She visited this particular physician twice a year. Each visit prompted a bit of musing about Dodge. He seemed to have lived and died a few times. One could never be entirely certain that he was dead. The Process that had been launched from his brain scan had ceased functioning years ago. No trace of it had been observed since. They would know if it woke up. Dodge’s account had shown debits of zero dollars and zero cents over the last two decades. At its zenith, a billion a month had coursed through it. So he seemed pretty dead.

After the appointment, she and Fronk got into another car for the trip down to the office. En route, as the car swung round a corner, Zula got a view over Lake Union. It was a vista she’d enjoyed every day when she’d lived up on the hill, but she now saw it with fresh eyes. Her mind went back to her academic training, which had been in geology. She thought about the glacier that had scooped the lake out long ago. She saw it in her mind’s eye, a cliff of ice shoving ruined mountains before it, and compared its size to all that humans had built upon the rocky earth it had left when it had melted. She thought about how recent the works of humans were, and how ephemeral, compared to geology, and wondered how long it would take for all of it to disappear.

The foundation’s building’s four elevators had begun breaking down almost as soon as they had been installed, for back in the day frugal young Zula had given the contract to the lowest bidder. The foundation had stopped repairing them a few years ago. Only one still worked. Humans and humanoid robots generally used the stairs—the building was only six stories high, and humans who couldn’t manage the climb under their own power could simply be carried. With a little help from Fronk, now at her elbow in wedding-usher mode, she made it to the top floor and entered the offices of the Forthrast Family Foundation, where she found two surprises waiting for her.

One of them was Corvallis Kawasaki. His presence in the office wasn’t unusual, but today was the first time he had shown his face since the death of his wife of thirty-eight years, Maeve Braden-Kawasaki. This had occurred three weeks ago as the result of a sudden cardiac event—some kind of arrhythmia, it seemed. She had of course been scanned and uploaded. C-plus had been going through the normal evolutions of grieving, which nowadays were torqued heavily out of their traditional shape by the awareness that the departed was, in some sense, alive and well—and, if Maeve’s preparations had actually worked, flying around Bitworld on a pair of wings.

So it was a pleasant, if poignant, surprise to see him at the table in the main conference room.