Fall or, Dodge in Hell

Corvallis had an “oh shit” moment then. A clear memory and an understanding. He checked the signature date on the documents. They were nine years old. Richard had caused them to be drawn up when he had become wealthy. He had signed them, filed them away, and forgotten about them. He was the last man in the world who would have bothered to update and maintain his will.

“Is he wearing a bracelet?” Corvallis asked Zula during a rare moment when she wasn’t on the phone to Iowa.

“A what?” she asked, not certain she’d quite heard him correctly. It was a weird question; Dodge was about as likely to wear a bishop’s miter as a bracelet.

“I mean a medical alert kind of bracelet. You know, like people wear if they have drug allergies or something.”

“For the doctor to read in the ER if you’re found unconscious.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I don’t think so. Want me to go check?”

“Hang on,” Corvallis said, “I think I can spare you the trouble.” He had brought up the photo application on his laptop. He had thousands of pictures archived on this thing. Organizing them into albums was one of those tasks he never seemed to have time for. But the application did have a built-in ability to recognize faces, and automatically to produce collections of pictures that included a particular face. During stretches of bored downtime on airplanes, Corvallis had taught it to recognize a few faces that were important to him, including that of Richard Forthrast. He clicked on “Dodge” in the interface. The application cogitated for a few moments and then populated the window with thumbnails of pictures featuring Dodge, or people who, according to its algorithm, resembled him. With another click Corvallis sorted them according to date, then began to page through them from the beginning. His earliest personal photograph of Dodge was from about eight years ago, but he had a few older photos, taken before he had even met the man, that had found their way onto his drive as the result of being attached to emails or what have you. Some of these showed a very young man: the long-haired 1970s draft-dodging edition of Richard Forthrast, hanging out in wild places along the Idaho–British Columbia border, and depicted in the flamboyant hues of scanned Kodachrome. No bracelets for him. Hitting the right-arrow key, he worked up through the years until he stumbled into a series of pictures taken around the time of Corporation 9592’s initial public offering. In one of those, Dodge was gripping a magnum of champagne in both hands, bracing it against his penis, holding a thumb over the mouth of the bottle to make it spray foam at Pluto. The photo was harshly lit by a flash and it showed both of his arms clearly. On his left wrist, competing for space with a cheap digital wristwatch, was a medical alert bracelet: a metal plaque about the size of a large postage stamp, held on with a chain, blazoned with a red caduceus, otherwise covered with print too fine to read. Way more metallic real estate than what would have been needed for “I am allergic to penicillin.”

Corvallis didn’t need to read it because he knew exactly what it was. Just to be sure, he checked the date of the photo and verified that it had been taken within a couple of months of the signing of the will.

He opened up a new browser window and clicked in the search box. He turned his attention to the health care directive and skimmed through one of those Monaco-font sections until he found an unusual series of words. He typed those in and hit the Enter key and was immediately presented with a screen full of exact matches. The same text had been copied and pasted in many places on the Internet. For his purposes, most of them would be red herrings. Corvallis scanned through the search results until finally he saw the word that he had, this entire time, been trying to dredge up from his memory.

He went back to the search box and typed “Eutropians.” A memory from the early days of the Internet, the 1990s tech boom.

The primary website had not been updated for more than ten years. The organization, if it even still existed, seemed to have gone dark in 2002, in the black years after the implosion of the tech bubble and 9/11.

The Wikipedia entry was bracketed in multiple layers of warnings; people had been fighting over it.

Some of the basic facts, however, seemed indisputable. The Eutropians were a movement that had taken shape during the early 1990s, when all things had seemed possible through technology. It was just an informal discussion group in Berkeley, with a branch around Stanford. They had adopted the World Wide Web early and created what at the time was an unusually sophisticated website. Now, of course, it was as dated as black-and-white TV. A nonprofit had been founded, later obtained 501(c)(3) status, and ceased to exist in 2004. More than one for-profit company had emerged from the movement. The Wikipedia entry was littered with question marks and complaints from various editors. Corvallis didn’t have to check its history to know that it had been the battleground of many flame wars. The details didn’t matter.

“If I can get Dr. Trinh in here,” Corvallis said, “can I then have a few minutes of your time?”

Actually he didn’t say it; he texted it to Zula, who was across the table from him, trying to calm someone down over the phone. She glanced at the screen of her phone, then looked up at him and nodded.

Corvallis had a bit of a hard time convincing the nurse at the front desk that what he had to tell Dr. Trinh was really more important than what he was doing at the moment, but when he used the words “health care directive” and “legal” it got her attention. A few minutes later, the doctor was in the room again with Corvallis and Zula.

“There was this group of geeks in the Bay Area in the 1990s who thought they saw a path to immortality through technology,” Corvallis began. “They became known as Eutropians. It is a quasitechnical name. If entropy is the tendency of things to become disorganized over time, then eutropy is a statement of optimism. Not only can we defeat entropy, but the universe, in a way, wants us to use our powers as conscious beings to make things better. And part of that is defeating death.”

“How’d that work out for them?” Zula asked, deadpan.

“These guys were smart,” Corvallis said. “Not flakes. There was nothing they didn’t know, or couldn’t learn, about the science. They knew perfectly well that it was going to be a long time—decades at least—before practical life-extension technology became available. They knew that in the meantime they could die at any point in a car accident or whatever. So, they instituted a stopgap. Based on the best science at the time, they designed a protocol for preserving human remains and keeping them on ice indefinitely.”

“So that, down the road—” Zula began.

“Down the road,” Corvallis said, “when it did become technologically possible, they could be brought back to life.”

“Like Walt Disney,” said Dr. Trinh.

“Apparently that’s an urban myth,” Corvallis said, “but yeah, it’s the same idea. Cryonics. It’s a big long hairy story. The idea has been around since the 1960s and it’s come and gone in waves. Well, what you both need to know is that Richard got caught up in one of those waves for a little while.”

“It doesn’t seem like him,” Zula said.

“Yes and no. Sure, he is—was—skeptical. A fatalist. But he was also open-minded. Willing to take calculated risks.”

“I’ll give you that.”

“Around the time that his company became a big deal, he was making a lot of contacts in the tech world, going to conferences, hanging out with VCs. One of the VCs who had backed Corporation 9592 also had some money in a startup that had been founded by an offshoot of the Eutropians. To make a long story short, it was a cryonics company. They constructed a facility in eastern Washington State. Electrical power is cheap there because of the Grand Coulee Dam.”

“And that was their biggest expense,” Dr. Trinh surmised. “Power to keep the freezers running.”

“Exactly. They approached a lot of people who had new tech money and offered them a Pascal’s Wager kind of deal.”

“Pascal’s Wager?” asked Dr. Trinh.

“Pascal once said that you should believe in God because, if you turned out to be wrong, you weren’t losing anything, and if you turned out to be right, the reward was infinite,” Corvallis said.

Zula nodded. “It was the same exact deal here.”

“Exactly,” Corvallis said. “If cryonics turned out to be worthless, and it was impossible to save your frozen body, who cares? You’re dead anyway. But if it actually did work, you might be able to live forever.”

“I can totally see Richard going for that,” Zula said, nodding. “After a few drinks.”

“He did go for it, and he followed all of their recommended procedures,” Corvallis said. “For a little while, he wore a special medical bracelet giving instructions on how to freeze his body.” He spun his laptop around and let them see the photograph. “Around the same time, he updated his will. And most of it, I’m guessing, is just an ordinary will.” Corvallis rested his hand on the thickest of the three documents. “But the health care directive and the disposition of remains consist mostly of boilerplate instructions that had been developed by the Eutropians. And basically what it says is that after his body has been chilled down, it’s supposed to be shipped to this facility out in eastern Washington, where a team of medical technicians will take over and prepare him for the full cryonic-preservation thing.”

“I’ve never seen that bracelet on him,” Zula remarked.

“Because he stopped wearing it before you came out to Seattle,” Corvallis said. “He told me this story once, a long time ago. About the Eutropians and the VC and all the rest. I had kind of forgotten it. Dodge had a lot of stories and this wasn’t the most interesting of them.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Zula confirmed, with a slow shake of the head.

“It was pretty clear from the way he told the story that he had decided the whole thing was ridiculous. Like when he went out and bought that Escalade and then wrecked it.”

“One of those silly things that boys do when they suddenly get a lot of money,” Zula said.

“Exactly. It’s long forgotten. But”—and Corvallis now rested his hand on the health care directive—“he never updated his will.”

“That is still legally binding?” Zula asked sharply, nodding at the documents.

“I’m not a lawyer,” Corvallis said.

They both looked at Dr. Trinh, who held his hands up as if under arrest and shook his head.

Stan Peterson—who was, in fact, a lawyer—was there half an hour later. He had canceled all of his appointments, he wanted it known. He did not announce this in a self-congratulatory 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?”