“It’s okay,” Corvallis said. “See, this is where Christopher Vail earned his fee. The founders of Ephrata were true believers. They believed they had come up with the ideal way to preserve human remains. And they believed that Ephrata Cryonics Inc. was going to be around forever.”
“Because so many people were going to sign up for the service …,” Zula said.
“That they’d have a fat bank account, economies of scale, the whole bit,” said Corvallis.
“Well, as one who knew Chris Vail well when his faculties were intact, I’m guessing he took neither of those presumptions for granted,” Stan said.
Corvallis nodded. “If you read this, I think what you’ll see is him basically saying: look, if Ephrata Cryonics is actually still in business when Richard Forthrast dies, and if they are solvent, and if no better technology has been invented in the meantime to preserve the remains, then go ahead and follow these instructions and ship Dodge off to the big freezer in Ephrata.”
“But if any of those is not true …,” Stan said.
“Well, then it gets complicated,” Corvallis said.
“Like it was all so simple before,” Zula muttered.
Corvallis pulled the disposition of remains over to him and flipped through to the last few pages, which were all in the standardissue justified Palatino of Argenbright Vail. “Complicated in a way that makes my brain hurt—but I’ll bet you can make sense of it.”
“At your service, sir,” Stan said.
Fortuitously, they were joined a moment later by a woman who introduced herself as the hospital’s general counsel. It was easy enough to infer that she’d been alerted to the presence of a patient’s attorney in the ICU department and was coming down to find out what was up. That the patient was a famous billionaire and the lawyer a senior partner at Argenbright Vail had presumably put some spring in her step. She was younger and less heavily groomed than might be expected; a Catholic feminist soccer mom with a Brown degree, according to the Miasma. Esme Hurlbut, believe it or not. Enjoyed knitting and free climbing. A few minutes were lost in making introductions and bringing Esme up to speed; Dr. Trinh repeated what the others already knew of Dodge’s condition. Corvallis spent the time rifling the Miasma for more information about Ephrata Cryonics Inc.
When the conversation resumed, he was in a position to say more: “Ephrata took in a bunch of money from people like Dodge. They froze a few bodies almost immediately—which probably seemed like progress at the time—but it forced them to keep the freezers running forever after that. They got hit with a lawsuit from some pissed-off Eutropians that depleted their reserves. They never really hit their targets financially. The bottom fell out after the dot-com crash. In 2003 they did a reorg. Their first step was to cut the heads off and burn the bodies.”
“I’m sorry, could you say that again?” Stan asked.
Esme Hurlbut, who had clearly been apprehensive when she had entered the room, was now more fascinated.
“They had eleven bodies in cryostorage at that point,” Corvallis said, flicking his gaze down at his laptop to verify the stats. “The contract that all eleven of those people had signed, while they were alive, when they gave Ephrata Cryonics their money, contained an out. It said that the remains were to be preserved in cryogenic storage—or through whatever means, in the judgment of Ephrata Cryonics, were best suited to the desired goal of eventually bringing the deceased back to life.”
Esme raised her hand like the smart girl in the front row. “Judgment? Or sole judgment?” she asked.
“Sole judgment,” Corvallis answered after scanning the words on his screen. In his peripheral vision he saw Esme and Stan exchanging a fraught glance.
“And based on that,” Corvallis continued, “the argument that Ephrata Cryonics now made was that the only thing that mattered was the head. Or, when you get right down to it, the brain. The body was basically disposable. Any future society that had enough technology to bring a frozen brain back to full conscious functioning would be able to grow a new body from DNA. So, to save money, Ephrata Cryonics decapitated the eleven frozen bodies and packed the heads into a much smaller freezer.”
“Cut their operating expenses to the bone!” Stan proclaimed approvingly. Momentarily losing track, perhaps, of whose side he was on.
“What does this mean for us today?” Zula asked.
Stan pulled the health care directive over to himself and began scanning it. He seemed to be focusing on the part of it that had been contributed by his former colleague Christopher Vail. As he did so, he spoke in a somewhat distracted manner: “I think that is going to depend, Zula, on the questions we talked about a minute ago … whether the company is solvent … what the current state of the technology is …”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘solvent,’” Corvallis said. “According to the Internet—”
“Which as we know is never wrong,” Esme put in.
“Yeah. According to the Internet, the decapitation gambit only bought them three more years. Then they reached a point—”
“Oh, my god, I remember this now. It was a news story, briefly,” Esme said. “The power company was threatening to shut them off for nonpayment. The company insisted that letting the brains thaw out would be tantamount to murder. It was a standoff.”
Stan literally slapped his forehead. “Jesus. I can’t believe Dodge got into business with these people.” Which merely drew quizzical looks from both Zula and Corvallis, wordlessly asking, Do you have the first idea of the kinds of people he did get into business with? Oblivious, Stan shook his head. “But at least we’ve answered the question of whether they are solvent.”
“Depends on what you mean,” Corvallis said. His Googling was still keeping pace with the conversation. “A deal was worked out. One of the original Eutropians swooped in. Elmo Shepherd.”
“One of those pissed-off Eutropians who had sued them earlier?” Zula asked.
“You got it. Shepherd was the main instigator of that lawsuit. He claimed that Ephrata Cryonics had laid claim to some IP—some intellectual property—that ought to have been in the public domain—the open-source work of the original Eutropians.”
“Hang on, I know who El Shepherd is. Hell, I’ve met him,” Stan said. “I think he’s one of our clients in the Silicon Valley office.”
“He made some money on an IPO and became a venture capitalist,” Corvallis said. “Mostly conventional tech VC stuff, it looks like—but he has maintained a side interest in life extension.”
“So, what happened when he ‘swooped in’?” Esme asked.
“He formed a new company called Ephrata Life Sciences and Health,” Corvallis said. He had ceased to be an autonomous participant in the conversation and become a conduit for whatever was on the Miasma. “He funded it with his own money. And he worked out a deal—he acquired Ephrata Cryonics lock, stock, and barrel. Ephrata Cryonics is now a wholly owned subsidiary of ELSH, which is based out of the Presidio, San Francisco, California.”
“So technically it is solvent?” Zula asked. She had been juggling text messages and ignoring phone calls for several minutes and was losing the battle against electronic distractions.
“As long as El Shepherd is pouring money into it, it’s difficult to claim otherwise,” Stan said. “But listen, that’s not the only out in this document. Assuming you’re looking for an out. There’s also the question of whether the technology that ELSH is now using is really the best.”
“In the sole judgment of ELSH?” Esme asked.
Stan permitted himself a look of mild satisfaction. “Nope. In the boilerplate contract