Another out was to plead lack of resources. The agreement couldn’t obligate the foundation to spend money it didn’t have. But the numbers didn’t favor that argument. Her cautious stewardship of the endowment was now coming back to bite her. They had plenty of money—more than enough to support not only the Process but several clones of it. They no longer even had to exert much effort to keep the endowment growing. Most of it was now under the management of financial bots that just kept on making money without human intervention. The fact of the matter was that tomorrow she could sign a document piping funds directly from those bots to Hole in the Wall and similar facilities that had recently come online. She could turn out the lights, lock the doors, walk away from the Forthrast Family Foundation, and take early retirement, and the whole thing would just run indefinitely, financial bots raking up profits from the collective endeavors of the living to pay for the eternal simulation of the dead. And even if some crash or bug wiped those bots out, the Waterhouse-Shaftoe Foundation—which was at least ten times the size of Forthrast, and even more wired in to all kinds of eldritch trading algorithms—would swoop in to keep the Process running. And when they were good and satisfied that it all worked, they’d boot up new processes for the MFN crew. If they hadn’t done so already.

She and her daughter had been played. Played expertly. Played by people who probably thought they were serving a higher purpose. She might spend the rest of her life wondering who was behind it all—whether Enoch was the mastermind, or Solly Pesador, or El Shepherd, or even—here was a disturbing thought—Corvallis Kawasaki. Or maybe it was Pluto playing an incredibly deep game. But it didn’t matter. The outcome was the same. The Process was running. And Enoch, standing up in front of all the people who mattered, had just come out and stated what many already believed: that to shut it down at this point would be to commit murder.

Chapter 26

Chapter 26

This whirling about of the dry leaves reached deep into him and fixed his attention for as long as it lasted—until, that is, the last of the leaves had blown away and left nothing but brown branches and the green ground. His mind could not get away from this. Dry and dead were ideas that came to his mind, though he had little grasp of what it meant for something to be dry, and no sense at all of what “dead” meant.