Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,120

and I’m happy to say as much if anyone raises any questions.” Marcus was talking in that diction peculiar to lawyers. He was, in other words, doing his job. Zula had come to depend on him. She had first met him on the day after Dodge had been stricken. He was the junior associate who had shown up in Alice’s hotel suite, acting as Stan Peterson’s wingman. After his stint at Argenbright Vail, he had begun putting his legal powers to use in the service of nonprofit organizations, and ended up here.

“Noted,” Zula said.

“Well played,” Marcus said, nodding at Sophia.

“If you have a minute to spare,” Zula said, “this young intern and I were just about to have a discussion of how she intends to use her time here at the foundation.”

“Of course. If I wouldn’t be intruding on family matters, that is,” Marcus said, edging toward an available chair.

“Marcus, it’s the Forthrast Family Foundation,” Zula reminded him.

Marcus laughed. They all sat down.

“Interns have a lot of leeway here,” Zula said. “Marcus pointed out to me a long time ago that anyone who makes it through our application process is, by definition, overqualified and underpaid. No one’s under any illusions as to why Ivy League students do internships. It’s all about résumé building. We could have our interns fetch coffee for us, but that wouldn’t serve their needs and would amount to taking jobs away from people in the community who could use that sort of work.”

“Point being,” Marcus added, “that we choose the best people we can find first, and get them in the door. Choosing a summer project tends to take care of itself.”

Sophia had been smiling and nodding through this, looking every inch the bright young intern.

“So,” Zula said, “this is the part where you’re supposed to tell us what you want to spend the summer working on.”

“Since you planned everything else out so carefully, I’m guessing you have a proposal,” Marcus said.

Sophia nodded. “I would like to work with You Know What.” After a pause for that to sink in, she added, “Or, depending on how you think about these things, You Know Who.”

“You want the password to DB,” Zula said.

20

DB was Dodge’s Brain. Corvallis Kawasaki had coined the term; in nerd-speak it was also a pun on a common abbreviation of “database.”

It was not a single unitary thing. It was a sprawling web of directories in which was contained every scrap of information that had emerged from the epic project to satisfy the requirements in the disposition of remains that Richard Forthrast had signed long before his death.

The actual data started with the completely raw and unprocessed output of the ion-beam scanning device that had cremated Richard’s frozen brain one axon at a time. This alone occupied more storage space than would have been affordable back when Richard had signed his will. In that form, it was essentially unusable. If you thought of Richard’s brain as a document being run through a scanner, the raw data was a list of voltages emerging from the scanner’s optics. In order to turn that into a meaningful picture, it had to be sifted through and processed on a vast scale. Merely crunching the numbers to produce something resembling a connectome—a wiring diagram of how the neurons were interlinked—had made it necessary for the Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation to construct one of the largest data centers in the world. This was a reasonably natural extension of what they were good at anyway as a result of running a huge electronic banking system. It had been crunching on DB for years.

Which wasn’t to suggest that the connectome was, in any sense, absolutely known. Twenty different people had written twenty different Ph.D. dissertations on how the raw data could be processed and interpreted; each of their algorithms generated different results. Meta-analyses had then been conducted, comparing and contrasting the outputs generated by those competing algorithms. So DB didn’t contain a single settled and agreed-on connectome but dozens of possible versions of it, each stored in its own incompatible data format and each encoding a different set of assumptions as to how the brain actually worked.

What DB wasn’t was a functioning simulation of Dodge’s actual brain. Various efforts had been made to take the contents of the database, feed them into a system designed to emulate the functions of human neurons, and hit the “on” switch. But for the most part DB was an inert repository of data. A noun, not a verb.