Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson

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СКАЧАТЬ 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?”

      Zula shook her head no and glanced at the will. “She’s just the most senior next of kin, I guess you would say. I don’t know how it works. If we’re going to do something—to pull the plug or whatever—she would want to be in on it.” Her face screwed up and she went into a little cry.

      “I’m sorry,” Stan said. In addition to nonplussed, he seemed a bit of a mess emotionally. It was evident that he too had cried, and done it recently enough that he had a lingering case of the sniffles. He had probably looked at Richard on his way in. “Who is named as the executor?”

      Zula looked up, sniffled, controlled it. Then her eyes turned to Corvallis.

      “Sorry, I haven’t read the will,” Corvallis began.

      Zula interrupted him. “I have. You’re the executor, C-plus.”

      “Oh.” Corvallis said. “Holy shit.”

      “You and I have a lot to talk about then,” Stan said.

      “But he’s not technically dead yet, right?” Corvallis said. “So, the will doesn’t kick in. Not until—”

      “Not until there is a death certificate,” Stan said with a nod. His eyes strayed toward the health care directive. He sniffled once more and nodded at it. “That was drawn up personally by Christopher Vail Jr.,” he said. Seeing that this meant nothing to the others, he elaborated: “The cofounder of our firm. He took early retirement about five years ago. Early-onset Alzheimer’s. He’s in a special hospice now. He’s feeling no pain. But he won’t be able to help us with these documents.”

      “Have you read them?” Corvallis asked.

      “In the Uber, on the way here.” Stan raised his eyebrows in a mute commentary on what he had seen on those pages, and Corvallis was unable to hold back a faint smile.

      “I took the liberty of running a diff,” Corvallis said.

      “I’ll guess that is some kind of technical term?”

      “I ran a text analysis program that compared these documents with the ones on the Internet that they were obviously adapted from.”

      “How did you obtain an electronic copy? These are paper,” Stan pointed out.

      “I took a picture of it with my phone and OCRed it,” Corvallis said.

      Stan seemed to find it all a bit irregular. “What did you learn from ‘running a diff’?”

      “Christopher Vail Jr. didn’t just blindly copy the boilerplate language,” Corvallis said. “He made changes.”

      “I would certainly hope so!” said Stan.

      “Not to the technical instructions, of course—that’s all the same, word for word. But in the language around it he added some other provisions.”

      “C-plus, you’ll have to forgive me for being, frankly, a little unprepared for all this,” Stan said, and sighed. “I will admit I hadn’t looked at Richard’s will or these other documents. If I had been aware of their unusual contents, I might have spoken to him, at some point, about refreshing them, doing a little routine maintenance. As it is, I am in all honesty running a little behind. Perhaps you could just tell me what it is that you think you have found and I can give you my word that by the time Alice arrives I will be fully on top of all of this.”

      “It looks to me like the original language from Ephrata was written by nerds.”

      “Ephrata? Sounds biblical.”

      “It is. But in this case I’m talking about Ephrata Cryonics Inc. The cold storage place in the town of the same name. It’s in the desert east of the mountains. Or it was.”

      It took a moment for that last word to sink into Stan’s brain. “Oh, shit.”

      “It’s okay,” Corvallis said. “See, this is where Christopher Vail earned his fee. The founders of Ephrata were true believers. They believed they had come up with the ideal way to preserve human remains. And they believed that Ephrata Cryonics Inc. was going to be around forever.”

      “Because so many people were going to sign up for the service …,” Zula said.

      “That they’d have a fat bank account, economies of scale, the whole bit,” said Corvallis.

      “Well, as one who knew Chris Vail well when his faculties were intact, I’m guessing he took neither of those presumptions for granted,” Stan said.

      Corvallis nodded. “If you read this, I think what you’ll see is him basically saying: look, if Ephrata Cryonics is actually still in business when Richard Forthrast dies, and if they are solvent, and if no better technology has been invented in the meantime to preserve the remains, then go ahead and follow these instructions and ship Dodge off to the big freezer in Ephrata.”

      “But if any of those is not true …,” Stan said.

      “Well, then it gets complicated,” Corvallis said.

      “Like it was all СКАЧАТЬ