What he found was neither. The health care directive was curiously verbose. And it was a bit odd from a typographical standpoint. The introductory paragraph and some of the connective tissue was in the Palatino that was standard at Argenbright Vail. But big slabs of it were in Monaco, a sans-serif typeface that tended to be used by nerds to display computer code in terminal windows. This was, in other words, a document that had been assembled largely by copying and pasting material from something else—something that looked like it had been downloaded from the Internet back in the pre-web days. Probably straight text, as opposed to a word processing document. The quotation marks and other punctuation suggested that it had originally been composed in the nerd-friendly text processing program Emacs. No effort had been made by Stan, or whoever had drawn this thing up, to “select all” and tidy up the formatting.
Those sections of the document contained instructions. Detailed instructions. Weird ones. Technically precise instructions on how to kill Dodge in a controlled manner, should he ever wind up on a ventilator. The machine was not just supposed to be disconnected. Instead it was to be left on while Dodge’s body was infused with a certain mixture of drugs and his core temperature was dropped using an ice bath. Only then was the ventilator to be removed. And then, at the moment that Dodge stopped being a living person at death’s door and became legally dead, the reader was urged to set aside the health care directive and pick up its companion document, the disposition of remains. And this had exactly the same typographical peculiarities. It was a seamless continuation of the protocol begun in the health care directive. Once the ventilator had been disconnected, Dodge’s body was supposed to be chilled down as quickly as possible with an ice-water IV, bath, and enema. Only then was it acceptable to move “the remains,” and this was supposed to happen in a meticulously described way, taking the corpse directly to a particular facility in the high desert outside of Ephrata, Washington, where it was to be kept cryogenically preserved.
The nerd in Corvallis was fascinated by the level of technical detail embodied in these documents, and wanted to have a conversation with whatever team of doctors and neuroscientists had toiled over them. And the socially awkward geek was relieved, in a way, to have something to take his mind off of what was happening around him. As long as he was hunched over these protocols he was absolved of responsibilities on the emotional front. But there was a third aspect of his personality that slowly came to the fore, and wrestled the steering wheel, as it were, away from the others. That was the CTO, the responsible business executive who was at least passingly familiar with the world of lawyers. And the CTO was curious about the typography thing. Argenbright Vail was a sophisticated tech law firm. Richard Forthrast was one of their most important clients. Many thousands of dollars must have been spent poring over these documents before they had been sent to Dodge for his signature. To set them all in Palatino and clean up the formatting would have been the work of a few moments for an intern. Leaving them in this state, he suspected, had been a deliberate choice. A way for Argenbright Vail to put the protocol in scare quotes. To make it clear, to any future reader, that they had just been following instructions. Dodge’s instructions, presumably.
Corvallis had an “oh shit” moment then. A clear memory and an understanding. He checked the signature date on the documents. They were nine years old. Richard had caused them to be drawn up when he had become wealthy. He had signed them, filed them away, and forgotten about them. He was the last man in the world who would have bothered to update and maintain his will.
“Is he wearing a bracelet?” Corvallis asked Zula during a rare moment when she wasn’t on the phone to Iowa.
“A what?” she asked, not certain she’d quite heard him correctly. It was a weird question; Dodge was about as likely to wear a bishop’s miter as a bracelet.
“I mean a medical alert kind of bracelet. You know, like people wear if they have drug allergies or something.”
“For the doctor to read in the ER if you’re found unconscious.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I don’t think so. Want me to go check?”
“Hang on,” Corvallis said, “I think I can spare you the trouble.” He had brought up the photo application on his laptop. He had thousands of pictures archived on this thing. Organizing them into albums was one of those tasks he never seemed to have time for. But the application did have a built-in ability to recognize faces, and automatically to produce collections of pictures that included a particular face. During stretches of bored downtime on airplanes, Corvallis had taught it to recognize a few faces that were important to him, including that of Richard Forthrast. He clicked on “Dodge” in the interface. The application cogitated for a few moments and then populated the window with thumbnails of pictures featuring Dodge, or people who, according to its algorithm, resembled him. With another click Corvallis sorted them according to date, then began to page through them from the beginning. His earliest personal photograph of Dodge was from about eight years ago, but he had a few older photos, taken before he had even met the man, that had found their way onto his drive as the result of being attached to emails or what have you. Some of these showed a very young man: the long-haired 1970s draft-dodging edition of Richard Forthrast, hanging out in wild places along the Idaho–British Columbia border, and depicted in the flamboyant hues of scanned Kodachrome. No bracelets for him. Hitting the right-arrow key, he worked up through the years until he stumbled into a series of pictures taken around the time of Corporation 9592’s initial public offering. In one of those, Dodge was gripping a magnum of champagne in both hands, bracing it against his penis, holding a thumb over the mouth of the bottle to make it spray foam at Pluto. The photo was harshly lit by a flash and it showed both of his arms clearly. On his left wrist, competing for space with a cheap digital wristwatch, was a medical alert bracelet: a metal plaque about the size of a large postage stamp, held on with a chain, blazoned with a red caduceus, otherwise covered with print too fine to read. Way more metallic real estate than what would have been needed for “I am allergic to penicillin.”
Corvallis didn’t need to read it because he knew exactly what it was. Just to be sure, he checked the date of the photo and verified that it had been taken within a couple of months of the signing of the will.