Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,207

different buckets. One large bucket was devoted to quarantining all notifications relating to the complex of lawsuits recently generated by Sinjin Kerr and his minions at the behest of Elmo Shepherd. Those were a strange blend of very boring and very stressful. Sophia had an understanding with the Forthrast attorneys that she could ignore all of them and they would notify her when her attention was really needed.

Much more interesting were the contents of the Enoch Root bucket, which was brimming over with discussion of a talk he had given earlier today on the subject of amortality. Not satisfied with giving it only one clever title, he had titled it “Amortality; or, Death after Death.”

His recent work on this topic had come about in the wake of a weird interaction, some months ago, between the Dodge Process and another soul, which had seemingly led to the latter’s being completely annihilated. In the LVU they could watch replays of the event, albeit in grainy, herky-jerky style and with no sound. It took place in the “Town Square” and started with what looked like an altercation between a member of the Pantheon and a town dweller. The latter was armed with some manner of tool or weapon, which he used to strike the former and inflict damage. Dodge then showed up and did something very computationally expensive, at the end of which the assailant no longer existed.

Of course, the system administrators had a backup copy of his data. Certain token holders had the privileges needed to reboot the terminated process. But first some questions needed to be answered, and, as one of those tohos, Sophia needed to pay attention to them.

For they had never considered, when they had set it all up, that souls would die. Much less that they would commit murder.

(That was not quite the right way to put it, since there were so many things they had not considered—such a vast scope of unintended consequences. But little point in fretting about that. This was how things got started now. You either paused to consult all of the stakeholders and think through all of the possible consequences—in which case you’d certainly end up doing nothing at all, since complex systems had consequences that were infinite and imponderable—or you just went for it and pressed the Enter key.)

(Also because “soul” was so fraught with unwanted philosophical and religious baggage. But the reality was that when scanned brains were booted up as new processes, with the ability to draw upon computing resources and to interact with the other processes, they took on seemingly personlike attributes: they existed in one place, not all places; they moved about in a way that seemed physical; and they dealt with other processes in a way that seemed social. And you could try to dodge around the hard questions by sticking to neutral terminology like “process.” But they weren’t selling the service to their customers by offering to spawn processes. Every customer who paid into the plan while alive, and who had their remains scanned after their death, was doing so in the belief that the resulting process was in some sense a continuation of their existence in a sort of afterlife. No amount of dancing around could really dodge the fact that what was really being talked about here was the soul. And part of the deal—the expectation—was to keep it going indefinitely.)

It was clear that there were processes that had been spawned in the system that had taken root, grown, thrived, done things, related to others of their kind, dug holes, chopped down trees, built houses, and spanned time, and then, for one reason or another (being murdered by Dodge was only one example), ceased. You never wanted to say “ceased to exist” because the data were always squirreled away somewhere. But the process itself stopped changing and surrendered its resources to the cloud. And that included the resources needed to maintain a virtual body.

This raised a number of issues that in the flesh-and-blood world of Meatspace were categorized as “life and death” but in the business world fell under the heading of customer service. If a service provider had extracted money from a customer by promising them that they would live forever (perhaps not in so many words—but this was what most customers understood and assumed); waited for them to die; scanned their remains, and in so doing vaporized them; uploaded the scan to the cloud; brought it to a kind of life; given