Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,121

The digital equivalent of freezing Richard Forthrast’s body while waiting for some future technology to come along capable of reanimating it.

“When Uncle Richard signed the disposition of remains, they were stuck in a cryopreservation mind-set,” Sophia said. “The document reflects that.”

“I’ll bite,” Marcus said. “Who’s ‘they’? And can you say more about the mind-set?”

“‘They’ is the Eutropians. The cabal of nerds who decided, back in the 1990s, that they wanted to live forever. Who talked Uncle Richard into copy-pasting that boilerplate language into his disposition of remains. And remember that the original language didn’t even consider the idea of digital scanning. It was straight analog: chill his body down fast, freeze him, store him in the cryofacility in Ephrata. For them, actually being able to reanimate a frozen body and bring it back to life was like building a starship that could cross the galaxy in ten minutes: a thing that they could think of in the abstract. But actually doing it was just inconceivably, ridiculously far in the future. And so Uncle Richard’s will doesn’t contain anything about that. It just says ‘freeze me’ with the implication being ‘someone will sort out the consequences a thousand or ten thousand years down the road when they actually know how to do this.’ The actual reanimation procedure is never laid out. It’s assumed that the mentality of people who might control such a technology is so advanced compared to our caveman understanding that it’d be pointless to try to anticipate what that process would look like and to give specific instructions as to under what conditions it ought to be attempted.

“But that’s all analog,” she continued. “It’s all about that one piece of frozen meat. You only get one chance to reanimate it. Best to wait until you’re sure it’ll work. Instead now we’ve got an opportunity to do this digitally. And that opportunity has come along within living memory of Uncle Richard himself.” Sophia’s voice got a little husky at this point, as she was clearly remembering her vague little-kid memories of sitting on Dodge’s lap. She cleared her throat. “So I want to work on that. And I don’t claim that I’m going to come up with the answer to it all during one summer’s worth of work, but to me it feels like exploring it is a worthwhile project, and being a member of the family—someone who knew him when I was a little girl—gives me a kind of standing that nobody else has.”

Zula’s eyes were shining, out of some combination of maternal pride in her daughter and grief for her uncle. “Sophia,” she said, “I have to ask you something. When you went off to college, your major was undeclared. But you were pretty sure it was going to be comparative religion or classics or something in that vein. That’s mostly what you studied in your freshman year. But after that you turned pretty decisively in the direction of cognitive science, neurology, computer science.”

Sophia was nodding, slightly impatient. “Those are just more technical ways of getting at the same questions.”

“I understand that, honey. But I have to know, just for my own curiosity: how long have you been thinking about this? The conversation we’re having right now, in my office: is it something you’ve been planning for years?”

Sophia shook her head. “Months, maybe. I mean, sure, my interest in neuroscience was piqued by all the exposure I had while I was growing up to dinner-table conversations about what you and C-plus and the others were up to concerning DB. But, the idea of actually digging into that thing and running some code? That wasn’t even on the table, technically speaking, until Hole in the Wall came online.”

“I kind of know what that is,” Marcus said. “The latest and greatest processor farm. But you’re going to have to help me out a little.”

“It’s at a place about a hundred miles from here called Hole in the Wall Coulee—an inlet on the Columbia River. Coincidentally, just a little downstream of Ephrata. They built it on the site of an old aluminum plant. So it’s got cheap juice and cold water.”

“Data centers are all over that part of the state,” Marcus pointed out. “Have been for decades. What makes Hole in the Wall a game-changer for DB?”

“It’s the first one exclusively built around quantum computers.”

“And you think that quantum computers are better at simulating brain processes?” The skepticism in Marcus’s voice was gentle but unmistakable.

“I’m agnostic on that. But I