Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,208

it qualia, experiences, a social life, memories, all of the other things that souls in Meatspace had; then allowed that to be extinguished for whatever reason, was the service provider then not guilty of letting its customers down? Friends and loved ones of the dead would notice that they were now dead again and make a stink about it and demand satisfaction. They might take their business and entrust their brains and souls to competitors who claimed they had eradicated the death bug from their systems.

In the old world, death had led to endless philosophical ruminations and spawned religions, but in Bitworld it led to one-star ratings from furious bereaved and threats of class-action lawsuits.

Comp sci Ph.D.s and, yes, philosophers and theologians had now gathered together at ACTANSS 5 to talk about the nature of the problem. Today Enoch Root had taken it upon himself to stake out a position on all of this. He was trying to get out ahead of people who were saying, “Fortunately there’s an easy solution to this—failed processes can simply be rebooted!” He wanted to bring to their attention certain complications that were perplexing, verging on disastrous. Given the reverence in which he was increasingly held, both in South Lake Union and Zelrijk-Aalberg, his was now the dominant, or at least the default, position—the one that all of the competing service providers might end up writing into their EULAs. It was big and complicated but it was summarized under the term “amortality.”

“If a tree falls on a forester, does it hurt?” had been the opening line of his talk today. The answer was “Yes, because otherwise the system falls apart.”

The Dodge Process, for whatever reason, had covered the Landform with trees. More recently arrived souls had begun chopping them down and using them for things such as shelter. Tree pieces were useless—you couldn’t make houses of them—unless they had physical properties such as weight, hardness, and stiffness. So far so good. But if a tree happened to fall on a person, it couldn’t suddenly turn into a pillow. Or rather it could—you could do anything with a computer program, after all—but what kind of a world was that, really? Our brains—be they flesh-and-blood Meatspace brains or their carefully husbanded digital simulations in Bitworld—weren’t hooked up to make sense of a universe where trees turned into pillows the moment they became dangerous. Once you made a special carve-out for falling trees, there was no end to it; very soon the whole universe stopped making sense, or “decohered.”

There was only one way out of it, and that was amortality. Not immortality—because when a tree fell on a forester, that forester had to get hurt, and maybe to die. But “to die” here did not mean to be extirpated forever. The form—the body—in which the soul had been clothing itself up until the moment when the tree hit it, that had to take damage and the damage had to have real consequences. If it was severe enough, then it was best for the soul in question to abandon that body and get a new one.

Simple enough in theory. There was—as always—a catch, which was that you couldn’t just boot up a fresh copy of the original scan from scratch. Or even of the virtual body at the moment the tree hit it. The techno-philosophical arguments were hyperarcane, but a straightforward analogy familiar to every consumer who had ever had to reboot an out-of-whack device was that these things were unfathomably complicated, with a million subsystems that had to be interconnected just so. If only one of those interconnections was wrong, the whole thing didn’t work. In theory, anything could be debugged and patched up, but in practice it was quicker and gave better results if you just shut the whole thing down and started again from a clean slate.

And Enoch wasn’t pretending he had all of the answers to these questions. That wasn’t the point of his talk. The point was to ask them.

A few people Sophia knew and liked were lounging around in the big hot tub out on the deck, so, after she had got her fill of amortality, she shut down the treadmill, pulled off her wearable, poked it into an external pocket of Daisy, and carried it out and set it on a nearby shelving unit used to store terry-cloth bathrobes. She peeled off her clothes and enjoyed a dip for fifteen minutes or so, turning down the offer of a hit on