Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,230

been sketched out by Dodge, but where rules were fluid and considerable resources available for the taking. In those days the scanning technology and the simulation software had been experimental, not as good as what came along later, and they’d only scanned brains—not bodies. Those souls, in many cases, had grown up in isolation from others. Several who had spawned near Dodge had ended up in his Pantheon, but many had developed on their own into creatures that in form, powers, and psychology were not really recognizable as human.

The epoch of Mags 3 to 4—between one thousand and ten thousand active souls—had been the age when the townlike thing had formed around Dodge and then transformed into what C-plus saw as a degenerate mess and El found so full of promise: the cottonlike Wad. By that point, SLUZA had got the scanning down to a science. It was as good as it was ever going to get. Future upgrades might make it faster or cheaper, but the quality of the data had reached its theoretical limit and was not going to improve.

The souls generated from those scans were, in their appearance and their powers, much more uniform. They were the population of the “town.” They knew about Dodge—the sole Mag 0 process—and they interacted with some of the more social, but still weird, Mag 1 and 2 souls. It was just a given feature of their universe, however, that those souls belonged to a different order. They had later surprised everyone by undergoing a sort of phase change into the Wad. When this had fallen over, they had dispersed, and gone back to having regular humanoid bodies and—as far as anyone could tell—social lives.

Those events coincided more or less with the boundary between Mags 3 and 4 and Mags 5 and 6, which was to say the era when the population had expanded from about ten thousand souls to more like one hundred thousand, on a growth curve that would pretty soon take it to a million. So it was maybe fortuitous that, after the Wad had dispersed, the population had spread out to occupy more of the Landform. In a Wad-like configuration, population density could be very high. But most customers, observing all of this in the LVU, didn’t fancy spending the afterlife in something like an insect colony. Heaven for them had grass, trees, fresh water, and sunsets. Projecting the numbers forward, the Landform was easily large enough to afford such comforts to 107 (ten million) souls—maybe even 108 (a hundred million) if they kept clustering together in cities, as seemed to be the trend along the banks of the big river in the east.

Anyway, by that yardstick they were at about Mag 5 (hundreds of thousands of souls) when the paperwork was signed on the consortium that became known as SLUZA. Its engineers rolled up their sleeves and got to work on the big difficult issues that they were going to have to solve as the system grew from there to Mag 8, 9, and beyond. Eventually they’d have to get it up to at least Mag 10: ten billion souls, assuming that everyone alive on Earth in the middle of the twenty-first century wanted to be scanned and uploaded.

Beyond that, it was unlikely to get much bigger. Partly that was for technical reasons: planet Earth could only support so much computational activity. Partly it was because population growth had plunged through zero and become decline.

Making the management of all this much more difficult than it ought to have been was the extreme differentness of various souls. So, after a couple of years’ inconclusive wrangling and beard pulling, the people who ran SLUZA wreaked a vast simplification on the whole picture: they agreed to just ignore a couple of hundred processes that had been booted up in the early days when there had been no standards and everything had been in flux.

At their peak, the Dodge and the Verna processes had controlled more computational resources—they had spent more money, had a higher burn rate, however you chose to phrase it—than any thousand ordinary souls put together. Actually the figure was much higher than that if you considered the Landform itself to be part of the Dodge process. But since it didn’t really seem that Dodge was personally looking after each cresting wave in the ocean and each tree in the forest, SLUZA’s high council of elders decided to bucket that kind of thing separately, as subprocesses that