Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,260

executed shower stall plumbing. Stairs were nothing. While carrying things much heavier than Zula, robots could climb stairs faster than humans could sprint on a level track.

Her handlers even tried to fit her out with a wearable robot—a set of bionic legs that would carry all of her weight while allowing her to move about like a proper bipedal humanoid. She drew the line at that and tried to graduate as soon as possible to hobbling about under her own power with a robot at her elbow—a sort of android wedding usher, wearisomely feature packed, more capable than an aircraft carrier. As she gained strength and stability and cleared various medical hurdles, she configured this thing to back farther and farther the fuck off until it was trailing her five paces behind like some lackey of feudal times.

She knuckled under and sold the place on the hill and moved to a houseboat on the lake, far enough from the office to afford her a decent walk every day. When she was really in a hurry she could do the commute in a robot boat or a robot car, always accompanied by Frankenstein, as she had dubbed her usher-ninja-bodyguard–bra-hook–stairway-sprinter robot. It didn’t feel like such a big concession at the time.

Five more years passed in Meatspace. Even fully recovered, walking and running with ease, she kept Frankenstein around. It was an unwieldy name. Someone pointed out that she was pronouncing it wrong. It became Fronk. One thing she liked about Fronk’s design was that it wasn’t all that humanoid. Admittedly it had to have legs and hands, but these were not at all humanlike; the legs bent the other way, like a dog’s, and the arms were generalized stumps that could pull various “hands”—none of which looked much like a human hand—from a carousel-shaped holster encircling what passed for the torso. Its “head” was just a slender conning tower speckled with tiny lenses.

In other words, it looked nothing at all like the Metatron that had killed her daughter.

That model had been discontinued after the tragedy, as much for PR as safety reasons, and replaced, after a decent interval, by something meant to look rather different but still, to Zula’s eye, similar enough to trigger PTSD whenever she noticed one loping down the street or unfolding itself from a fetal position on a loading dock.

One morning during her seventy-second year of life she began the day by allowing a car to drive her to a doctor’s appointment on Pill Hill. Nothing momentous. Just one of those regularly scheduled check-ups that tiled the calendars of persons her age. It just happened to take place in the very building where her uncle Richard had, forty-some years earlier, been stricken during a routine procedure. Even so, the building held no strong emotional associations for Zula, since on that day she had not actually caught up with Richard until he had been moved to the nearby hospital. And that was where all of the heavy trauma had been inflicted.

She visited this particular physician twice a year. Each visit prompted a bit of musing about Dodge. He seemed to have lived and died a few times. One could never be entirely certain that he was dead. The Process that had been launched from his brain scan had ceased functioning years ago. No trace of it had been observed since. They would know if it woke up. Dodge’s account had shown debits of zero dollars and zero cents over the last two decades. At its zenith, a billion a month had coursed through it. So he seemed pretty dead.

After the appointment, she and Fronk got into another car for the trip down to the office. En route, as the car swung round a corner, Zula got a view over Lake Union. It was a vista she’d enjoyed every day when she’d lived up on the hill, but she now saw it with fresh eyes. Her mind went back to her academic training, which had been in geology. She thought about the glacier that had scooped the lake out long ago. She saw it in her mind’s eye, a cliff of ice shoving ruined mountains before it, and compared its size to all that humans had built upon the rocky earth it had left when it had melted. She thought about how recent the works of humans were, and how ephemeral, compared to geology, and wondered how long it would take for all of it to disappear.

The foundation’s building’s