Читать книгу Fall or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson - Страница 12

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 unchanged. Jake had a somewhat scruffy beard, auburn turning gray, and had gone mostly bald. He was wearing the sensible flannel-lined work clothes that he wore day in and day out at his job, which was building log cabins and rustic furniture. He gazed around at the lobby’s opulent furnishings with an expression Corvallis did not know how to read. The elevator, which was paneled with finely wrought hardwood, gave him something to focus on.

Alice Forthrast was the widow of Richard’s older brother, John, and the matriarch of the extended family, operating from a farmhouse in northwest Iowa. She was in her seventies but could have passed for younger. She hadn’t bothered with trying to color her hair, which was thoroughly gray now, and cut short. When Corvallis first saw her she was smiling at Zula, showing real teeth, somewhat the worse for wear. They had been remembering something funny that Richard had done. But when Corvallis and Jake came in they sobered up, as if they’d been caught out misbehaving. Jake greeted Zula with a long, warm hug and Alice with a more perfunctory one; she did not fully rise out of her chair, but she did smile at him, lips pressed together, eyes slitted against tears.

Corvallis and Alice had met before, but Zula reintroduced them just in case Alice had forgotten his name. Maybe Alice’s short-term memory was a little leaky, or maybe it was one of those all-Asians-look-the-same deals. Anyway Alice nodded and said, “Of course, I remember Dodge talking about you and your Rome activities.” Referring to an eccentric hobby.

“But he’s also—” Zula put in.

“Of course, I know that there’s much more to C-plus than just that,” Alice said, then turned to Corvallis. “Otherwise I don’t think that Dodge would have entrusted you with being the executor of his will, would he?”

Good. So someone had laid that on her.

Alice continued, “I want you to know that Richard, whatever some people might say about him, was a fine judge of men, and if he trusted you, then we trust you. And I can see all kinds of intelligent reasons to have the executor be someone outside the family—an impartial person.”

“Well, I’m just sorry that we are re-meeting under these circumstances,” Corvallis said. This was a bit of dialogue he had concocted ahead of time, and it sounded that way. So he improvised, “Thanks for your statement that you just made.” Zula and Alice kept looking at him as if they were expecting more. “It means a lot to me,” he tried. Both women seemed to find this acceptable as a termination of whatever it was he’d been trying to gasp out. “I’ll do my best,” he tacked on, unable to stop himself, and they began to look a little unnerved.

He was saved by the timely arrival of Stan, who showed up with a younger lawyer in tow.

The summit conference had now attained a sort of quorum. Alice, Zula, and Jake were the closest Richard had to next of kin: to put it bluntly, enough critical mass to pull the plug on Richard’s ventilator. Corvallis was there in his role as executor, which had not formally commenced yet, and the lawyers were in the house, and on the clock. Insensitive to the ways of lawyers and their hourly rates, Alice insisted on making coffee and small talk, racking up, in Corvallis’s loose estimation, about a thousand dollars’ worth of billable hours before allowing the conversation to spiral around to matters that might be considered business. Distracted by the meter running in his head, Corvallis sipped his coffee—which was terrible—and looked around at the room, which was finished like the abode of a wealthy old lady. Of course, Alice Forthrast was, in fact, a wealthy old lady, but he suspected that her house was finished in an altogether different style.

The younger lawyer was named Marcus, he was from Shaker Heights, he had attended Penn, where he had majored in philosophy and lettered in rowing. After a stint working in a rural Mississippi town with Teach for America, he had gone on to Stanford Law School. He had a lovely wife of Korean ancestry and a six-month-old baby and was just days away from closing on a Tudor Revival three-bedroom in the Queen Anne neighborhood—a bit of a fixer-upper but with good bones, a great family dwelling once they pulled the asbestos-covered heating ducts out of the basement, a job on which they were taking bids now. Alice extracted all of this from him and then, almost as an afterthought, got him to admit that his specialty was structuring transactions in the tech industry and that he didn’t really know anything about family law and had never drawn up a will. Before Stan—who had spent most of the conversation checking his phone—was fully aware of the trap that his young associate had just stepped into, he made a similar confession. Now that it was too late, he assured Alice that Christopher Vail had been quite good at that kind of thing.

Alice shook her head like a disappointed mom. On the flight from Omaha 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 here. So I reached out to them and broke the news about Richard, whom they love, by the way. And I asked if they knew anything on this topic. I told them about the process that ELSH used several years ago to scan those eleven brains that they had frozen. And they—the Waterhouse people—said it is definitely not the state-of-the-art in that field. Much more sophisticated techniques have been developed. Night and day.”

“Then why isn’t ELSH using them?” Alice asked.

“Well, it looks like I could just hit redial on my phone and ask El Shepherd,” Corvallis said, “but the answer is probably that they have never been used on human brains before. Only mice.”

“Only mice,” Alice repeated.

The Forthrasts’ reactions were varied. Alice was incredulous, perhaps wondering why Corvallis had bothered mentioning it if that was the case. Jake shook his head in utter disdain at the foolishness of these rodent-brain-scanning humanists. But Zula got it.

“How many years?” Zula asked.

“What?” Alice asked.

“How many years out? Before they can make one big enough to do a human?”

“That,” Corvallis said, “is what I am trying to find out. I have a call in to—”

“Years? What good does that do us?” Alice demanded. “We have to make a decision now. Richard’s lying in a bed across the street on a ventilator.”

“We could freeze him now,” Corvallis said.

“Who’s ‘we’?” Jake demanded.

“Sorry,” Corvallis said. “Point taken. You, the family, could freeze him now.”

“I’ll have no part of it,” Jake reminded him.

“Jake, stop interrupting,” Alice said. “Go on, please, C-plus.”

“If he were frozen now, using the latest version of the Eutropian protocol—which supposedly preserves the connectome, the pattern of connections among the neurons—and if he were kept frozen for a few years, then, when this new scanning technology did become available, his brain could be scanned that way.”

“But I was told that the company that freezes people was out of business,” Alice said.

“Richard’s net worth is something like three billion dollars,” Corvallis pointed out.

“Enough to buy a freezer, you’re saying.”

“I’m saying it’s an option.”

“Then do we hire someone to stand by the freezer for a few years and make sure it keeps running?” Jake demanded.

“I don’t know,” Corvallis said, “I haven’t thought it through yet.”

Marcus, the junior lawyer, had been silent ever since blundering into Alice’s trap. He spoke up now. “Our law firm has done some work for the Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation—the primary funder of WABSI, the Waterhouse Brain Sciences Institute,” he announced.

“Of course it has,” Alice said. “Argenbright Vail works for everyone.”

Marcus held up a hand to stay her. “It’s a big firm,” he said, “and we are very careful to avoid conflicts of interest. We have to be. All I’m saying is that, around here, such foundations are pretty common. A lot of people have made a lot of money in tech. When they reach a certain point in their lives, they start giving it away, and that’s how these foundations get established. They interlock”—he laced his fingers together—“in complicated ways. Now, as soon as a death certificate is issued for Richard Forthrast, according to his last will and testament, a new one of those is going to be brought into existence.”

“The Forthrast Family Foundation,” Alice said, “inevitably.”

“You don’t have to buy your own freezer, is my point. I think the odds are that if you go and talk to Wabsy—”

“Wabsy?”

“WABSI, which, as Corvallis points out, is less than a mile away, you can work something out in which Richard’s brain is donated to science.”

“But then they could do anything they like with it!”

Marcus shook his head. “You can write up any contract you want. Be as specific as you like about what is to be done with it.”

“Why would they sign such a contract?” Alice asked.

“Because the Forthrast Family Foundation is going to give them a shit-ton of money,” Zula predicted, “and money talks.”

“I’m just the lawyer here,” Stan said, “but I like this. We cannot make a reasonable argument that Ephrata Cryonics is insolvent, because it is being supported by El Shepherd out of his own seemingly bottomless funds. So. If the family’s preference is that Dodge’s brain not be prematurely subjected to the same destructive scanning process that ELSH is pushing, then, according to the terms of the health care directive, we simply need to make an argument that there is some better process available. And if there’s anything to what Corvallis is saying, that’s going to be easy.”

“Easy enough to satisfy Elmo Shepherd?”

“We don’t have to satisfy him,” Stan said. “We just have to be able to look him in the eye when we’re telling him to fuck off.”