Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,229

and Dragons types had, decades earlier, culturally appropriated from Polynesian religion. In some role-playing games, mana was a kind of magical fuel that characters accumulated, stored, and then burned when they performed magical spells. In its new usage, it referred to all of the computational infrastructure needed to make Bitworld run: the CPUs, which nowadays were all quantum devices; the memory storage systems; the networking gear that sent messages back and forth between various subprocesses; and all of the electrical generating equipment and cooling gear needed to keep that stuff running. The more of that that came online, the faster and better Bitworld ran. Investments that they’d made years ago began to pay off. The amount of mana climbed at a rate that would have seemed impossible a few years ago. It easily outpaced the rate at which people were dying, and being scanned, in Meatspace.

Accordingly, the Time Slip Ratio sped up. That was a way of saying that the simulation was running more rapidly than real time. Years, as perceived and counted by the dead, were passing faster in Bitworld than they were for the living in Meatspace.

Sophia, the Pantheon, and the Dodge Process abandoned Town. For that matter, they abandoned the entire Landform. They began creating a new place altogether. They cloaked it with some kind of jamming algorithm that prevented the Landform Visualization Utility from working there. So it wasn’t clear what was happening, exactly. Sometimes they came back in smaller or larger groups to the Landform, and things happened that, when slowed down and viewed in the LVU, looked like altercations. Even full-on battles.

Some while later—about four years in Meatspace, but hundreds of years in Bitworld—the Dodge Process was abruptly shut down by none other than Sophia. She had the power to do such things, apparently, since the same AIs that had recognized her when she was alive now recognized her in Bitworld.

For better or worse, the Landform was a single contiguous thing. Some of its inhabitants “lived,” and some of its geographical features were simulated, on hardware maintained by the cluster of entities spawned and controlled by Forthrast and Waterhouse out of SLU. Others ran on equipment owned by El’s network of companies based in Z-A. But they could not be separated. So the two sides, like conjoined twins sharing a heart, had to coexist.

They formed a consortium. This had an official name that was only used on legal documents. People called it SLUZA. Corvallis became the elder statesman of SLU. Sinjin Kerr was his counterpart in Z-A—though it was always difficult to make out just what was really going on over there. Enoch Root was the kindly professor they called upon to resolve squabbles and arcane techno-philosophical points. Zula, wizened by grief, dropped out of the picture entirely for a couple of years after Sophia’s death, and then returned to the Forthrast Family Foundation in a vaguely defined CEO emeritus role.

ACTANSS went on a year’s hiatus following the Incident, then resumed. It was never the same. It moved to bigger, more accessible venues. It flourished into what someone described as “the COMDEX of Death,” with overtones of revival meeting and academic conference. Even the biggest venues had small rooms hidden away in quiet corners, and in such rooms, C-plus and Sinjin and Enoch and Zula used ACTANSS as the annual summit meeting where they discussed, and agreed on practical solutions to, the Big Questions that were going to dominate their work in the decades to come.

Or, in terms more useful to planners, Magnitudes 5 to 8.

Because of the way the Time Slip Ratio varied, using years as a measuring scheme was tricky. A better yardstick was the number of independent souls or processes currently running on the system, and for that, instead of using absolute numbers, it was convenient to use a Richter scale–like system based on orders of magnitude.

Ten raised to the power 0, 100, was equal to one. So, for the entire duration of the time the Dodge Process had been running on its own, the system had existed at Magnitude 0.

Inevitably, they truncated “Magnitude” to “Mag.” Ten to the first power, 101, was simply equal to ten, and 102 was a hundred. The Mag 1/2 version of Bitworld—the epoch when it had hosted something like ten to a hundred distinct souls—had been the age of truly bizarre experimentation by newly booted processes who had spawned, mostly out in the middle of nowhere, in a world whose basic shape and environment had