“That’s actually true, unlike a lot of stuff that’s written about me,” El said, “but there is a need to take calculated risks.”
As often happened when he was talking on the phone, Corvallis’s gaze was wandering about freely, focusing from time to time on things that lit up his visual cortex: a pretty student from the adjacent university, a purple Tesla driving by, a chocolate Lab taking a crap in the bushes as its owner stood vigil with a blue New York Times bag everted over his free hand. A perfect red maple leaf lay spread-eagled on the sidewalk at his feet, plastered down by the rain. Around it, the concrete was stained with the colors that kids’ toys came in: sickly artificial purples and greens and pinks. Someone had come here with a box of sidewalk chalk and drawn a piece of art. Corvallis took a step away from it and saw a rain-blurred portrait of a man with white hair and beard. A God of the Old Testament in grape-colored robe with a rainbow aura surrounding his head. Inscribed at the base of the artwork was EGDOD. The name of Dodge’s most powerful character in T’Rain. Some fan must have seen the video on Reddit, pulled out its GPS coordinates, and come to the site to pay homage by chalking up an ikon. Maybe they believed that Dodge’s hospital room overlooked this place, that Dodge was in some sort of condition to look out the window and see it.
“You still there?” El asked. “I ducked into a conference room.” The private jet terminal was the sort of place that had nice conference rooms just sitting there available for people like El to duck into.
“How do you see the day taking shape?” Corvallis asked. Because El must have had some reason to take what he viewed as a calculated risk. Basically—according to what was written about him—El Shepherd intended to live forever, and so he didn’t like to place himself in situations where his brain could be destroyed. He had a mobile office, built into a bus, which he preferred over airplane travel. Buses could crash, of course, but unless you T-boned a gasoline tanker at a hundred miles an hour, the destruction probably wouldn’t rise to the level that would completely destroy the brain. Whereas the crash of a jet airplane could leave nothing behind for rescuers to scrape up and put into the freezer.
“I have a few errands I could run, as long as I’m up here,” El returned, “but I’m sure you can guess the primary reason for my visit.”
“Yes.”
“The last thing I want to do is impose on the family at a time like this …”
“It’s fine,” Corvallis said, wondering if El could hear the smile in his voice. He got it. The bereaved family was off-limits but the bereaved friend was fair game. “I am running a brief errand. It will take me five minutes. Then I’ll grab my car and head for Georgetown.” That was the neighborhood just north of Boeing Field. “If you want to pick out a suitable restaurant or whatever, just text me the coordinates and I will be there in half an hour.”
“Fine. Over and out,” El said.
Corvallis snapped a picture of the sidewalk art, then went into the building, steeling himself for yet another in the seemingly endless series of awkward conversations that had accounted for the last day of his life. It was going to be awkward because the people at the medical office were going to try to be nice to him, to voice sympathy. And yet they couldn’t say anything that would place them at a disadvantage when it was repeated in a courtroom during a malpractice suit and so it was all going to be so terribly awkward. By comparison he was actually looking forward to the meeting in half an hour with El Shepherd, who could be relied upon to charge blindly across the emotional minefield and get down as soon as possible to geeking out on connectomics.
They had a little conference room near the front desk of the medical practice, the most generic conference room you could imagine. The office manager escorted Corvallis to it. Sitting there alone in the middle of the table were Dodge’s shoulder bag and a canvas tote bag emblazoned—this was too inevitable—with the logo of the local National Public Radio station. Someone had neatly folded Dodge’s clothing, which Dodge had no doubt simply left in a heap on the floor of the changing room, and placed it into the tote bag. This one detail made it more clear than anything else that Dodge was dead. Corvallis pulled one of the chairs back, sat down, folded his arms on the table, bent forward, and rested his forehead on them. He cried fully and freely for a couple of minutes. The office manager hovered nervously at first, then excused herself, then came back a minute later with a box of tissues, then excused herself again. Corvallis inferred all of this from sounds; he could see nothing through his tears but the fake wood grain of the conference room table. When he sat back up again, he could see her standing outside wringing her hands. He blotted his eyes with tissues and then used them to wipe tears that had spilled onto the tabletop. He threw the damp tissues into a convenient receptacle, then slung Dodge’s messenger bag over his shoulder and tucked the canvas tote under his arm. The office manager opened the door for him. He nodded to her and walked out of the medical practice without looking back.
On the sidewalk outside, someone had, during the last few minutes, placed a bouquet of grocery store flowers on the picture of Egdod. The bouquet had been additionally wrapped up in a length of black wire. On a closer look, it was a controller from a video game console neatly bundled around the stems of the flowers.
Half an hour later he was in a booth in the back of a bar in Georgetown. Across from him was El Shepherd. El was wearing a suit. Some Bay Area tech zillionaires liked to cut against the grain by wearing finely tailored clothing. He was one of those. “C,” he said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“It’s okay,” Corvallis said, “I did the sad thing. Just took care of it. Done with that now.” His arm was draped over the items he had collected from the medical practice. He had brought them into the bar with him. Georgetown was a complicated neighborhood, 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?”