The actual data started with the completely raw and unprocessed output of the ion-beam scanning device that had cremated Richard’s frozen brain one axon at a time. This alone occupied more storage space than would have been affordable back when Richard had signed his will. In that form, it was essentially unusable. If you thought of Richard’s brain as a document being run through a scanner, the raw data was a list of voltages emerging from the scanner’s optics. In order to turn that into a meaningful picture, it had to be sifted through and processed on a vast scale. Merely crunching the numbers to produce something resembling a connectome—a wiring diagram of how the neurons were interlinked—had made it necessary for the Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation to construct one of the largest data centers in the world. This was a reasonably natural extension of what they were good at anyway as a result of running a huge electronic banking system. It had been crunching on DB for years.

Which wasn’t to suggest that the connectome was, in any sense, absolutely known. Twenty different people had written twenty different Ph.D. dissertations on how the raw data could be processed and interpreted; each of their algorithms generated different results. Meta-analyses had then been conducted, comparing and contrasting the outputs generated by those competing algorithms. So DB didn’t contain a single settled and agreed-on connectome but dozens of possible versions of it, each stored in its own incompatible data format and each encoding a different set of assumptions as to how the brain actually worked.

What DB wasn’t was a functioning simulation of Dodge’s actual brain. Various efforts had been made to take the contents of the database, feed them into a system designed to emulate the functions of human neurons, and hit the “on” switch. But for the most part DB was an inert repository of data. A noun, not a verb. The digital equivalent of freezing Richard Forthrast’s body while waiting for some future technology to come along capable of reanimating it.

“When Uncle Richard signed the disposition of remains, they were stuck in a cryopreservation mind-set,” Sophia said. “The document reflects that.”

“I’ll bite,” Marcus said. “Who’s ‘they’? And can you say more about the mind-set?”