Half an hour later, during the lunch break, she confirmed as much with Marcus Hobbs, the chief counsel of the Forthrast Family Foundation, who had actually managed to follow Sinjin’s argument all the way through.

“This isn’t complicated. El Shepherd has never been happy with the state of affairs that began when Corvallis made Sophia a token holder in Dodge’s Brain and she used that authority to launch the Process. He’s made it obvious in many ways, over the years, that he wants that same level of authority.”

Zula looked across the table at her daughter. Sophia and Maeve had joined Zula, Marcus, and C-plus for lunch. They were sitting around a corner table in an Ethiopian place on Cherry Street. The restaurant was about three blocks down the hill from the medical office building where Richard had been stricken. The time of year was early October. It was an unspoken family tradition that they would haunt this part of town when the maple leaves were red. And “family” had become a complicated word to them. C-plus had effectively been made into a Forthrast long ago. Sophia was now a beloved aunt to the teenage children of Corvallis and Maeve.

And all of them together were haunted by departed spirits. They were responsible for having created the systems on which Dodge, Verna, and Pluto were now, in some sense, alive.

“He keeps complaining that the Singularity isn’t working out the way he’d hoped,” Zula said. “I think part of what disappoints him is just how damned bureaucratic it is. So many lawyers. So many meetings.”

“But it is,” Sophia said. “It is starting to turn his way now, I think.”

“You mean, with the Wad?” Corvallis asked. He had told everyone at this table about his encounter with Elmo Shepherd’s avatar.

“Yeah,” Sophia said.

“He loves the Wad,” Corvallis admitted.

“Fine,” Zula said, “but even if that’s everything he was hoping for, who’s going to keep it running after he goes and joins it? A bunch of foundations with interlocking boards of directors. Their endowments distributed across god knows how many different investment vehicles, spread across every financial institution in the world.”

“A lot of that is self-managing by this point,” Marcus reminded her. “Most of our investments are now managed by bots we don’t even understand. In his case, the fraction’s probably much higher than that.”

“But physical stuff still has to exist. The computers that run it all need electricity, and roofs to keep rain from falling on them. Humans can shut it down any time they want.”

“That’s what bothers him,” Sophia said. “And it’s what bothers me about what he’s asking for.”

“Could you say more on that?” Marcus asked. “Because it’s increasingly obvious that it’s the real reason Sinjin’s here.”