“Umm, sorry. There’s a weird connection. Pardon the pun.”

“Connection to what?” Esme asked. Her primary reason for remaining in the room had long since become sheer intellectual curiosity.

“I should explain,” Corvallis said, “that I work for—I am the CTO of—a cloud computing company here in Seattle. And one of our clients is—well—”

“Don’t tell me,” Zula said. “Ephrata Life Sciences and Health.”

“Not quite. But Elmo Shepherd has a stable of companies that he runs out of the Presidio. Some for profit. Others are more like think tanks, research institutes, and the like. He’s really interested in the Singularity, which is—”

“I know what it is,” Zula said.

“I don’t. Would you indulge me?” Esme said. She had, in some nonverbal way, bonded with Zula.

Zula nodded and said, “It’s a kind of belief system that in the future we are going to upload our brains into computers and live forever digitally.”

“How do you get ‘Singularity’ out of that?”

“You add in Moore’s Law,” Corvallis said.

“That’s the one that says computers keep getting faster?”

“Exponentially. Extrapolate it out, and it suggests that the souls that have been uploaded to silicon will become super fast, super powerful, and render living, biological brains irrelevant.”

“I still don’t see how ‘Singularity’ describes that—isn’t that a word for a black hole?”

“It’ll happen in a flash, is the idea,” Zula explained.

“And El Shepherd believes in this,” Esme said.

Stan was just sitting there with his hands cupped around his eyes. When is this day going to stop getting weirder?

“Some of his other companies exist to support research on different aspects of phenomena relating to the Singularity. One of those is the connectome of the brain. There’s a whole stable of them. Look, I’m on thin ice here because I can’t breach the confidentiality of Nubilant’s relationship with its customers.”

“But it’s obvious,” Stan said, “from the look on your face that El Shepherd is storing the connectomes of the Ephrata Eleven on your company’s servers.”

“If you haven’t gotten sick of everything being ironic yet,” Corvallis said, “you might enjoy knowing that our biggest server farm is out in eastern Washington State. Not far from Ephrata.”

“Where power is cheap, and cooling water is plentiful,” Zula said. She had majored in geology.

“I feel like I’m losing the thread of this conversation,” Esme admitted.

“This is either really good or really bad, in terms of my ability to be useful,” Corvallis said. “I’ll ask around and see if I can get through to some of Elmo Shepherd’s people in the Presidio.”

“Or El himself,” Stan said. “This warrants his attention, I think.”

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

The conversation petered out as it became clear to them that they were not going to pull the plug on Dodge right away. Dr. Trinh left the room to attend to patients who weren’t beyond helping. Esme distributed business cards and swapped cell phone numbers, then excused herself. Other patients’ families needed to use the room and so Stan, Zula, and Corvallis shifted to the hospital cafeteria. From there they went their separate ways: Stan to his office to bone up on the documents, Zula to her home, Corvallis to his office.