because he never chose to pull the plug on me.” Adam hadn’t even known at the time that that was possible, but in retrospect he was glad no one had told him. It might have made those bedside chats a little tense.
“Because …?” Gerald demanded. When Adam didn’t reply immediately, Gerald laughed. “Or is the reason he decided you were worth the trouble part of the thirty percent of his mind that you don’t have?”
“It could well be,” Adam conceded, trying to make that sound like a perfectly satisfactory outcome. A joke about the studios’ bots only achieving ten percent of the same goal and still earning a tidy income got censored halfway to his lips; the last thing he wanted to do was invite the old man’s relatives to view him in the same light as that cynical act of shallow mimicry.
“So you don’t know why he didn’t care that you don’t know whatever it is that you don’t know? Very fucking Kafka.”
“I think he would have preferred ‘very fucking Heller’ … but who am I to say?”
“Next week’s trash, that’s what you are.” Gerald stepped back, looking pleased with himself. “Next week’s fodder for the wrecking yard.”
The car pulled up beside Adam and the door slid open. “Is that your grandma come to take you home?” Gerald taunted him. “Or maybe your retarded cousin?”
“Enjoy the wake,” Adam replied. He tapped his skull. “I promise, the old man will be thinking of you.”
3.
Adam had a conference call with the lawyers. “How do we stand?” he asked.
“The family’s going to contest the will,” Gina replied.
“On what grounds?”
“That the trustees, and the beneficiaries of the trust, misled and defrauded Mr. Morris.”
“They’re saying I misled him somehow?”
“No,” Corbin interjected. “US law doesn’t recognize you as a person. You can’t be sued, as such, but other entities you depend on certainly can be.”
“Right.” Adam had known as much, but in his mind he kept glossing over the elaborate legal constructs that sustained his delusions of autonomy. On a purely practical level, there was money in three accounts that he had no trouble accessing—but then, the same was probably true of any number of stock-trading algorithms, and that didn’t make them the masters of their own fate. “So who exactly is accused of fraud?”
“Our firm,” Gina replied. “Various officers of the corporations we created to fulfill Mr. Morris’s instructions. Loadstone, for making false claims that led to the original purchase of their technology, and for ongoing fraud in relation to the services promised in their maintenance contract.”
“I’m very happy with the maintenance contract!” When Adam had complained that one of his earlobes had gone numb, Sandra had come to his home and fixed the problem on the same day he called.
“That’s not the point,” Corbin said impatiently. Adam was forgetting his place again: Jurisprudentially, his happiness cut no ice.
“So what happens next?”
“The first hearings are still seven months away,” Gina explained. “We were expecting this, and we’ll have plenty of time to prepare. We’ll aim for an early dismissal, of course, but we can’t promise anything.”
“No.” Adam hesitated. “But it’s not just the house they could take? The Estonian accounts … ?”
Gina said, “Opening those accounts under your digital residency makes some things easier, but it doesn’t put the money out of reach of the courts.”
“Right.”
When they hung up, Adam paced the office. Could it really be so hard to defend the old man’s will? He wasn’t even sure what disincentives were in place to stop the lawyers from drawing out proceedings like this for as long as they wished. Maybe a director of one of the entities he depended on was both empowered and duty bound to rein them in if they were behaving with conspicuous profligacy? But Adam himself couldn’t sack them, or compel them to follow his instructions, just because Estonia had been nice enough to classify him as a person for certain limited purposes.
The old man had believed he was setting him up in style, but all the machinery that was meant to support him just made him feel trapped. What if he gave up the house and walked away? If he cashed in his dollar and euro accounts for some mixture of blockchain currencies before the courts swept in and froze his funds, that might be easier to protect and enjoy without the benefits of a Social Security number, a birth certificate, or a passport. But those currencies were all insanely volatile, and trying to hedge them against each other was like trying to save yourself in a skydiving accident by clutching your own feet.
He couldn’t leave the country by any lawful means without deactivating his body so it could be sent as freight. Loadstone had promised to facilitate any trips he wished to make to any of the thirty-nine jurisdictions where he could walk the streets unchaperoned, as proud and free as the pizza bots that had blazed the trail, but the idea of returning to the company’s servers, or even being halted and left in limbo for the duration of the flight, filled him with dread.
For now, it seemed that he was stuck in the Valley. All he could do was find a way to make the best of it.
4.
Sitting on two upturned wooden crates in an alley behind the nightclub, they could still hear the pounding bass line of the music escaping through the walls, but at least it was possible to hold a conversation here.
Carlos sounded like the loneliest person Adam had ever met. Did he tell everyone so much, so soon? Adam wanted to believe that he didn’t, and that something in his own demeanor had inspired this beautiful man to confide in him.
Carlos had been in the country for twelve years, but he was still struggling to support his sister in El Salvador. She’d raised him after their parents died—his father
