Fortuitously, they were joined a moment later by a woman who introduced herself as the hospital’s general counsel. It was easy enough to infer that she’d been alerted to the presence of a patient’s attorney in the ICU department and was coming down to find out what was up. That the patient was a famous billionaire and the lawyer a senior partner at Argenbright Vail had presumably put some spring in her step. She was younger and less heavily groomed than might be expected; a Catholic feminist soccer mom with a Brown degree, according to the Miasma. Esme Hurlbut, believe it or not. Enjoyed knitting and free climbing. A few minutes were lost in making introductions and bringing Esme up to speed; Dr. Trinh repeated what the others already knew of Dodge’s condition. Corvallis spent the time rifling the Miasma for more information about Ephrata Cryonics Inc.

When the conversation resumed, he was in a position to say more: “Ephrata took in a bunch of money from people like Dodge. They froze a few bodies almost immediately—which probably seemed like progress at the time—but it forced them to keep the freezers running forever after that. They got hit with a lawsuit from some pissed-off Eutropians that depleted their reserves. They never really hit their targets financially. The bottom fell out after the dot-com crash. In 2003 they did a reorg. Their first step was to cut the heads off and burn the bodies.”

“I’m sorry, could you say that again?” Stan asked.

Esme Hurlbut, who had clearly been apprehensive when she had entered the room, was now more fascinated.

“They had eleven bodies in cryostorage at that point,” Corvallis said, flicking his gaze down at his laptop to verify the stats. “The contract that all eleven of those people had signed, while they were alive, when they gave Ephrata Cryonics their money, contained an out. It said that the remains were to be preserved in cryogenic storage—or through whatever means, in the judgment of Ephrata Cryonics, were best suited to the desired goal of eventually bringing the deceased back to life.”

Esme raised her hand like the smart girl in the front row. “Judgment? Or sole judgment?” she asked.

“Sole judgment,” Corvallis answered after scanning the words on his screen. In his peripheral vision he saw Esme and Stan exchanging a fraught glance.

“And based on that,” Corvallis continued, “the argument that Ephrata Cryonics now made was that the only thing that mattered was the head. Or, when you get right down to it, the brain. The body was basically disposable. Any future society that had enough technology to bring a frozen brain back to full conscious functioning would be able to grow a new body from DNA. So, to save money, Ephrata Cryonics decapitated the eleven frozen bodies and packed the heads into a much smaller freezer.”