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 on the Internet? Yes. Of course. Way better than running it through a deli slicer and taking pictures.”
“I would go further,” El said, “and say that, once we have it up and running, we are done here. Even if we did later invent a higher-resolution system, it would serve no additional purpose. It would be like making a map of the United States at submillimeter scale: no better than a map done at centimeter scale.”
Corvallis broke eye contact and took a swallow of beer. In the last few moments, some kind of emotional sea change had swept over him. He had come to see all this talk of brain scanning as just another tedious detail to be sewn up as quickly as possible, preferably by other people. Two well-funded think tanks full of smart people—WABSI and El Shepherd’s cluster of foundations and startups—seemed to have independently arrived at the conclusion that ion-beam scanning was the be-all and end-all. Cloud computing companies, such as the one Corvallis worked for, had made the long-term storage of the resulting data so cheap and reliable as to be trivial.
So what was there to talk about? As El himself had just said, they were done here.
“What is your objective in coming up to Seattle today?” Corvallis asked him.
“To see to it that Richard Forthrast’s last will and testament—including the health care directive and the disposition of remains—is enforced,” El said.
“You see that as something you have the moral and ethical authority to do?”
“I don’t know anything about the family,” El said. “You are a different matter, C. Even though we haven’t met, I can evaluate who you are based on your track record, your LinkedIn profile. I came into this bar knowing that you and I would be able to have a conversation that was calm and technically well informed.”
“What does that have to do with my question?”
El held up a hand to placate him. Stay with me, bro. “A thought experiment. A man is born into a primitive tribe where medical care is in the hands of witch doctors. Their most advanced therapeutic technology is a rattle. Later he manages to get an education. He moves to London and becomes well-off. He wants to make sure that, if he gets sick, he’ll get the same medical care as anyone else in London. So he writes a health care directive that—never mind the polite language—basically says the following to the doctor. It says, ‘If I get sick and can’t speak for myself, some of my relatives might show up and try to heal me using rattles. They might try to prevent you, the doctors, from giving me the medical care I want. Well, fuck them. Keep them out of my room. They can hang around on the street outside the hospital shaking their rattles all day and all night, but the only people I want inside the room making decisions about medical care are actual doctors and nurses.’ He writes that all up in a form that is completely bombproof from a legal standpoint and he signs and seals it six ways from Sunday and he files it away in a safe place. Now, let’s say that the worst comes to pass and this man does in fact get so sick that he can’t speak for himself anymore. He winds up in the hospital, and sure enough, his relatives show up with their rattles. And not only do they want to stand by his bed and shake their rattles but they want to exclude the doctors and nurses, pull out the IVs, turn off the machines, withdraw the medicine. In that situation, Corvallis, would you say that the doctor has the moral and ethical authority to have security escort the rattle shakers to the exit?”
“So you want to know if Richard’s next of kin are rattle shakers?”
“Yes.”
“And,” Corvallis said, “just to be clear about your analogy—you are the doctor. And the medical care you are talking about is not just normal medical care as we would conventionally understand it, but—”
“But ion-beam scanning of his brain. Yes.”
It was Pascal’s Wager again. El Shepherd was convinced that with the right technology he could make Dodge immortal. That this was what Dodge wanted. And he wasn’t going to let the family stand in the way of carrying out Dodge’s wishes. The stakes were too high.
“Let’s go back to your analogy for a minute,” Corvallis said. “When push comes to shove, the doctor calls security and has the rattle shakers thrown out of the building. What’s your plan, El, if push comes to shove in this case?”
“I would not hesitate to go in front of a judge and seek a court order.”
“Wow.”
“I mean, look. The Forthrast family will be sad and hate me for a while. That is the downside. The upside is—”
“You save Richard’s life. Or his afterlife—whatever you want to call it.”
“And, down the road? Maybe that of those angry family members too. A million years from now they are thanking me for having taken the steps that were necessary.”
“Just wow.”
“You can maybe see why I wanted to talk to you. Not the family. It could get personal with those people.”
“It’s personal with me.”
“But different, right? Even while you’re hating me, you can see where I’m coming from on the technical level.”
Corvallis thought it perhaps best not to say anything. El Shepherd, undeterred, circled around to probe from another angle. “You said a minute ago that you had taken a look at ion-beam scanning as an option.”
He was right. Corvallis had said that. Perhaps that had been a mistake.
“I take it, then, that you have decided to investigate alternatives to the services being offered by Ephrata Life Sciences and Health.”
Yes, definitely a mistake. “Where is this going?”
“You’re probably looking at the line inserted into the agreement that states the family