Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,116

the ensuing legal and financial complications. The dispute over Dodge’s will meant nothing as far as its practical effect on her life was concerned; either way, she was rich, and her offspring would never want for anything material. But in monetary terms the difference was quite large. And, when they got that big, sums of money took on wills of their own. Which maybe explained why the document at the root of the matter was called a “will.”

The family’s share of the money had long since been wired to Iowa and ceased to be any of Zula’s concern, except for those increasingly rare occasions when she would be called on to give a deposition or sign an affidavit connected with the semiautonomous subbranch of the legal profession supported by the ecosystem of lawsuits that had been spawned by a few ill-chosen words. The balance of Richard’s fortune—most of it, actually—had gone to the Forthrast Family Foundation. Zula had been its president and director from day one, and it was increasingly obvious that she would never have any other job. She paid herself a reasonable salary—nothing that would raise the eyebrows of the foundation’s board—and she devoted her career to seeing to it that her uncle’s fortune was applied toward the causes he would have favored. His money had attracted more donations, mostly from old friends of his who wanted to get in on a good thing.

During the first decade, the problem had been finding responsible ways to spend the money faster than it accumulated. This was like shoveling your driveway during a blizzard. When foundation money needed to be parked, she had at first put it in simple index funds. This reassured her she wasn’t missing out on any market moves, without her paying a lot for fancy advisers. Slowly she’d begun moving money into financial bots running algorithms too complicated for any human to understand. These had performed better than the humans. In one case, a single bot had made so much money over a span of several consecutive years that it had more than doubled the foundation’s endowment. As a result, the proportion of the foundation’s money controlled by inscrutable artificial intelligences had become disproportionate to what was parked in old-fashioned funds and stocks.

Uncle Richard hadn’t exactly knocked himself out providing specifics as to what the foundation should be spending the money on. She’d had leeway that had daunted her. She’d spent more than she should have getting expert advice, then fired the experts. Running the foundation would have been easy had its sole purpose been, say, to preserve a rare species of tree snail. Instead the will’s language had pointed her in the general direction of supporting research that was somehow beneficial to mankind but somehow related to game technology. Which could mean just about anything.

The foundation’s headquarters was constructed on a pier that projected a short distance from the southern shore of Lake Union. This was the only remarkable thing about it; other than that, the building was as generic as it could be. During the early days, she had entertained proposals from world-famous architects who saw the job as an opportunity to make a statement. They’d expressed it in more high-flown language, but what it boiled down to was that they wanted to build something really cool. Zula’s sympathies had been with them, but she’d gone with boring instead. For, as a new and inexperienced director who could justly be accused of having got the job through nepotism, she needed to send the message that she wasn’t just screwing around with her uncle’s money. The other billionaires, the self-made men whom no one would question, they could put their money into building outlandish structures. But Zula had built something that was just another Class A office building that would appreciate in value along with all the other buildings like it and that could be liquidated on the market as easily as a pork belly. The upper two floors had been reserved for the Forthrast Family Foundation and the lower four had been leased to other organizations.

She relaxed her pace as she drew near. The building’s network recognized her from a block away and caused a little status indicator to appear in the corner of her vision. The doors opened for her automatically and she walked into the lobby. This building too had a roving security guard; he’d seen her coming and wandered over to the entrance so that he could greet her with a nod