washed bag slung over one shoulder. Homo Seattleus, Corvallis thought as he regarded this lanky young man, his dreadlocks, his long reddish beard, his Utilikilt, his blinding array of independently flashing bike safety lights, his stainless-steel water bottle. Somewhat contrary to his appearance, he was all business and insisted that Zula would have to sign for the receipt of the documents. She did so without interrupting a telephone conversation that she was having over her earbuds. Corvallis took the envelope back to the little private room that they had turned into their operations center and undid the string tie and pulled out a stack of documents. There were three of them: a fat one that was the actual last will and testament, and two shorter ones, the health care directive and the disposition of remains. He did so with a feeling of dread so powerful that it induced tingling in his fingertips. He was afraid that the voice of Dodge was about to speak to him from the health care directive, stating bluntly that if he ended up on a ventilator he was to be put to death forthwith. In which case it would happen now, before Corvallis had had time to even Google the five stages of grief. He was holding out some hope that Dodge might have gone soft—or, much more likely in the case of Dodge, that he had been so bored by the process of drawing up these documents that he had simply signed whatever they had put in front of him, and that it might afford some kind of loophole. An excuse to keep him on the machine for a few days at least—long enough for more family members to converge on the scene and shoulder Corvallis out of the way and make it not be his problem.
What he found was neither. The health care directive was curiously verbose. And it was a bit odd from a typographical standpoint. The introductory paragraph and some of the connective tissue was in the Palatino that was standard at Argenbright Vail. But big slabs of it were in Monaco, a sans-serif typeface that tended to be used by nerds to display computer code in terminal windows. This was, in other words, a document that had been assembled largely by copying and pasting material from something else—something that looked like it had been downloaded from the Internet back in the pre-web days. Probably straight text, as opposed to a word processing document. The quotation marks and other punctuation suggested that it had originally been composed in the nerd-friendly text processing program Emacs. No effort had been made by Stan, or whoever had drawn this thing up, to “select all” and tidy up the formatting.
Those sections of the document contained instructions. Detailed instructions. Weird ones. Technically precise instructions on how to kill Dodge in a controlled manner, should he ever wind up on a ventilator. The machine was not just supposed to be disconnected. Instead it was to be left on while Dodge’s body was infused with a certain mixture of drugs and his core temperature was dropped using an ice bath. Only then was the ventilator to be removed. And then, at the moment that Dodge stopped being a living person at death’s door and became legally dead, the reader was urged to set aside the health care directive and pick up its companion document, the disposition of remains. And this had exactly the same typographical peculiarities. It was a seamless continuation of the protocol begun in