Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,36

car prowls were common, and he didn’t want Dodge’s effects turning up for sale tomorrow on the Miasma. This would have appealed to Dodge’s sense of humor but would have been distressing to Alice.

“Okay,” El said, a little disconcerted. “Look then, I’m not going to beat around the bush. Are you up to speed on the documents that Richard Forthrast signed with Ephrata Cryonics? Do you know about that?”

“Fully,” Corvallis said. “Yes.”

“And you know . . .”

“About ELSH and everything? The buyout? The scanning and the cloud storage? Yes.”

“This is probably neither here nor there, by the way, but your company . . .”

“Nubilant is storing those scans. Yes, I was aware of that too.”

“Okay,” said El with a nod, “then it sounds like you are up to speed on what I would consider the past and the present aspects of the situation. But there’s no way that you can know what we have in mind for the future.”

“Fair enough.”

The waitress showed up with a pint of beer that Corvallis had ordered. He felt justified in the consumption of alcohol at lunch under these circumstances. El was drinking a clear fluid with lime, presumably nonalcoholic. Not taking any risks with those brain cells. What was the “calculated risk,” Corvallis wondered, of sitting in a Georgetown bar at all? How many of the people sitting at the bar, drinking at noon, were carrying concealed weapons as a matter of course? An accidental discharge, or a not-so-accidental one, could put a bullet through El’s skull and scatter his brains and his plans for immortality. Did El have a spreadsheet somewhere, where he calculated these probabilities and weighed them against each other?

“Since it’s just you and me here, having a private conversation, I will not insult your intelligence, C, by trying to claim that the scanning technique that was used on the Ephrata Eleven was anything we would consider using today.”

“On Richard Forthrast, you mean.”

“Him or anyone.”

“Anyone?”

“Me. C, please understand that I see myself as being on exactly the same footing as Richard Forthrast. If something were to happen to me today that caused me to end up on a ventilator, then I would want the most advanced possible measures taken to preserve my connectome. No expense would be spared to get it right. I am here to tell you that there is no difference between me and Richard Forthrast as far as that is concerned. There is no such thing as a second-class treatment option.”

Corvallis took a sip of his beer. It was good. He wondered if there was beer in El Shepherd’s digital heaven.

“You’re probably looking at ion-beam scanning,” El said.

“Yes.” This was the new technique Corvallis had alluded to earlier. The one WABSI was using on mouse brains. The family conference in the hotel suite hadn’t felt like the right time or place to delve into its technical details.

If you bought into the proposition, which El Shepherd apparently did, that the connectome was all that there was to the human brain—that, once you had created a digital record of the wiring diagram, and stored that in the cloud, you could throw away what was left of the body and not lose anything that mattered—then ion-beam scanning appeared to be the answer. The older technique, used on the eleven Ephrata Cryonics brains, had been to run them through what amounted to a high-precision bologna slicer, cutting away the thinnest possible layers, one at a time, and photographing what had been thus exposed, and then repeating the process. Then trying to trace the connections as they angled across the photographic layers. This was the hard problem that WABSI had attempted to gamify a couple of years ago. It was only as good as the thinness of the bologna slicing, the resolution of the photographs, and the attention span of the gamers.

Ion-beam scanning destroyed the brain a few molecules at a time in order to save it. A beam of charged particles, focused to subcellular precision, burned away the brain tissue. But as it did so it was gathering information about what it was destroying, and storing it to a much higher resolution than could be attained using the older technique. In its essentials it was the same as bologna slicing; it just worked at higher precision. Instead of a heap of paper-thin brain slices, the physical residue was smoke and steam. A higher form of cremation.

“Look,” Corvallis said. “As far as I am concerned, as a nerd who has read about it