The family’s share of the money had long since been wired to Iowa and ceased to be any of Zula’s concern, except for those increasingly rare occasions when she would be called on to give a deposition or sign an affidavit connected with the semiautonomous subbranch of the legal profession supported by the ecosystem of lawsuits that had been spawned by a few ill-chosen words. The balance of Richard’s fortune—most of it, actually—had gone to the Forthrast Family Foundation. Zula had been its president and director from day one, and it was increasingly obvious that she would never have any other job. She paid herself a reasonable salary—nothing that would raise the eyebrows of the foundation’s board—and she devoted her career to seeing to it that her uncle’s fortune was applied toward the causes he would have favored. His money had attracted more donations, mostly from old friends of his who wanted to get in on a good thing.

During the first decade, the problem had been finding responsible ways to spend the money faster than it accumulated. This was like shoveling your driveway during a blizzard. When foundation money needed to be parked, she had at first put it in simple index funds. This reassured her she wasn’t missing out on any market moves, without her paying a lot for fancy advisers. Slowly she’d begun moving money into financial bots running algorithms too complicated for any human to understand. These had performed better than the humans. In one case, a single bot had made so much money over a span of several consecutive years that it had more than doubled the foundation’s endowment. As a result, the proportion of the foundation’s money controlled by inscrutable artificial intelligences had become disproportionate to what was parked in old-fashioned funds and stocks.

Uncle Richard hadn’t exactly knocked himself out providing specifics as to what the foundation should be spending the money on. She’d had leeway that had daunted her. She’d spent more than she should have getting expert advice, then fired the experts. Running the foundation would have been easy had its sole purpose been, say, to preserve a rare species of tree snail. Instead the will’s language had pointed her in the general direction of supporting research that was somehow beneficial to mankind but somehow related to game technology. Which could mean just about anything.