In any case, when she walked her daily gantlet of gyms and restaurants, she began to feel that the tech industry, which prided itself on having disrupted so many other things, was now creeping up on the moment when it would attempt to disrupt death. For if you had conquered every other foe and made an infinite amount of money along the way, and found yourself savoring a bite of some exquisite sushi or a dram of thirty-year-old single-malt, why should you not ask yourself what in principle was standing in the way of your being able to enjoy such things forever? And if you didn’t believe—as most of these people didn’t—that there was some higher reward awaiting you on the other side of that bourne from which no traveler returns, then why not choose to remain on this side of it for as long as technology would allow?

Zula, left to her own devices, would never have thought to approach death head-on, as if it were just another Old Economy bogeyman on a Silicon Valley whiteboard, waiting to be disrupted. But the train wreck that had begun at the moment Dodge’s heart had stopped beating had obliged her to make it a significant part of her life’s work. Not so much as a researcher in her own right (she was a geologist) but as a den mother for those who were.

Chapter 19

Chapter 19

In the architects’ rendering of the reception area of the Forthrast Family Foundation’s sixth-floor suite, blazered and skirted guests had lounged around its coffee table, sipping lattes and checking their phones under the alert but hospitable eye of a receptionist stationed behind a stylish curving desk as they waited for their hosts to show up and keycard them in.

The reality, this day and every day since they’d moved in, was that this was wasted space. They’d never got around to hiring a receptionist, so no one had ever sat behind the stylish desk. Its office chair had long since been poached, leaving more room for boxes of office supplies that tended to pile up there. Guests didn’t sit around the coffee table waiting to be buzzed in; their hosts knew where they were, and vice versa. The door leading back into the offices was propped open. Stationed next to it, plugged into a wall outlet, were charging docks for two different brands of telepresence robots: wheeled contraptions sporting flat-panel monitors thrust into the air at about the altitude of a person’s head, capable of purring around the office under the control of persons who weren’t physically present but who had the right passwords, and the right software installed on their systems. Even these had been gathering dust. The foundation had invested in them a few years ago, and Jake had frequently used them to “attend” meetings from his home in Idaho, but they had been superseded by virtual equivalents, or better robots that could walk up and down stairs on two legs. So walking through the reception area, which the architects had tried so hard to make nice, now had the feel of entering through the loading dock and the mail room.