Fall or, Dodge in Hell

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 (#ulink_8316d695-fe3a-5169-8db4-db81f187b2cc)

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.