Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,259

the face was a video feed of a live human, a simulation, or some blended combination of both.

More vehicles showed up. Humans got out of them, pulling on gloves, and did nothing except watch a different kind of robot—an intelligent stretcher/gurney—approach Zula. The logo was that of a Japanese company. They’d long ago begun thinking about how to build robots that would handle many of the routine functions of keeping senior citizens safe, clean, and healthy.

The robot unfurled many-jointed arms terminated with white Teflon spatulas, which it very gingerly and precisely slid under her. It lifted her up out of the gutter and got her gliding with exquisite smoothness toward the nearest medical facility, which was actually so nearby that they didn’t even bother putting her in a vehicle. There, for the first time, she was touched by humans, who gave her something for the pain and informed her that she had suffered patellar tendon ruptures in both of her knees—a fairly common sort of occurrence—and that it was going to be a while before she was on her feet again. Robots did surgery on her knees through incisions so small that placing Band-Aids over them seemed like overkill. She was out of the hospital before sundown. Friends and family came to see her in the place where she had lived now for more than forty years. Cards and flowers began to clutter her field of vision. Serious conversations were had about whether she ought to consider selling the place and moving down to flatter parts of the city, closer to the offices of the Forthrast Family Foundation. Or conversely whether the office itself should be shut down, since most people worked from home now, and meetings happened in a crazy-quilt pseudo-space of real bodies in a room, videoconference, telepresence robots, and augmented reality. But Zula and Corvallis continued to go there almost every day, as if daring each other to be the first to give up on it.

The younger Zula’s friends were, the more nervous they were about her way of life. She understood why, of course: they wanted to make sure they got a good scan of her brain when she died, so that she could live forever.

This was how people thought nowadays. It wasn’t only cops, soldiers, and firemen who did everything through telepresence. It had been obvious for a long time that certain activities, such as going to the grocery store for a quart of milk, weren’t worth the effort of leaving the house, parking the car, and waiting in the checkout lane. Buying things online, and having them delivered by drones, was better. Added to this, now that death had been disrupted, was the factor of what had come to be known as “brain safety.” Even in the most prosperous and stable communities, going to the grocery store brought with it a small risk that one might die in a traffic accident en route, and if the accident were of the wrong sort, it might lead to destruction of the brain, barring the victim’s entry into the afterlife. Better to remain indoors and do as much as possible through telepresence. The time saved could perhaps be spent in virtual wanderings around the fascinating geography of the world that Dodge had brought into being, that Pluto had perfected, and that El had taken over. The living stayed home, haunting the world of the dead like ghosts.

During the weeks after her fall, Zula was a little creeped out by just how little it really mattered that she could not walk. It seemed like that ought to be a much bigger deal. But this only went to show how stuck she was in outmoded ways of thinking, born as she was in the days when crutches, wheelchairs, and other such medieval improvisations had still been a thing. Remnants of those days—dilapidated wheelchair ramps and cracked yellow curb cuts—still peppered the streetscape. Having access to a basically infinite amount of money, Zula could get the best assistance robots in the world—contraptions that could pick her up and carry her to the toilet, or hold her up in the shower, whenever she wanted. They could even dress and undress her. Millions must have been spent on the bra-strap-hooking algorithm. Their code libraries knew how to do and undo every type of necklace ever devised by the jewelry industry, how to flush every sort of toilet, and how to fiddle with the knobs on even the most poorly conceived and wretchedly