Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,21

marks and other punctuation suggested that it had originally been composed in the nerd-friendly text processing program Emacs. No effort had been made by Stan, or whoever had drawn this thing up, to “select all” and tidy up the formatting.

Those sections of the document contained instructions. Detailed instructions. Weird ones. Technically precise instructions on how to kill Dodge in a controlled manner, should he ever wind up on a ventilator. The machine was not just supposed to be disconnected. Instead it was to be left on while Dodge’s body was infused with a certain mixture of drugs and his core temperature was dropped using an ice bath. Only then was the ventilator to be removed. And then, at the moment that Dodge stopped being a living person at death’s door and became legally dead, the reader was urged to set aside the health care directive and pick up its companion document, the disposition of remains. And this had exactly the same typographical peculiarities. It was a seamless continuation of the protocol begun in the health care directive. Once the ventilator had been disconnected, Dodge’s body was supposed to be chilled down as quickly as possible with an ice-water IV, bath, and enema. Only then was it acceptable to move “the remains,” and this was supposed to happen in a meticulously described way, taking the corpse directly to a particular facility in the high desert outside of Ephrata, Washington, where it was to be kept cryogenically preserved.

The nerd in Corvallis was fascinated by the level of technical detail embodied in these documents, and wanted to have a conversation with whatever team of doctors and neuroscientists had toiled over them. And the socially awkward geek was relieved, in a way, to have something to take his mind off of what was happening around him. As long as he was hunched over these protocols he was absolved of responsibilities on the emotional front. But there was a third aspect of his personality that slowly came to the fore, and wrestled the steering wheel, as it were, away from the others. That was the CTO, the responsible business executive who was at least passingly familiar with the world of lawyers. And the CTO was curious about the typography thing. Argenbright Vail was a sophisticated tech law firm. Richard Forthrast was one of their most important clients. Many thousands of dollars must have been spent poring over these documents before they had been sent to Dodge for his signature. To set them all in Palatino and clean up the formatting would have been the work of a few moments for an intern. Leaving them in this state, he suspected, had been a deliberate choice. A way for Argenbright Vail to put the protocol in scare quotes. To make it clear, to any future reader, that they had just been following instructions. Dodge’s instructions, presumably.

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