that we have cloud computing,” he said, “storing bits is way cheaper than storing body parts in a freezer. A few years ago, ELSH, in its sole judgment, decided that the only thing that really mattered was the connectome—the pattern of connections among the neurons in the brain. They took each of those eleven brains and scanned them. Reduced them to data structures. Stored the data in the cloud.”
“And where are those brains now?” Esme asked. Because that shoe was going to drop eventually.
“The scanning,” Corvallis said, “is a destructive process.” He was reading about it as he spoke. “Destructive” was putting it mildly but he saw no need to be heavy-handed. “By the time it is finished, there is nothing left that could be considered a brain. What is left is, they claim, disposed of in a respectful manner. Cremated. Ashes returned to the next of kin.”
“And since ELSH went over to this process,” Stan asked, “have there been any more?”
“Any more what?” Corvallis asked.
“Any more like Richard,” Zula said.
Stan nodded. “People who had signed a contract with Ephrata Cryonics and then died after the company got into difficulty.”
“If so,” Corvallis said, “no one is talking about it on the Internet.” He scrolled back. “One of these articles does say that ELSH refunded money to some clients, at their request, and canceled the contracts.”
“But not Richard,” Zula said.
“I would have no way of knowing,” said Corvallis.
Zula was staring at him. “C-plus. Come on. This is Richard. Do you really think he would have bothered?”
“No,” Corvallis said. “Dodge wouldn’t have bothered. If he even remembered signing the contract.”
“So, I have some action items,” Stan announced. “If it’s okay with the family, I can reach out to ELSH and find out whether that contract is still in force. Then it’ll be up to you all to decide how you would like to proceed. My recommendation is that we do a little background research on this—what do you call it? The connection thing?”
“Connect—connectomics,” Corvallis said, stumbling over the word in a way that drew puzzled looks from the others. Because some part of his brain had put up an oh shit flag while he was saying it.
“Everything okay, C-plus?” Zula asked. Giving him a mild feeling of shame that she, of all people, was concerned for his state of mind at such a moment.
“Umm, sorry. There’s a weird connection. Pardon the pun.”
“Connection to what?” Esme asked. Her primary reason for remaining in the room had long since become sheer intellectual curiosity.
“I should explain,” Corvallis said, “that I work for—I am the CTO of—a cloud computing company here in Seattle. And one of our clients is—well—”
“Don’t tell me,” Zula said. “Ephrata Life Sciences and Health.”
“Not quite. But Elmo Shepherd has a stable of companies that he runs out of the Presidio. Some for profit. Others are more like think tanks, research institutes, and the like. He’s really interested in the Singularity, which is—”
“I know what it is,” Zula said.
“I don’t. Would you indulge me?” Esme said. She had, in some nonverbal way, bonded with Zula.
Zula nodded and said, “It’s a kind of belief system that in the future we are going to upload our brains into computers and live forever digitally.”
“How do you get ‘Singularity’ out of that?”
“You add in Moore’s Law,” Corvallis said.
“That’s the one that says computers keep getting faster?”
“Exponentially. Extrapolate it out, and it suggests that the souls that have been uploaded to silicon will become super fast, super powerful, and render living, biological brains irrelevant.”
“I still don’t see how ‘Singularity’ describes that—isn’t that a word for a black hole?”
“It’ll happen in a flash, is the idea,” Zula explained.
“And El Shepherd believes in this,” Esme said.
Stan was just sitting there with his hands cupped around his eyes. When is this day going to stop getting weirder?
“Some of his other companies exist to support research on different aspects of phenomena relating to the Singularity. One of those is the connectome of the brain. There’s a whole stable of them. Look, I’m on thin ice here because I can’t breach the confidentiality of Nubilant’s relationship with its customers.”
“But it’s obvious,” Stan said, “from the look on your face that El Shepherd is storing the connectomes of the Ephrata Eleven on your company’s servers.”
“If you haven’t gotten sick of everything being ironic yet,” Corvallis said, “you might enjoy knowing that our biggest server farm is out in eastern Washington State. Not far from Ephrata.”
“Where power is cheap, and cooling water is plentiful,” Zula