Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,139

not actually hooked up to anything except a bank account.

The presentation was inconclusive by design. She was asking questions, not reciting answers. And it was bracketed in the usual disclaimer that Sophia, foolish undergraduate that she was, had done it all wrong. She shouldn’t have launched a whole brain just to see what it would do. She ought to have built it up gradually and figured out a way to connect input/output systems to it at each step.

Halfway through the talk, though, the robot stepped forward and walked up the length of the hall to a position where it could get a clearer view. El’s boys woke up and took notice. No one really knew for certain, but it was generally assumed that the robot—a telepresence device meant to serve as the sensorium of a person not physically in attendance—was being controlled from Europe by Elmo Shepherd.

Early telepresence robots had just stood there stolidly when not moving, like statues; this one was more elegant. Even when it wasn’t going anywhere it never stopped making minute shifts in its attitude, transferring its weight from foot to foot and turning its head toward sound and movement. Its head was a prolate spheroid, matte gray and featureless except for a few tiny holes for cameras and microphones. In theory, if you looked at it through a wearable device, you’d see the operator’s face projected onto it, and it’d be almost like sharing the room with them. But El, or whoever was controlling this thing, had turned off that feature and so the robot was anonymous. Which only tended to confirm that this was in fact El, or perhaps some assistant sitting in a room with El. He’d not been seen in public for a while and it was assumed that his disease—which was now common knowledge—was getting the better of him.

The final session of the afternoon had been about wills, dispositions of remains, and other legalities. Because of the dry subject matter, it had been sparsely attended; by that point in the day, many attendees had been eager to break away for impromptu discussions in the hallways and the bar. Zula had sat through it. It was expected of her. The presenter—a recent Yale Law graduate—had chosen to focus on the “most favored nation” clauses that had begun showing up in such documents, beginning with Verna’s. Since Verna had died, three dozen others had signed similar deals with the Forthrast Family Foundation. Of those, eight—including Randall Waterhouse; his wife, Amy Shaftoe; and several of their business partners—had since died, and been subjected to the same preservation and scanning procedures as they’d invented for Dodge. So in addition to DB there were now nine other complete connectomes that could in principle be switched on in the same manner, creating nine more monsters, if you wanted to think of it that way. Attorneys representing the estates of those nine people had recently approached the Forthrast Family Foundation requesting information about the Process: how it worked, and what it was doing. Nothing had been stated openly yet, but it was clear where this was going. To the extent that simulating Dodge’s brain fulfilled the conditions in his will and his disposition of remains, it—simulating it, turning it on, letting it run—should fall under the most favored nation clause. Those nine connectomes—and, for that matter, the Ephrata Eleven as well—should become processes of their own.

For most of the neurologists and engineers at this conference, it was a dry and abstract topic. For Zula, it was pressing. To a point, her foundation could argue—and had been arguing—that the Process was merely an experiment, with results that couldn’t be known. As such it fell under the heading of R & D. It was not yet the kind of proven treatment that should be covered by the most favored nation clause. But the more interesting the Process became—the longer it kept running without degenerating into a waste of computing power—the weaker that argument looked.

After that session, they’d broken for a bit of downtime followed by cocktails in the lodge, which was connected to the hall by a rambling covered walkway. Meanwhile, resort staff had rolled tables into the hall and reconfigured it for dinner. The attendees, relaxed and prelubricated with locally sourced microbrews and artisanal cocktails, had filed back into the hall to find the lighting scheme reprogrammed: hidden LEDs were bouncing dim, warm light from the red-cedar ceiling planks over two rows of tables set with white linen, crystal,