Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson
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Название: Fall or, Dodge in Hell
Автор: Neal Stephenson
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Контркультура
isbn: 9780008168841
isbn:
“I have a few errands I could run, as long as I’m up here,” El returned, “but I’m sure you can guess the primary reason for my visit.”
“Yes.”
“The last thing I want to do is impose on the family at a time like this …”
“It’s fine,” Corvallis said, wondering if El could hear the smile in his voice. He got it. The bereaved family was off-limits but the bereaved friend was fair game. “I am running a brief errand. It will take me five minutes. Then I’ll grab my car and head for Georgetown.” That was the neighborhood just north of Boeing Field. “If you want to pick out a suitable restaurant or whatever, just text me the coordinates and I will be there in half an hour.”
“Fine. Over and out,” El said.
Corvallis snapped a picture of the sidewalk art, then went into the building, steeling himself for yet another in the seemingly endless series of awkward conversations that had accounted for the last day of his life. It was going to be awkward because the people at the medical office were going to try to be nice to him, to voice sympathy. And yet they couldn’t say anything that would place them at a disadvantage when it was repeated in a courtroom during a malpractice suit and so it was all going to be so terribly awkward. By comparison he was actually looking forward to the meeting in half an hour with El Shepherd, who could be relied upon to charge blindly across the emotional minefield and get down as soon as possible to geeking out on connectomics.
They had a little conference room near the front desk of the medical practice, the most generic conference room you could imagine. The office manager escorted Corvallis to it. Sitting there alone in the middle of the table were Dodge’s shoulder bag and a canvas tote bag emblazoned—this was too inevitable—with the logo of the local National Public Radio station. Someone had neatly folded Dodge’s clothing, which Dodge had no doubt simply left in a heap on the floor of the changing room, and placed it into the tote bag. This one detail made it more clear than anything else that Dodge was dead. Corvallis pulled one of the chairs back, sat down, folded his arms on the table, bent forward, and rested his forehead on them. He cried fully and freely for a couple of minutes. The office manager hovered nervously at first, then excused herself, then came back a minute later with a box of tissues, then excused herself again. Corvallis inferred all of this from sounds; he could see nothing through his tears but the fake wood grain of the conference room table. When he sat back up again, he could see her standing outside wringing her hands. He blotted his eyes with tissues and then used them to wipe tears that had spilled onto the tabletop. He threw the damp tissues into a convenient receptacle, then slung Dodge’s messenger bag over his shoulder and tucked the canvas tote under his arm. The office manager opened the door for him. He nodded to her and walked out of the medical practice without looking back.
On the sidewalk outside, someone had, during the last few minutes, placed a bouquet of grocery store flowers on the picture of Egdod. The bouquet had been additionally wrapped up in a length of black wire. On a closer look, it was a controller from a video game console neatly bundled around the stems of the flowers.
Half an hour later he was in a booth in the back of a bar in Georgetown. Across from him was El Shepherd. El was wearing a suit. Some Bay Area tech zillionaires liked to cut against the grain by wearing finely tailored clothing. He was one of those. “C,” he said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“It’s okay,” Corvallis said, “I did the sad thing. Just took care of it. Done with that now.” His arm was draped over the items he had collected from the medical practice. He had brought them into the bar with him. Georgetown was a complicated neighborhood, car prowls were common, and he didn’t want Dodge’s effects turning up for sale tomorrow on the Miasma. This would have appealed to Dodge’s sense of humor but would have been distressing to Alice.
“Okay,” El said, a little disconcerted. “Look then, I’m not going to beat around the bush. Are you up to speed on the documents that Richard Forthrast signed with Ephrata Cryonics? Do you know about that?”
“Fully,” Corvallis said. “Yes.”
“And you know …”
“About ELSH and everything? The buyout? The scanning and the cloud storage? Yes.”
“This is probably neither here nor there, by the way, but your company …”
“Nubilant is storing those scans. Yes, I was aware of that too.”
“Okay,” said El with a nod, “then it sounds like you are up to speed on what I would consider the past and the present aspects of the situation. But there’s no way that you can know what we have in mind for the future.”
“Fair enough.”
The waitress showed up with a pint of beer that Corvallis had ordered. He felt justified in the consumption of alcohol at lunch under these circumstances. El was drinking a clear fluid with lime, presumably nonalcoholic. Not taking any risks with those brain cells. What was the “calculated risk,” Corvallis wondered, of sitting in a Georgetown bar at all? How many of the people sitting at the bar, drinking at noon, were carrying concealed weapons as a matter of course? An accidental discharge, or a not-so-accidental one, could put a bullet through El’s skull and scatter his brains and his plans for immortality. Did El have a spreadsheet somewhere, where he calculated these probabilities and weighed them against each other?
“Since it’s just you and me here, having a private conversation, I will not insult your intelligence, C, by trying to claim that the scanning technique that was used on the Ephrata Eleven was anything we would consider using today.”
“On Richard Forthrast, you mean.”
“Him or anyone.”
“Anyone?”
“Me. C, please understand that I see myself as being on exactly the same footing as Richard Forthrast. If something were to happen to me today that caused me to end up on a ventilator, then I would want the most advanced possible measures taken to preserve my connectome. No expense would be spared to get it right. I am here to tell you that there is no difference between me and Richard Forthrast as far as that is concerned. There is no such thing as a second-class treatment option.”
Corvallis took a sip of his beer. It was good. He wondered if there was beer in El Shepherd’s digital heaven.
“You’re probably looking at ion-beam scanning,” El said.
“Yes.” This was the new technique Corvallis had alluded to earlier. The one WABSI was using on mouse brains. The family conference in the hotel suite hadn’t felt like the right time or place to delve into its technical details.
If you bought into the proposition, which El Shepherd apparently did, that the connectome was all that there was to the human brain—that, СКАЧАТЬ