Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,205

tightly linked. The system’s threatening to burn itself out.”

“You know my opinion on this,” Corvallis said. “It’s degenerate activity. A lot of these things have just gotten caught up in infinite loops. Race conditions. There’s no meaningful computation happening in the Wad.”

“But it’s just your opinion,” Marcus reminded him. “Imagine you’re in front of a jury in a civil case, trying to get them to believe that. You need to be able to say with a straight face that all of the computation associated with Dodge and the Pantheon processes is legit, but everything in the Wad is ‘degenerate.’”

Sophia was nodding her head. “It’d be a different story if we actually knew what those processes were thinking. But all we have to go on is traffic analysis and burn rate.”

“I disagree,” Corvallis said. “We have plenty of track record indicating that the result of the Pantheon’s computation is the Landform. What’s the result of all the computation in the Wad? Nothing that we can discern.”

“Again. Jury,” Marcus said.

“We can’t enter Critique of Pure Reason into evidence?” Maeve cracked.

“The fact is,” Marcus said, “that the Wad plays directly into El’s hands by creating a shortage of computational power that never existed before. And he can use that shortage as leverage against us. What could be more reasonable sounding than to say it’s time to impose some limits?”

“It didn’t take him all morning just to say that,” Zula pointed out.

“Everything else is just Sinjin sending the message that if we don’t agree to El’s request he can make an amount of trouble for us that’s big enough that it’ll be easier to just change our minds.”

Food was served, and conversation stopped for a while as all reached into the middle of the table to tear the injera bread and pinch up mouthfuls of spicy food. Once Maeve had taken the edge off of her hunger, though, she wiped her hands on a napkin and spoke: “I draw the line at giving El, or anyone, the power to terminate a process. I’ve already lost my sister once. If the process we’ve named Verna is in any sense Verna, then I want her protected. And the same goes for any little nieces and nephews.”

The others took a minute or so to process that. Verna, who was Maeve’s only sibling, had died childless. Corvallis was an only child. It was an impossibility for Maeve to have any nieces or nephews. One by one, the others got puzzled looks on their faces until Corvallis turned to her and said, “You might want to unpack that for them, sweetheart.”

“We’re seeing evidence that a new process is being assembled. Connected with Verna.”

“That’s been going on for a while now, right?” Marcus asked. “That’s what makes the behavior of Verna different from all the others: she has figured out how to spawn processes that run on their own.”

Maeve held her thumb and index finger barely apart. “Wee ones. Little ‘hello world’ contraptions that run on their own. They don’t do much. Don’t consume a lot of resources.”

“They all get billed to our accounts,” Corvallis added, “so we can track them. They are too tiny to matter.”

“Until now,” Maeve said. “Now Verna’s working on spawning two big ones.” She looked to Corvallis, who nodded in confirmation. “The new process looks to be on a similar scale to a scanned human connectome. It’s been a-building for a few months.”

Marcus nodded, getting it. “So that’s what you meant when you were talking about nieces and nephews.”

“Maybe that’s another reason El’s gotten so cranky,” Zula said. “If our processes figure out how to make new copies of themselves, it could go viral in a hurry, and crowd out his.”

Marcus’s watch had hummed on his wrist a minute ago, and he’d been looking at some new information in his wearable—this was obvious from the fact that he’d been staring at a blank spot on the wall for no discernible reason. He wiped his hand on a napkin and pushed the device up onto his forehead. “He’s about to get a whole lot crankier,” Marcus announced.

“What happened?” Zula asked. “What did you just learn?” She’d been getting notifications too but ignored them.

Marcus shook his head. His expression was saying, Who the hell knows? He announced, “The Wad just fell over.”

“Fell over?” Maeve asked sharply.

“Crashed. The amount of computational activity going on in the Wad suddenly dropped by three orders of magnitude. And that green thing above the Town Square? It’s gone. Town Square’s back to