Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,203

was about three blocks down the hill from the medical office building where Richard had been stricken. The time of year was early October. It was an unspoken family tradition that they would haunt this part of town when the maple leaves were red. And “family” had become a complicated word to them. C-plus had effectively been made into a Forthrast long ago. Sophia was now a beloved aunt to the teenage children of Corvallis and Maeve.

And all of them together were haunted by departed spirits. They were responsible for having created the systems on which Dodge, Verna, and Pluto were now, in some sense, alive.

“He keeps complaining that the Singularity isn’t working out the way he’d hoped,” Zula said. “I think part of what disappoints him is just how damned bureaucratic it is. So many lawyers. So many meetings.”

“But it is,” Sophia said. “It is starting to turn his way now, I think.”

“You mean, with the Wad?” Corvallis asked. He had told everyone at this table about his encounter with Elmo Shepherd’s avatar.

“Yeah,” Sophia said.

“He loves the Wad,” Corvallis admitted.

“Fine,” Zula said, “but even if that’s everything he was hoping for, who’s going to keep it running after he goes and joins it? A bunch of foundations with interlocking boards of directors. Their endowments distributed across god knows how many different investment vehicles, spread across every financial institution in the world.”

“A lot of that is self-managing by this point,” Marcus reminded her. “Most of our investments are now managed by bots we don’t even understand. In his case, the fraction’s probably much higher than that.”

“But physical stuff still has to exist. The computers that run it all need electricity, and roofs to keep rain from falling on them. Humans can shut it down any time they want.”

“That’s what bothers him,” Sophia said. “And it’s what bothers me about what he’s asking for.”

“Could you say more on that?” Marcus asked. “Because it’s increasingly obvious that it’s the real reason Sinjin’s here.”

“The Process that I launched at Princeton may be very complicated, and powerful, and expensive to run,” Sophia said, “but it’s still a computer program that responds to some very simple commands. And one of those commands is ‘exit.’ Or maybe it’s ‘quit’ or ‘shut down.’ I don’t actually know because I’ve obviously never invoked such a command against it. Or against Verna or Pluto or any of the others.”

“You as the token holder have the power to terminate the Process—or any subprocess—at any time,” Marcus said.

“That’s basically how it works,” Sophia answered, looking to Corvallis. He nodded in confirmation.

“Do you also have that power, C?” Marcus asked. “Since you were the one who issued the token to Sophia?”

Corvallis shook his head no. “You’re thinking I’m like the superuser or the sysadmin. This is different. The token I issued to Sophia gave her the access and the authority to establish a new system altogether. On that system she is root—she has total authority over all of the processes and I have none whatsoever. Nor,” he added, “do I want it.”

Maeve had been tracking this intensely, suggesting that she’d been curious about it for a while but had never found the right moment to ask. “To be blunt, honey, what happens if you get hit by a bus?”

“Nothing,” Sophia said.

“In other words,” Marcus said, “you haven’t made arrangements for that token to be transferred to someone else in the event of your demise.”

“I wouldn’t even know how,” Sophia said. “I’ve never thought about it. But I will now.”

“To ask the same question in a less loaded way,” Zula said, “since we are talking about my daughter here, what if you forget the password?”

“We don’t use passwords.”

“I know. It’s connected to your PURDAH. I get it. Work with me here.”

“There’s no ‘it.’ You can’t understand this in terms of passwords. We got rid of passwords exactly because they had these defects: if you forget yours, you’re screwed. And if someone steals yours, they become you, they suddenly have all of your power, all your privs. The point of the ‘H’ in PURDAH—‘Holography’—is that you have to prove your identity from one moment to the next—”

“With your face, your voice, the way you type, the way you walk . . . ,” Zula said. She knew all this.

“Back in the day, yeah. It was clearly traceable to face recognition or whatever. Now we don’t even know how it works. We’ve handed it over to AIs that just know when it’s you, based on—who