Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,95

He raised both hands, palms up, and made a salaam gesture, or as best he could while belted in. Sophia took a moment wryly to imagine how C-plus would react to hearing himself described as a retainer.

“Okay,” Phil said, impatient for drama. “So C-plus reads the will and does the math. Word gets out that this trust is going to be set up.”

“Set up by him personally, because he turned out to be the ‘personal representative,’ or what they used to call the executor,” Sophia said. “And C-plus was duty-bound to follow the language in the will. The per stirpes language meant dividing the trust money equally among Richard’s siblings—or, in a case where a sibling had already died, the heirs of that sibling. So. One-third would be allocated to John and Alice, one-third to Patricia, and one-third to Jake. Or that was his intent when he signed the will.”

“But Patricia was already dead?” Anne-Solenne asked.

Sophia nodded. “Patricia—my mom’s adopted mother—was already dead.”

“So her third of it should have gone to Zula—your mom—Patricia’s heir?”

“Should have. Didn’t. Because John and Alice had legally adopted my mom. And the law says that once you have been legally adopted by a new set of parents, you can’t inherit from the previous set. So the trust was split two ways instead of three. Jake got half of it. Alice—because John was dead by this point—got the other half. Then she made a decision to split the trust up, not among her four kids—or five, if you count Zula—but among their kids, of which there are now a total of thirteen. So, I ended up with one-thirteenth of one-half of the trust.”

“Instead of one-third,” Julian said.

“The one-third that Richard probably intended you to get,” Anne-Solenne added.

“Probably he was expecting my mom to get one-third,” Sophia said. “I wasn’t born yet. But yeah. That is basically the story.”

A new thought had crossed Julian’s mind. “Was this how C-plus and Maeve became interested in PURDAH and VEILs? Because of all these hassles over this one paper document?”

Sophia shook her head. “I would say not. I mean, this was all after the blockchain craze, and all of the issues related to anonymity and privacy on the Old Internet.”

“Mmm,” Julian said, going a little passive-aggressive on her.

“No, seriously,” she insisted. “Again, it goes back to the language in the will. One of the stated missions of the foundation was to work on applications of gaming technology outside of what was conventionally thought of as the game industry. And to tackle social issues related to games. And a hot topic in those days, before the Fall, was that women in the games industry were subjected to a lot of overt harassment. And even when they weren’t being harassed as such, their contributions just weren’t taken seriously by gamer bros.”

“Got it,” Anne-Solenne said. “PURDAH was a way around that—any coder or team could use it to sign code.”

“Code that would have to be evaluated strictly on its own merits—just like with any test essay or job app that we’ve ever turned in,” Sophia said.

Phil had been silent for a little while, doing arithmetic in his head. “The difference between one-third and one-twenty-sixth is a number with a lot of zeroes,” Phil said.

“Yeah,” Sophia said. She was staring out the window. A smile came over her face. “And look. Here’s the thing. At Princeton we talk a lot about privilege, right? Well, the reality is that Richard was so wealthy, and the amount of money that mistakenly went into the trust was so huge, that even one-twenty-sixth of it—my share—is huge. I’ll never have to work. I am fantastically privileged because of him. Those zeroes that Phil mentioned are pretty much meaningless. But it’s still a huge number.”

“What about the foundation?” Phil asked.

“Completely separate from the trust,” Sophia said.

“Your mom runs it,” Julian reminded her.

“The saving grace of the will,” Sophia said, “was that it named John as the director of the foundation. If he was deceased, and if my mom was old enough, then she was to become the director. He was. So she did. She’s been running the Forthrast Family Foundation for the last fifteen years. She’s been drawing a salary. Nothing crazy. There are all kinds of rules around conflict of interest and so on.”

“How’s that going to affect your little plan?” Anne-Solenne asked.

“You mean, my little plan to spend my summer working for the Forthrast Family Foundation?”

“Yeah. Isn’t that a conflict of interest or something?”

“Not the way I’m