Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,138

and had had a couple of hours to freshen up before the opening session had commenced at one o’clock in the afternoon.

Zula had arranged more conferences than she could count. The seeming informality of this setting belied all of the premeditation that had gone into it, and the long experience of her staff. The trip from the city was just long enough to reset the mind and instill a sense of having gone somewhere special, but not enough to deter people from coming. The midday start time enabled people to ease into it. She’d federated the guest list, handing out some slots to the Waterhouse people, some to ONE. Some she’d handed off to Sinjin Kerr, trusting him to sort out the Gordian knot of Elmo Shepherd’s network. Others had gone to Solly Pesador, and of course she’d reserved a bloc for the Forthrast Family Foundation. She had only sent out her invitations after the others had made their picks, and she’d chosen with an eye toward balancing the slate if need be.

But need hadn’t arisen. The other organizations had chosen wisely. By tech industry standards, the Waterhouses were, by this point, old money—the unglamorous ballast that would keep the conference from heeling over to one side or the other. The glittering-eyed libertarians from El Shepherd’s world were counterbalanced by the invitees from ONE, which had evolved, over the years, into a mostly harmless foundation that tried to bridge the gap between science and religion. Top-drawer brains had been nominated by Solly Pesador, who to his credit had reached outside of his own department and invited some who could be counted among his rivals. The roster had struck Zula as a little weak when it came to currently active members of the underlying industries. So, once she’d made certain that Corvallis and Maeve could attend, she’d spent her remaining invitations on CEOs and CTOs of companies working on things like quantum computers and distributed ledgers. The guest list now comprised twenty-seven humans, one robot, and one monster.

As far as she knew the word “monster” had not been uttered until this moment, but she was relieved, in a way, that it had now broken the surface.

The afternoon sessions had all been introductory in nature. They went over the ground rules: everything here was off the record, private, not to be photographed or posted. The usual conflicts and rivalries were to be left on the pier. Indeed, some of the session topics were specifically about the legal and political twists and turns that had been part of this story from the moment Richard Forthrast had signed his will.

Sophia had told the story of her internship and her senior thesis, bringing them up to May of this year. It was now October. Solly had picked up the torch, starting with the moment during Sophia’s thesis presentation when the account had run out of money only to receive a large, unexpected infusion of funds, “presumably from someone in this hall,” and continuing through the summer and fall as the resources demanded by the Process (as they called the thing that Sophia had launched) had grown, sometimes in small increments, and—as had occurred last week—sometimes in huge quantum leaps.

The late-afternoon session had been on the topic of mind reading. The thumbnail image in the program was a still from Star Trek, portraying Spock with his hands all over Captain Kirk’s face, using the Vulcan mind meld to read what was going on in Kirk’s brain. At the beginning, El’s people had conducted a virtual boycott, clustering in the nest of sofas around the fireplace where the robot had planted itself. They’d assumed, based on the title, that the subject matter was pure fluff. Indeed, the speaker—a brain scientist from USC, invited by Solly—had warmed up the room with a few such pop-culture references. But then she had asked, in all seriousness, how we could really know what was going on inside of another mind—be it a biological brain or a digital simulation. We took speech and other forms of communication for granted. Computer geeks tended to see those as add-on modules, separate from the brain per se—peripheral devices that could be plugged in, like a microphone or a printer, when some input or output was desirable. Brain scientists considered the input and the output as more fundamental, woven into the neural fabric of the brain. No one really knew what to make of the Process, which purported to simulate activity in a brain but was