Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,178

been running.”

“Take it away,” Zula said.

The Landform faded. One of El’s techies, physically in the room, gestured in the air and brought into being an abstraction: a constellation of colored objects hovering in the space above the table. Thousands of small white blobs, like aspirin tablets, were crowded into the lowest few inches of the display, just above the surface of the table. These were webbed together by countless gossamer strands. Above them floated perhaps two dozen larger balls, color-coded according to a scheme El hadn’t explained yet. Surmounting the whole thing was a big yellow sphere about the size of a grapefruit. Radiating down from it were many fine golden rays linking it to some of the big objects hovering just below it.

“We can’t eavesdrop on the actual content of messages being exchanged between processes,” El said, “but we can get a general idea of which talks to which. What you’re looking at is the output of a network analysis system. It shows who talks to who, and how often. And some trends are obvious.”

“Forgive a basic question,” Corvallis said, “but each of these objects represents a different process? A soul, as it were?”

“Yes, and the lines drawn between them show what we believe to be communication.”

“Why are some so much larger than others?”

“Their size is proportional to how many resources they use—how much memory, how much processing power.”

“Okay. So, clearly, we have a whole lot of little tiny ones that talk to each other all the time,” Corvallis said, skating his hands through the lower stratum, which looked like aspirin tablets trapped in a cobweb.

“Yes. The vast majority of individual processes fit that profile. But above it you see the fat cats. The resource hogs. The huge yellow one on top is the first Process that Sophia spawned back at Princeton.”

“Dodge’s Brain,” Zula said.

“Yes—though its connectome has changed so much since then that, for all we know, it might have very little in common with Dodge at this point.”

“But it built the park, with the tower . . . ,” Zula pointed out, then shook her head impatiently. “Sorry. Go on.”

“In between you’ve got the Pantheon.”

“Come again?”

“That is my term for a group of twenty or so processes that impose a disproportionate load on the system—they consume a lot of resources. Most of the nine MFN processes are there, including the one simulating Verna Braden’s connectome, which is second only to Dodge’s Brain. They, and some of the Ephrata Eleven, got an early start. They grew rapidly.”

“Pluto?”

“The big purple one,” El said. “And, to be fair, a few of mine are in there too.”

“Of yours!?”

“You know what I mean. Clients of my organization, scanned using my devices, uploaded through my network.”

Zula got up and walked around the table, viewing the display from different angles. “If this is correct, I’m seeing that Dodge talks to Verna, to Pluto, to the other members of what you’re calling the Pantheon. But he almost never talks to the little guys.”

“The little guys talk to each other a lot,” Corvallis observed, “and they have some contact with members of the Pantheon.”

“Some more than others,” Jake observed. “Verna’s not talking to the little guys at all but some of the other angels have lots of contact.”

“Angels?” El asked sharply.

Jake smiled. “My preferred term for what you are calling members of the Pantheon.”

Zula was holding out one hand toward Jake, as if holding him back—beseeching him not to plunge into a debate about angels vs. gods. But El broke in: “Zula, I notice you’re standing pretty close to the green shape now.”

“The one you identify with Verna, if I’m not mistaken,” Zula said, nodding. “What about it?”

“Take a close look and let me know what you see.”

Zula leaned in close and wrinkled her nose. “Around Verna I can see a bunch of tiny little motes. Just pinpricks of green. Like fruit flies hovering around a watermelon. Faint lines connecting them to the Verna blob. What do those represent?”

“I don’t know,” El said, “and that is what concerns me. Actually it’s one of many things about the overall situation that is concerning. But this is new, and strictly a Verna-related phenomenon.”

“Verna was a hacker. Underappreciated. Never really got her feet under her before the cancer took over her life. Maybe she’s up to her old tricks,” Corvallis said.

“Meaning what?” Jake asked.

“Those tiny motes—the fruit flies—are independent processes that have been spawned recently,” El said. “Mind you, they are in no way as complex, or as capable,