Sinjin let him work it out on his own for a bit, then, in a gentle tone that barely rose above the lapping of the waves on the boat’s hull, said, “Elmo Shepherd releases a statement a week after Moab in which he fesses up. Pulls back the veil. Maybe plays some behind-the-scenes video showing how the hoax was staged—a blooper reel of the actors, some ‘making of’ footage about burn makeup and CGI mushroom clouds. ‘All this was done on a one-million-dollar budget,’ he says, and gives a sermon about how if he can get you to believe Moab was nuked by spending a million bucks, just imagine what the Russians and the big Internet companies are doing to your mind every day with much larger budgets. Followed by a pitch for a cryptographically secure successor to the Internet.”
“Yeah,” Corvallis said. “That’s pretty much what I had in mind in the way of an other shoe.”
“That video was actually made,” Sinjin said.
“No shit!?”
“I kid you not. I was there, Corvallis. I vetted the script and sat off camera while he read it off the teleprompter. That whole video was in the can, ready to go, before the exploit was launched.”
“But he changed his mind.”
“By degrees.”
“What?”
“El changed his mind by degrees, over a period of weeks. He was holed up in Z-A to avoid any possible issues around extradition.”
As Corvallis knew, Z-A was Zelrijk-Aalberg, a Flemish nanostate and tax haven where El had been spending most of his time the last few years.
“So there was a degree of insulation from legal consequences—but even so he was disconcerted by how effective it had been. By the fact that people died.”
“I can see how that would give you pause,” Corvallis said, a bit sarcastically.
Sinjin raised his eyes studiously and declined to rise to the bait. “So the airing of the video was delayed, and delayed again, as he pondered his next move. ENSU happened and seemed to take the wind out of his sails. He wasn’t expecting that.”
“It did a lot of his work for him,” Corvallis said, nodding. “Made the same point.”
“Inasmuch as ENSU succeeded, it made Moab seem unnecessary. Cack-handed. Inasmuch as ENSU failed, it made him wonder whether there was any real future in his own visions for a secure Internet.”
“When you say ENSU failed, you’re referring to the fact that—”
“That billions of people went on believing everything they saw on the Internet in spite of it.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Corvallis said.
“Then you must feel a little of what Elmo Shepherd felt,” Sinjin said.
“Why fight it?”
Sinjin nodded. “What’s the point? The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There’s no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool’s errand.”
“Seems kind of bleak. There are things you could do in the way of education—”
“Not if your primary focus is on preparing for the next world.”
“You mean, what happens after death.”
Sinjin nodded.
“I’ve seen El on social media, suggesting that Moab actually was nuked. Like, openly pandering to the people who still believe that,” Corvallis said. “I don’t see how that helps. That’s crazy.”
“Exactly!” Sinjin said, brightening. “This brings us back to the main thread of this conversation.”
“Which is?” Corvallis asked, throwing up his hands in bewilderment.
“El’s going crazy.”
Corvallis turned to look Sinjin in the eye. Sinjin wasn’t joking.
“Elmo Shepherd suffers—has always suffered—from an incurable genetic disorder. I’ll tell you the medical name later and you can Google it if you want to know the gory details. It runs in his family. He’s been aware of it since he was in college. One of its inevitable results is a degeneration of the brain that typically begins when the sufferer is in his forties or fifties. Mr. Shepherd is fifty-two.”
“Okay,” Corvallis said, after a pause to consider this news. “I see what you mean about the main line of the conversation. Everything he’s done with Ephrata Life Sciences, the preservation and scanning of brains—it all relates to this.”
“We are all mortal,” Sinjin said grandly, “and we differ only in the extent to which we ignore that fact. Mr. Shepherd was never granted the luxury of being able to ignore it and so he has prepared for it with greater forethought than most.”
“How does Moab fit in?”
“I wish I knew,” Sinjin sighed. “In addition to the things you and I talk about—the brain stuff—there is a vast scope of other activity. He compartmentalizes well, so I don’t always know of these projects until he chooses to make me aware of them. But in the last year or so I have become conscious of an acceleration.”
“You mean, he’s getting sick faster, or kicking these projects up into high gear?”
“Both. And since ‘getting sick’ here is a euphemism for going crazy, well, you can probably see that I have a quite interesting job. When one of his fascinating projects comes to light, as it does from time to time, I honestly can’t say whether Mr. Shepherd is pursuing some profound strategy or succumbing to his disease.” Sinjin paused for a few moments—a rare occasion in which it seemed he was groping for words. “You should understand that El thinks highly of you and of Zula Forthrast. In my judgment, he would not knowingly take actions that were in any way injurious to either of you.”
“‘Knowingly’ being the key word in that sentence,” Corvallis said.
“Indeed, Corvallis, just as the existence of your beautiful young family is an unpredictable side effect of one of my client’s more imaginative projects, there’s no telling what the future may hold as Mr. Shepherd’s disease progresses toward its inevitable conclusion and his affairs pass into the management not just of me, but of others he has decided to entrust with this or that task. Until he changes his mind, however, I’m your man when it comes to all things brain related.”
“When does he want to do it?” Corvallis asked.
Sinjin said nothing for a while. He pretended to pay attention to some important nearby boat traffic.
“That’s his dilemma, isn’t it?” Corvallis went on. “On the one hand, he should wait until the technology is better proven. On the other, his brain is degenerating, and he knows it. What’s the point in perfectly preserving a brain that has gone to pieces?”
“It’s a question we could all ask ourselves,” Sinjin said. “He just has to ask it every minute of every day.”
Seventeen years after Richard Forthrast’s death
The ancestral home of the Forthrasts was situated in the northwestern quadrant of Iowa: a two-hundred-mile-wide quadrangle defined by Interstates 80 and 90 to the south and north, and 29 and 35 to the west and east. It was now being displayed in