Zula glanced around the hall. Most of the attendees—even the ones who disagreed—seemed to be enjoying the talk. Some part of her wished she could be one of those people. An academic or an engineer who could sit back, wineglass in hand, and soak it all up and take it for what it was.

She didn’t have that luxury. In her peripheral vision, she could see one or two faces turned her way, leveling gazes she preferred not to meet. They were people who had earlier staked out aggressive positions concerning the nine MFN, or Most Favored Nation, donors, and the Ephrata Eleven. Those all tended to be true believers in the proposition that the human mind could be uploaded and switched back on, as a digital simulation, after the body was gone. They believed that the Process was the first time this had actually been done. That it could be done again, as many times as resources allowed. And that the language in the agreements by which Verna Braden and the other nine MFN donors had given their brains to science, strictly interpreted, imposed an obligation on the Forthrast Family Foundation to create new instantiations of the process simulating those brains.

Zula, as the director of that foundation, had a number of outs. She could argue that the Process was just an experiment, and as such not covered by the MFN language at all. She could shut the Process down, bringing the debate to an abrupt end.

Enoch Root had just checked her on that front. She couldn’t murder her uncle.