Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,141

so? We can’t possibly know. And that is what creates the ethical dilemma we are now faced with. The Process has developed unique and irreplaceable characteristics. To destroy it would at best be akin to burning a library. At worst it might be murder.

“In that—in the ethical problem—we have our monster. Shutting the Process down would be indefensible. We could try to freeze it, just as Dodge’s brain was once frozen. But we don’t actually know how to shut such a process down and store it without loss of information. Even if Hole in the Wall could be stopped and its state recorded—which it can’t, by the way—we would have a devil of a time tracking down the subprocesses that it has established on other systems, with which it communicates using encrypted packets that are nearly impossible to sort out from all of the other traffic on the Net.

“We are stuck with the Process. We must find ways to keep it running as we learn how to inspect it, to evaluate it, and—if it actually does work like a brain—to talk to it.”

Zula glanced around the hall. Most of the attendees—even the ones who disagreed—seemed to be enjoying the talk. Some part of her wished she could be one of those people. An academic or an engineer who could sit back, wineglass in hand, and soak it all up and take it for what it was.

She didn’t have that luxury. In her peripheral vision, she could see one or two faces turned her way, leveling gazes she preferred not to meet. They were people who had earlier staked out aggressive positions concerning the nine MFN, or Most Favored Nation, donors, and the Ephrata Eleven. Those all tended to be true believers in the proposition that the human mind could be uploaded and switched back on, as a digital simulation, after the body was gone. They believed that the Process was the first time this had actually been done. That it could be done again, as many times as resources allowed. And that the language in the agreements by which Verna Braden and the other nine MFN donors had given their brains to science, strictly interpreted, imposed an obligation on the Forthrast Family Foundation to create new instantiations of the process simulating those brains.

Zula, as the director of that foundation, had a number of outs. She could argue that the Process was just an experiment, and as such not covered by the MFN language at all. She could shut the Process down, bringing the debate to an abrupt end.

Enoch Root had just checked her on that front. She couldn’t murder her uncle.

Another out was to plead lack of resources. The agreement couldn’t obligate the foundation to spend money it didn’t have. But the numbers didn’t favor that argument. Her cautious stewardship of the endowment was now coming back to bite her. They had plenty of money—more than enough to support not only the Process but several clones of it. They no longer even had to exert much effort to keep the endowment growing. Most of it was now under the management of financial bots that just kept on making money without human intervention. The fact of the matter was that tomorrow she could sign a document piping funds directly from those bots to Hole in the Wall and similar facilities that had recently come online. She could turn out the lights, lock the doors, walk away from the Forthrast Family Foundation, and take early retirement, and the whole thing would just run indefinitely, financial bots raking up profits from the collective endeavors of the living to pay for the eternal simulation of the dead. And even if some crash or bug wiped those bots out, the Waterhouse-Shaftoe Foundation—which was at least ten times the size of Forthrast, and even more wired in to all kinds of eldritch trading algorithms—would swoop in to keep the Process running. And when they were good and satisfied that it all worked, they’d boot up new processes for the MFN crew. If they hadn’t done so already.

She and her daughter had been played. Played expertly. Played by people who probably thought they were serving a higher purpose. She might spend the rest of her life wondering who was behind it all—whether Enoch was the mastermind, or Solly Pesador, or El Shepherd, or even—here was a disturbing thought—Corvallis Kawasaki. Or maybe it was Pluto playing an incredibly deep game. But it didn’t matter. The outcome was the