said, “why would I even—”
“Speaking as one technically sophisticated man to another,” El said, “allow me to assure you that no such alternative exists. ELSH is second to none in this field. And I intend to be very active in stating our case. Making sure that there are no misunderstandings. Protecting our brand.”
“I wish you all the best of luck with your brand,” Corvallis said, sliding out of the booth, reaching out, almost as an afterthought, to throw an arm over Dodge’s messenger bag and the sack full of his effects. He turned without shaking El Shepherd’s hand and stalked away. His exit route took him right along the line of bar stools. Four of these were supporting humans. For midday drinkers, they seemed curiously fit. Maybe it was because they were all drinking water. They raised their heads and tracked him in their peripheral vision. One then glanced back at El. “It’s okay,” El called, “let him go.”
The sign hanging in the front door said OPEN to Corvallis, which meant that it showed as CLOSED to people on the sidewalk.
So, El had rented out the whole bar just for this conversation, and staffed it with his private security detail.
Let him go. Those were the words that stuck with Corvallis as he strode to his car. Was it a serious possibility that they wouldn’t? Were they thinking of detaining him?
It was unlikely, Corvallis decided, as he shifted his car into gear and began heading north on Airport Way. They might have been goons, but they were probably professional goons. They had no legal power to detain anyone, and they knew it. Inwardly, they had to be thinking about what a dickhead their boss was to even say something like that.
Or maybe he was just trying to settle himself down by telling a comforting story.
He had intended to go straight to the hotel to drop off Dodge’s things, but Zula waved him off via text message, letting him know that they were going to be busy with “the transfer” for a couple of hours. Then she added another message: C U @ Richard’s in a couple hours.
So. No vent farm for Dodge. He was going to die in his own bed.
He pulled over into a legit parking space and texted Stan: Can El get a court order? Is that a real thing?
Then he dialed Ben Compton’s number. Of the game programmers who had defected from Corporation 9592 to the Waterhouse Brain Sciences Institute, Ben had been the first to go, and the ringleader. Later, some of them had drifted back to the world of conventional game programming, but Ben had stuck around.
“C-plus.” Ben’s voice was flat. He had, of course, heard the news. His voice was coming out of the car’s sound system, Bluetoothed to the phone.
“Ben. You know about it.”
“Yeah. Of all the fucking horrible things. I don’t know what to say. Almost didn’t come in to work today.”
“Maybe it’s good you did.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
“Reserve a conference room in half an hour.”
“Will attempt. Food?”
“Sure. I just had a really unsatisfactory lunch.”
“What’d you have?”
“Half of a beer.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad. Except for the half part.”
“It was more the company I was keeping.”
“Lawyers?”
On cue, Corvallis’s phone began vibrating down in the cupholder. He glanced at it. Stan was calling from his work number. “Gotta take this. See you in a few.”
He tapped the screen and switched over to Stan. Then he pulled out into a gap in traffic and began heading north toward downtown.
“You took El’s call,” Stan said. “I’d rather you hadn’t.”
“Hell, I sat across the table from him.”
“What!?”
“No shit. While we were talking in the hotel, he flew up from San Rafael. With his security detail in tow.”
“Jesus. And threatened to get a court order?”
“Yeah, is that even possible legally?”
“It’s rare. Rare enough that I’ll need to do some research,” Stan said. “But in principle, yeah. If the family is about to take some step that directly violates the health care directive, then the attorney general can take an interest in it, go to a judge, get a court order.”
“And then—?”
“And then if the family, or the doctors, violate the court order, they’re in contempt of court. So that is definitely a club he can wave over Zula and Alice. But I find it shocking he would even consider it.”
“He’s protecting his brand, he says.”
“Fine way to do it.”
The organization known to Alice as the Weird Cyber Bank had bought a great big old building from an old-school, non-weird, non-cyber bank that, around the turn of the millennium, had gone belly-up in a financial downturn and pursuant imbroglio.
During the 1930s, this building had probably been considered tall and futuristic. Now it was medium-sized and retro-quaint. The new owners had done all of the structural upgrades needed to keep it from collapsing into a huge mound of bricks during the next earthquake and then they had parceled it out into chunks for use by various of their subentities.
The Weird Cyber Bank per se—the for-profit financial institution that had been spawned out of an earlier startup called Epiphyte, and been joined by diverse more or less murky coconspirators—occupied the upper two-thirds of the building. The lower floors were for the Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation and its offshoot, WABSI.
It was on a steep downtown slope. On the downhill side you walked into the first floor, but on the uphill side, the pedestrian entrance was on the fourth story. In between was a wedge of space that was difficult for spatially challenged visitors and so the architects had made the probably wise decision to leave it mostly deconstructed, exposing all the massive new structural steelwork that was now knitting together the gingerbready brick-and-marble confection on top of it. There was security, befitting a bank with supposed connections to all kinds of mysterious and maybe nefarious clients. But the internal partitions were mostly glass, and so you could at least see all of the places you weren’t being allowed to go.
It was out of the question that Corvallis Kawasaki would just stroll in on short notice and sign the boilerplate NDA that the security guard would present to him. Therefore it went without saying that he was going to be issued a mere sticker, not a badge, and that he’d have to be accompanied by Ben at all times. They’d be restricted to visitor-friendly zones on the building’s lower levels. There were a few meeting rooms for just such occasions, but a glance through their glass walls proved that those were all spoken for at the moment. Therefore Ben and C-plus, having nowhere else to go, began to wander through a permanent museum exhibit that occupied the interior of the first three stories.
This looked expensive. It had not just been thrown together by interns. One sensed that serious people had come over from London and worked on it for years. It was intended to be here for a long time. Wordy plaques, etched in mysterious corrosion-proof metal, explained deep background that struck C-plus as very interesting; he’d have to come back later and actually read them. But the quick visual takeaway, absorbed by some background process in his brain as he ambled around and made small talk with Ben, was that the deep history of this institution reached all the way back to some era of history when men wore large periwigs—not