Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,231

Dodge had spawned but should no longer be billed for. So those, as well as Verna’s myriad subprocesses, were covered in what eventually came to be known as the Buildings and Grounds budget, which was split between SLUZA’s membership according to a complex and ever-shifting formula.

Which didn’t change the fact that Dodge and a number of the other old souls were just different in so many ways that merely cataloging the differences would be a lifelong task for a researcher. All bets were off when it came to those. And yet there were so few of them that devoting a lot of attention to them seemed like the wrong way to allocate resources. They had to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

Now, admittedly this was simplified quite a bit by the fact that Dodge, incomparably the most powerful, had, for lack of a better term, died. You couldn’t point to a body, but he had surrendered all of his resources, and no further billable activity had since shown up on his account. Sophia for her part seemed to flit in and out of existence. It was hard to tell since she seemed to have tricky ways of cloaking her activities.

Meanwhile the second-most resource-hungry Mag 0–2 process—the one associated with Verna—spawned two completely new processes of humanlike complexity, then dropped off the radar, reducing her level of activity to something not much out of line with a typical soul.

Maybe Verna would ramp up again later. And maybe her “children” would spawn more children, et cetera, and those would one day pose an insupportable burden on the computing infrastructure of Meatspace. But none of them was posing a problem now. The Verna process had so many interactions with Buildings and Grounds—the shared account for simulation and maintenance of the Landform’s geography, meteorology, and biology—that it was pointless trying to tease them apart. So, from an accounting point of view, the best way to manage Verna was to keep an eye on B & G’s burn rate and watch for weird upticks. Which they did. And there were indeed weird upticks. But they came and went faster than humans could schedule meetings to talk about them and never created enough of a problem to demand a response.

So, of the most resource-hungry processes, El and his crew had paid their own way, as it were, by showing up concurrently with new mana brought online just for that purpose by El’s support system in Meatspace. Dodge was no more. The Pantheon stayed to itself and did not have problematic interactions with the other souls. Verna had been merged into the enormous B & G account. She was like a brush fire smoldering out in the middle of nowhere.

That left various Mag 0–2 processes, numbering on the order of a hundred, who by and large had spawned and grown in isolation and ended up in bodies that had odd shapes, sizes, and powers. Idiomorphs. They remained on the Landform proper, where they were, in principle, capable of being very problematic indeed if they called upon all of the powers that they had acquired in the wild and woolly first eons. But they almost never did. And as years, then a decade went by in Meatspace while decades, then centuries went by in Bitworld, a consensus emerged among the engineers of SLUZA and was ratified in ACTANSS conference proceedings, not as a formal constitution or rulebook but as a list of best practices. As far as the Mag 0–2 idiomorphs were concerned it comprised two principles:

The Algernon Principle, a.k.a. the Prime Directive, was loosely inspired by the Hippocratic Oath (“First do no harm”) but more so by a tragic/cautionary science fiction story by Daniel Keyes called “Flowers for Algernon,” about a developmentally disabled man who is given an experimental drug that turns him, for a while, into a genius—but it wears off and we see, by reading his daily journal entries, the inexorable decay of his mind: a slow torturous intellectual death. No one wanted to inflict anything of that sort upon a soul that had, in the early days of Bitworld, acquired vast powers and a unique kind of intelligence. The mere fact that they were expensive did not justify inflicting Algernon-like cruelty on them. There weren’t that many idiomorphs, their combined resource usage was not actually a problem, and anyway it seemed that something about their very weirdness made them disinclined to interact much with “normal” souls of the eras of Mag 3 and

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