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Corvallis broke into a run. He was able to keep pace with the ambulance for about a block as it negotiated some turns, slowing to honk in righteous fury at a dim-witted motorist, then cutting across six lanes of traffic. Presently it went around a corner and disappeared from view behind a vast hospital, but Corvallis was able to track it by sound, and compare those findings with red signs pointing the way to EMERGENCY. Dodge’s ambulance ride had been all of about three blocks long. They could almost have rolled him there on the gurney.
Corvallis resisted an urge to just run out into traffic, the way characters did in movies. He whacked buttons and waited in law-abiding fashion for pedestrian signals, then ran when he could. He reached the emergency room perhaps sixty seconds after the ambulance had pulled in. Dodge had already been wheeled in past the reception barrier. Here the receptionists were shielded behind thick walls of glass, like inner-city liquor store clerks, and watched over by ceiling-mounted cameras in black glass bubbles, as well as an actual human security guard who seemed a little distracted by what had just blown by him. Corvallis found himself on the outside of the glass barricade, sharing a waiting room with a Hispanic construction worker who had damaged his left hand and a stocky black woman who was texting. The nurse behind the glass wall asked Corvallis whether she could help him. He sensed that she was sizing him up, putting her training to use as she evaluated him for signs of trauma or mental illness. He was wearing khaki trousers and an old T-shirt with a black raincoat. He approached the glass wall and explained that he was with the man who had just been wheeled in from the ambulance.
He didn’t make it past the barrier. It was some kind of policy issue regarding Corvallis’s actual relationship to the patient. He and Richard had not come in together. Richard had not formally designated Corvallis as his wingman. Corvallis could have been anyone. For all they knew, he was a mentally ill person who had just followed the ambulance in. Or perhaps Richard and Corvallis were lovers, and it was a domestic violence situation. The nurse at the front desk had no way of knowing. She had made some remark about “next of kin.” This shut him up and sent him to the nearest waiting room chair. Partly because it was a disturbing turn of phrase and partly because, yes, of course, that was his highest responsibility at this moment: to get in touch with Zula Forthrast and let her know that she needed to come to the hospital.
She was there twenty minutes later, breathing hard. She had simply run from her condo, which was less than a mile away in the adjoining hilltop neighborhood. She worked part-time now, mostly from home, which was within walking distance of Sophia’s preschool. The Forthrast family had adopted her, at the age of seven, from an orphanage in Eritrea, and raised her in a farm town in Iowa. Her adoptive mother had died in an accident and she had become a ward of the whole extended family. Corvallis wasn’t certain who her parents were according to the letter of the law, but she’d become very close to her uncle Richard. Corvallis saw her running down the sidewalk, puffs of steam coming from her mouth. To have come here on foot was an unusual choice, but just the sort of calculation that Zula would make; the distance was such that she could cover it this way faster than it would take to summon an Uber. She slowed to a fast walk as she approached the building. The glass doors opened for her automatically. She was wearing a sweater and jeans and toting the knapsack she often used in lieu of a purse; she hadn’t bothered with a hat or a raincoat. Her uncontained hair had drawn humidity from the air and was a bedewed, corkscrewy glory. As she came in she recognized Corvallis, who had stood up. She took a step in his direction before correcting her course to the nurses’ station. “Zula Forthrast,” she announced, reaching for her wallet. “Here to see my uncle Richard Forthrast.” She slid her driver’s license across the counter. “I was told he was here.” And only then did she look up and meet Corvallis’s eye. She looked alert and interested. After some of the things she had lived through, nothing much could make her distraught. Not that she didn’t have feelings, but she’d learned how to wall them off. The events of a few years ago had thrust her into the public spotlight for a while, forced her to develop the knack that all famous people had of maintaining a certain persona while exposed to the gaze of strangers. It was serving her well now. She had a kind of distracted air about her, and Corvallis couldn’t tell whether she was dazed by the news or being wry. How many things could go wrong in her life?
“Nothing is simple with my uncle, huh?” she said.
“Nope” was the best Corvallis could come up with.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
He didn’t know what to say.
“It’s pretty bad, huh?” she said. Giving him permission.
“I kinda got the sense that it was super bad,” he admitted.
She nodded and blinked.
The nurse informed them that Richard had already been transferred to the ICU and gave them an idea of how to find it.
Corvallis and Zula went down the suggested hallway, found some elevators, and began to navigate the three-dimensional labyrinth of the hospital. Other patients or medical staff were always getting in between them, and so they didn’t try to talk. Zula sent a couple of text messages, then tilted her head back to trap some tears in the pouches of her eyes.
Finally they got to the entrance of the intensive care unit. “Here we go,” Zula said.
“Is there anything—” Corvallis began, but she strode ahead of him and approached the nurse at the front desk. “Zula Forthrast,” she said. “Next of kin of Richard Forthrast, who I think was just brought up here. Is there anyone who can give us the rundown? We have no information whatsoever yet about his condition.”
They found themselves sitting in a small office that, Corvallis guessed, had been placed here specifically for conversations of this type. Modern sofas formed a right-angled U around a coffee table with flowers in a vase. Kleenex boxes competed for space with Purell dispensers. Takeout menus for local restaurants were neatly arranged in a binder; the Wi-Fi password was handwritten on the inevitable Post-it note. A big window afforded a rain-spotted view down the hill to the central business district, white sky above it and gray sea below.
A perfunctory knock on the door preceded the entrance of a scrub-wearing man in his forties. Asian-American, heavy-framed eyeglasses chosen to fit a square face. He introduced himself as Dr. Trinh and invited everyone to make themselves comfortable on the available seating.
“He suffered an unusual complication during the procedure that caused him to stop breathing. The staff were unable to correct the situation. By the time the emergency medical technicians were able to arrive on the scene and insert a breathing tube, his heart had stopped. They had difficulty restarting it. Currently he is on a ventilator. That means that a machine is breathing for him.”
“He’s not capable of breathing for himself?” Zula asked.
“We don’t think so.”
“That means his brain is badly damaged, right?”
“We are observing a complete lack of brain function. In my estimation, he is not coming back. I’m sorry to have to give you this news. But I need to ask you whether your uncle had a living will. Did he ever make a statement as to how he wanted to be treated in the event he ended up on life support?”
Corvallis interrupted the long silence that followed by saying, “I can work on that.”
He knew in his heart that he was taking the coward’s way out. He suspected that Zula knew it too. Her task was a nightmare: to contact all of the other family members and to tell them what was going on while holding it all together for Sophia. And, possibly, to make an executive decision to pull the plug on the man who was the closest thing she had to a father. Merely being in proximity to someone going through all of that was enough to put Corvallis into a cold sweat.
Tracking down a legal document seemed light duty.
Zula nodded and spared him a little smile. “Thank you, C-plus.” She looked at Dr. Trinh. “I would like to see him, if that is okay.”
In the college town that was his namesake, Corvallis had been raised by a father who was clearly on the autism spectrum and a mother who was within spitting distance of it. He was an only child. The household was stable and drama-free. They read books and played board games. Emotional matters were outsourced to relatives, who were all rather far away. From time to time Mom or Dad would be called upon to offer support to a relative or a family member in distress, which they generally did by wiring money, solving a logistical problem, or making a donation to an apposite charity. They didn’t go to church, which—never mind what you actually believed, or didn’t—inoculated children with a steady low-level exposure to christenings, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals. While in middle school Corvallis had started to become aware that he was not much good, compared to other people, at situations where he was called upon to express his emotions. Like the early warning signs of a dread disease, this had first surfaced when he had found himself at a party and discovered that he couldn’t dance. Movement per se he was good at—he already had a brown belt in tae kwon do—but movement expressive of feelings was impossible for him. Since then the condition had only become more pronounced.
This lack of surefootedness extended to simple matters such as talking to strangers on the telephone and complimenting female friends on their new haircuts—two things, among many, that he would cross the street to avoid doing. The mere thought of all the telephone calls that Zula was about to have to make, the crying, the hugging, the writing of notes, tear-soaked airport pickups, long wrenching heart-to-hearts with third cousins twice removed—merely being in proximity to it, with no real expectations or responsibilities at all, was nearly enough to send Corvallis into a panic attack.
But there was always a way out. Corvallis’s dad was the designated photographer at family reunions. He was not a hugger, but he did a dynamite job of taking pictures of people hugging; no hug could escape the sleepless gaze of his bleeding-edge Nikon. Corvallis was enormously relieved now to have a specific task in which expressing emotions was not merely unnecessary but actually somewhat counterproductive. He opened his laptop. He figured out how to get on the hospital’s guest Wi-Fi network. He forced himself to ignore all of the email that had piled up during the hour or so since he had last checked it and went to the website for Argenbright Vail. This was a Seattle-based law firm with branches in San Jose and a few other centers of the tech economy. Formerly a small, white-shoe sort of practice, it had, during the decades since Microsoft had taken root in this area, grown to the point where it now had something like a thousand lawyers. Argenbright Vail had helped Dodge form Corporation 9592, accepting payment in the form of an envelope of twenty-dollar bills, and had represented both him personally and his company ever since. Corvallis didn’t know whether Dodge even had a will, or, if he did, where it might be found, but this was an obvious place to start looking.
Argenbright Vail occupied ten floors of an office tower that was directly visible out the window of this very room. When Corvallis dialed the extension of Stan Peterson, the partner there whom he deemed most likely to know the answer to his question, he could almost imagine that Stan was visible through one of those windows, the white French cuff of his shirt flashing as he reached out to pick up his handset. For once, the telephone gods were smiling upon Corvallis, and he was able to get through on the second ring. It probably helped that he was the CTO of a hot startup, his name, title, and photograph enshrined in Argenbright Vail’s awesome high-tech phone system and displayed on the screen of Stan’s computer at the same time the phone rang.
“Corvallis Kawasaki, as I live and breathe!” Stan called cheerfully.
“Stan, are you in your office? Someplace private?”
“Yeah, let me just close the door.” Corvallis heard Stan doing so. “What’s up? Should I get Laura?” He was referring to another partner there who handled the account of Nubilant—the company Corvallis now worked for. Stan, on the other hand, was Dodge’s personal lawyer. Perhaps he was assuming that Corvallis was confused and had dialed the wrong extension. Happened all the time.
“No, this is about Dodge.”
“Is he in trouble again?” Stan asked with feigned exasperation that was meant to be humorous, and would have been, if Dodge hadn’t been brain-dead.
Corvallis gave him an explanation of what was happening. Or had happened was truer, but more painful, as it captured the reality that it was not going to un-happen. Every so often, he paused in case Stan wanted to jump in with a question. But Stan was utterly silent, except for some breathing, which sounded a little faster and heavier than normal.
“Of course!” he blurted out, when Corvallis had finally got around to asking about the will. “I mean, yes! We drew up his will. Years ago. It’s got the thing you’re asking for.”
“A living will?”
“Health care directive,” Stan corrected him. “Same thing. But, C-plus, are you sure …”
“Sure of what?”
“That his condition is really at the point where—where we need to be reading that document?”
“You mean the document that states what Dodge wanted to happen in the case where he was brain-dead, and on life support?” Corvallis asked.
After a long pause, Stan said, “Yeah.”
“The doctor didn’t pull any punches. He’s with Zula now. When he comes back I’ll double-check. But in the meantime I think you had better get it over here.”
Stan was slow to respond. Corvallis tried, “Worst case is that it’s a false alarm and we have a laugh over it.”
This was a lie, but it worked. “I’ll do it,” Stan said immediately.
Dodge’s will arrived twenty minutes later, delivered by a bicycle messenger who pulled it out of a rain-washed bag slung over one shoulder. Homo Seattleus, Corvallis thought as he regarded this lanky young man, his dreadlocks, his long reddish beard, his Utilikilt, his blinding array of independently flashing bike safety lights, his stainless-steel water bottle. Somewhat contrary to his appearance, he was all business and insisted that Zula would have to sign for the receipt of the documents. She did so without interrupting a telephone conversation that she was having over her earbuds. Corvallis took the envelope back to the little private room that they had turned into their operations center and undid the string tie and pulled out a stack of documents. There were three of them: a fat one that was the actual last will and testament, and two shorter ones, the health care directive and the disposition of remains. He did so with a feeling of dread so powerful that it induced tingling in his fingertips. He was afraid that the voice of Dodge was about to speak to him from the health care directive, stating bluntly that if he ended up on a ventilator he was to be put to death forthwith. In which case it would happen now, before Corvallis had had time to even Google the five stages of grief. He was holding out some hope that Dodge might have gone soft—or, much more likely in the case of Dodge, that he had been so bored by the process of drawing up these documents that he had simply signed whatever they had put in front of him, and that it might afford some kind of loophole. An excuse to keep him on the machine for a few days at least—long enough for more family members to converge on the scene and shoulder Corvallis out of the way and make it not be his problem.
What he found was neither. The health care directive was curiously verbose. And it was a bit odd from a typographical standpoint. The introductory paragraph and some of the connective tissue was in the Palatino that was standard at Argenbright Vail. But big slabs of it were in Monaco, a sans-serif typeface that tended to be used by nerds to display computer code in terminal windows. This was, in other words, a document that had been assembled largely by copying and pasting material from something else—something that looked like it had been downloaded from the Internet back in the pre-web days. Probably straight text, as opposed to a word processing document. The quotation marks and other punctuation suggested that it had originally been composed in the nerd-friendly text processing program Emacs. No effort had been made by Stan, or whoever had drawn this thing up, to “select all” and tidy up the formatting.
Those sections of the document contained instructions. Detailed instructions. Weird ones. Technically precise instructions on how to kill Dodge in a controlled manner, should he ever wind up on a ventilator. The machine was not just supposed to be disconnected. Instead it was to be left on while Dodge’s body was infused with a certain mixture of drugs and his core temperature was dropped using an ice bath. Only then was the ventilator to be removed. And then, at the moment that Dodge stopped being a living person at death’s door and became legally dead, the reader was urged to set aside the health care directive and pick up its companion document, the disposition of remains. And this had exactly the same typographical peculiarities. It was a seamless continuation of the protocol begun in the health care directive. Once the ventilator had been disconnected, Dodge’s body was supposed to be chilled down as quickly as possible with an ice-water IV, bath, and enema. Only then was it acceptable to move “the remains,” and this was supposed to happen in a meticulously described way, taking the corpse directly to a particular facility in the high desert outside of Ephrata, Washington, where it was to be kept cryogenically preserved.
The nerd in Corvallis was fascinated by the level of technical detail embodied in these documents, and wanted to have a conversation with whatever team of doctors and neuroscientists had toiled over them. And the socially awkward geek was relieved, in a way, to have something to take his mind off of what was happening around him. As long as he was hunched over these protocols he was absolved of responsibilities on the emotional front. But there was a third aspect of his personality that slowly came to the fore, and wrestled the steering wheel, as it were, away from the others. That was the CTO, the responsible business executive who was at least passingly familiar with the world of lawyers. And the CTO was curious about the typography thing. Argenbright Vail was a sophisticated tech law firm. Richard Forthrast was one of their most important clients. Many thousands of dollars must have been spent poring over these documents before they had been sent to Dodge for his signature. To set them all in Palatino and clean up the formatting would have been the work of a few moments for an intern. Leaving them in this state, he suspected, had been a deliberate choice. A way for Argenbright Vail to put the protocol in scare quotes. To make it clear, to any future reader, that they had just been following instructions. Dodge’s instructions, presumably.
Corvallis had an “oh shit” moment then. A clear memory and an understanding. He checked the signature date on the documents. They were nine years old. Richard had caused them to be drawn up when he had become wealthy. He had signed them, filed them away, and forgotten about them. He was the last man in the world who would have bothered to update and maintain his will.
“Is he wearing a bracelet?” Corvallis asked Zula during a rare moment when she wasn’t on the phone to Iowa.
“A what?” she asked, not certain she’d quite heard him correctly. It was a weird question; Dodge was about as likely to wear a bishop’s miter as a bracelet.
“I mean a medical alert kind of bracelet. You know, like people wear if they have drug allergies or something.”
“For the doctor to read in the ER if you’re found unconscious.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I don’t think so. Want me to go check?”
“Hang on,” Corvallis said, “I think I can spare you the trouble.” He had brought up the photo application on his laptop. He had thousands of pictures archived on this thing. Organizing them into albums was one of those tasks he never seemed to have time for. But the application did have a built-in ability to recognize faces, and automatically to produce collections of pictures that included a particular face. During stretches of bored downtime on airplanes, Corvallis had taught it to recognize a few faces that were important to him, including that of Richard Forthrast. He clicked on “Dodge” in the interface. The application cogitated for a few moments and then populated the window with thumbnails of pictures featuring Dodge, or people who, according to its algorithm, resembled him. With another click Corvallis sorted them according to date, then began to page through them from the beginning. His earliest personal photograph of Dodge was from about eight years ago, but he had a few older photos, taken before he had even met the man, that had found their way onto his drive as the result of being attached to emails or what have you. Some of these showed a very young man: the long-haired 1970s draft-dodging edition of Richard Forthrast, hanging out in wild places along the Idaho–British Columbia border, and depicted in the flamboyant hues of scanned Kodachrome. No bracelets for him. Hitting the right-arrow key, he worked up through the years until he stumbled into a series of pictures taken around the time of Corporation 9592’s initial public offering. In one of those, Dodge was gripping a magnum of champagne in both hands, bracing it against his penis, holding a thumb over the mouth of the bottle to make it spray foam at Pluto. The photo was harshly lit by a flash and it showed both of his arms clearly. On his left wrist, competing for space with a cheap digital wristwatch, was a medical alert bracelet: a metal plaque about the size of a large postage stamp, held on with a chain, blazoned with a red caduceus, otherwise covered with print too fine to read. Way more metallic real estate than what would have been needed for “I am allergic to penicillin.”
Corvallis didn’t need to read it because he knew exactly what it was. Just to be sure, he checked the date of the photo and verified that it had been taken within a couple of months of the signing of the will.
He opened up a new browser window and clicked in the search box. He turned his attention to the health care directive and skimmed through one of those Monaco-font sections until he found an unusual series of words. He typed those in and hit the Enter key and was immediately presented with a screen full of exact matches. The same text had been copied and pasted in many places on the Internet. For his purposes, most of them would be red herrings. Corvallis scanned through the search results until finally he saw the word that he had, this entire time, been trying to dredge up from his memory.
He went back to the search box and typed “Eutropians.” A memory from the early days of the Internet, the 1990s tech boom.
The primary website had not been updated for more than ten years. The organization, if it even still existed, seemed to have gone dark in 2002, in the black years after the implosion of the tech bubble and 9/11.
The Wikipedia entry was bracketed in multiple layers of warnings; people had been fighting over it.
Some of the basic facts, however, seemed indisputable. The Eutropians were a movement that had taken shape during the early 1990s, when all things had seemed possible through technology. It was just an informal discussion group in Berkeley, with a branch around Stanford. They had adopted the World Wide Web early and created what at the time was an unusually sophisticated website. Now, of course, it was as dated as black-and-white TV. A nonprofit had been founded, later obtained 501(c)(3) status, and ceased to exist in 2004. More than one for-profit company had emerged from the movement. The Wikipedia entry was littered with question marks and complaints from various editors. Corvallis didn’t have to check its history to know that it had been the battleground of many flame wars. The details didn’t matter.
“If I can get Dr. Trinh in here,” Corvallis said, “can I then have a few minutes of your time?”
Actually he didn’t say it; he texted it to Zula, who was across the table from him, trying to calm someone down over the phone. She glanced at the screen of her phone, then looked up at him and nodded.
Corvallis had a bit of a hard time convincing the nurse at the front desk that what he had to tell Dr. Trinh was really more important than what he was doing at the moment, but when he used the words “health care directive” and “legal” it got her attention. A few minutes later, the doctor was in the room again with Corvallis and Zula.
“There was this group of geeks in the Bay Area in the 1990s who thought they saw a path to immortality through technology,” Corvallis began. “They became known as Eutropians. It is a quasitechnical name. If entropy is the tendency of things to become disorganized over time, then eutropy is a statement of optimism. Not only can we defeat entropy, but the universe, in a way, wants us to use our powers as conscious beings to make things better. And part of that is defeating death.”
“How’d that work out for them?” Zula asked, deadpan.
“These guys were smart,” Corvallis said. “Not flakes. There was nothing they didn’t know, or couldn’t learn, about the science. They knew perfectly well that it was going to be a long time—decades at least—before practical life-extension technology became available. They knew that in the meantime they could die at any point in a car accident or whatever. So, they instituted a stopgap. Based on the best science at the time, they designed a protocol for preserving human remains and keeping them on ice indefinitely.”
“So that, down the road—” Zula began.
“Down the road,” Corvallis said, “when it did become technologically possible, they could be brought back to life.”
“Like Walt Disney,” said Dr. Trinh.
“Apparently that’s an urban myth,” Corvallis said, “but yeah, it’s the same idea. Cryonics. It’s a big long hairy story. The idea has been around since the 1960s and it’s come and gone in waves. Well, what you both need to know is that Richard got caught up in one of those waves for a little while.”
“It doesn’t seem like him,” Zula said.
“Yes and no. Sure, he is—was—skeptical. A fatalist. But he was also open-minded. Willing to take calculated risks.”
“I’ll give you that.”
“Around the time that his company became a big deal, he was making a lot of contacts in the tech world, going to conferences, hanging out with VCs. One of the VCs who had backed Corporation 9592 also had some money in a startup that had been founded by an offshoot of the Eutropians. To make a long story short, it was a cryonics company. They constructed a facility in eastern Washington State. Electrical power is cheap there because of the Grand Coulee Dam.”
“And that was their biggest expense,” Dr. Trinh surmised. “Power to keep the freezers running.”
“Exactly. They approached a lot of people who had new tech money and offered them a Pascal’s Wager kind of deal.”
“Pascal’s Wager?” asked Dr. Trinh.
“Pascal once said that you should believe in God because, if you turned out to be wrong, you weren’t losing anything, and if you turned out to be right, the reward was infinite,” Corvallis said.
Zula nodded. “It was the same exact deal here.”
“Exactly,” Corvallis said. “If cryonics turned out to be worthless, and it was impossible to save your frozen body, who cares? You’re dead anyway. But if it actually did work, you might be able to live forever.”
“I can totally see Richard going for that,” Zula said, nodding. “After a few drinks.”
“He did go for it, and he followed all of their recommended procedures,” Corvallis said. “For a little while, he wore a special medical bracelet giving instructions on how to freeze his body.” He spun his laptop around and let them see the photograph. “Around the same time, he updated his will. And most of it, I’m guessing, is just an ordinary will.” Corvallis rested his hand on the thickest of the three documents. “But the health care directive and the disposition of remains consist mostly of boilerplate instructions that had been developed by the Eutropians. And basically what it says is that after his body has been chilled down, it’s supposed to be shipped to this facility out in eastern Washington, where a team of medical technicians will take over and prepare him for the full cryonic-preservation thing.”
“I’ve never seen that bracelet on him,” Zula remarked.
“Because he stopped wearing it before you came out to Seattle,” Corvallis said. “He told me this story once, a long time ago. About the Eutropians and the VC and all the rest. I had kind of forgotten it. Dodge had a lot of stories and this wasn’t the most interesting of them.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Zula confirmed, with a slow shake of the head.
“It was pretty clear from the way he told the story that he had decided the whole thing was ridiculous. Like when he went out and bought that Escalade and then wrecked it.”
“One of those silly things that boys do when they suddenly get a lot of money,” Zula said.
“Exactly. It’s long forgotten. But”—and Corvallis now rested his hand on the health care directive—“he never updated his will.”
“That is still legally binding?” Zula asked sharply, nodding at the documents.
“I’m not a lawyer,” Corvallis said.
They both looked at Dr. Trinh, who held his hands up as if under arrest and shook his head.
Stan Peterson—who was, in fact, a lawyer—was there half an hour later. He had canceled all of his appointments, he wanted it known. He did not announce this in a self-congratulatory manner. He just wanted Zula to understand that the full resources of Argenbright Vail, up to and including drone strikes and private rocket ships, were at her and the family’s disposal.
“Alice is on a plane,” Zula told him. “She’ll be here late tonight.”
Stan looked a little nonplussed.
“Richard’s sister-in-law,” Zula explained.
“She’ll be the executor?”
