Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,117

and a smile. The building knew that she had arrived and that she’d be wanting an elevator to the sixth floor, but let her know that regrettably there would be a wait of between thirty and sixty seconds; this was the busiest time of day for the lifts. She considered taking the stairs but decided against it since her knee was talking to her. She waited before the elevator banks along with some of the regulars she saw every day, and a few visitors, there for meetings or job interviews. Those were discernible because they had to engage in old-school navigation schemes like reading the building directory and physically pressing elevator buttons.

One of them, a grizzled, red-bearded guy with a somewhat shaggy academic vibe, gave her side-eye as he did so. He was likely en route to ONE, the Organization for New Eschatology, which occupied the second floor. Very likely he had business with Zula’s one surviving uncle, Jake Forthrast. It wasn’t the first time Zula had seen this guy. As he reached out to press the elevator button, his hand shot loose from the ragged sleeve of his hoodie to reveal a Band-Aid on the back of the wrist. When his hand returned to his side, she noticed a matching Band-Aid on the inner wrist. Other than that, his hands seemed normal. But Zula realized, from this detail, that this must be the guy, Enoch what’s-his-name, who had recently been crucified in Nebraska while running some kind of errand for Jake. She considered saying hello to him and introducing herself but wasn’t sure how to strike up a chat with someone who had just been through that. For his part, he clearly knew who she was, and gave her a polite nod. But it seemed he did not wish to intrude on her privacy.

Jake had personally ended up with the same amount of money as all of John and Alice’s descendants put together. Jake’s family was smaller and simpler—he had three sons who were almost a generation younger than the children of John and Alice, and no grandchildren as yet. Unlike Alice, he had decided to retain control of his share of the money personally, rather than divvying it up among his descendants. He was a survivalist living in a cabin in the north woods and hadn’t a clue what to do with all of that money. For the most part he had just followed Zula’s lead, investing in the same portfolio of stocks, funds, and financial bots as the foundation. To the extent he’d spent any of it, he had done so on helping Zula clean up the peculiar state of affairs that had arisen concerning what should be done with Richard’s brain.

The Organization for New Eschatology was an outgrowth of that. Occupying the Venn diagram intersection of everything that the Internet hated, it had drawn a nearly infinite amount of derision. Some of that had been deserved; it had taken Jake a couple of years and a few million dollars in misspent funds before he had really got the hang of running a nonprofit.

In essence, it had forced Jake to grow up and get his shit together—not just financially, but philosophically as well. As Zula and Alice had both feared, Jake had, at first, plowed some of the money into some of the wackier causes that he had got into the habit of believing in, and built his family’s life around, in Idaho. But becoming rich had changed what he believed, not by the more academic route of challenging his evidence and debating his logic, but by changing the sorts of things that he was predisposed to want to believe.

In addition to spawning ONE, the disposition of Richard’s brain had yoked the Forthrast Family Foundation together with the even larger Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation and kept them all in a perennially awkward relationship with El Shepherd’s network of companies and nonprofits. Their activities all went directly to the matter of mortality, consciousness, and what it meant to be a human. To have a soul. ONE had become the think-tank branch of the Forthrast/Waterhouse/Shepherd brain science complex.

Sometimes tech advanced by gradually creeping up on things. Other times it did so by saltation: suddenly leaping forward. She had heard an argument that those two couldn’t really be teased apart, because in the case of an exponential creep-up, like Moore’s Law, the bend in the curve could look like a jump if you took your eye off the ball at the