In essence, it had forced Jake to grow up and get his shit together—not just financially, but philosophically as well. As Zula and Alice had both feared, Jake had, at first, plowed some of the money into some of the wackier causes that he had got into the habit of believing in, and built his family’s life around, in Idaho. But becoming rich had changed what he believed, not by the more academic route of challenging his evidence and debating his logic, but by changing the sorts of things that he was predisposed to want to believe.

In addition to spawning ONE, the disposition of Richard’s brain had yoked the Forthrast Family Foundation together with the even larger Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation and kept them all in a perennially awkward relationship with El Shepherd’s network of companies and nonprofits. Their activities all went directly to the matter of mortality, consciousness, and what it meant to be a human. To have a soul. ONE had become the think-tank branch of the Forthrast/Waterhouse/Shepherd brain science complex.

Sometimes tech advanced by gradually creeping up on things. Other times it did so by saltation: suddenly leaping forward. She had heard an argument that those two couldn’t really be teased apart, because in the case of an exponential creep-up, like Moore’s Law, the bend in the curve could look like a jump if you took your eye off the ball at the wrong time.

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