Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,232

beyond.

Having said all that:

The Fenris Principle, a.k.a. the Mad God Rule (which had never actually been invoked), envisioned a Mad God and laid down some rules of thumb for coping with same (Fenris was a giant wolf of Norse mythology who, it was prophesied, would return one day to fuck everything up, and such were the ground rules of that mythos that there was nothing the gods could do about it). The closest they’d ever come to a Mad God scenario had been Dodge destroying the hive, and El ejecting Dodge and the Pantheon. The classic Mad God hypothetical was: what if El tried to revoke the law of gravity? It would affect everything in Bitworld at once: not just B & G (rivers would stop running downhill, etc.) but every single soul at once (they would all see rocks, and themselves, floating, their perceptions and thinking would undergo radical shifts, they would talk to one another about it). In the space of a few seconds the resource usage would jump up by orders of magnitude. Cooling systems would overheat, circuit breakers trip; previously undetected bugs would make their presence felt. The whole system would likely go down. In theory it could be rebooted; in practice no one even wanted to contemplate what a cold restart would entail and whether it would work at all.

So there was a general consensus that Mad Gods needed to be checked if their actions created such existential risks, and there were committees and task forces and draft policy papers that always consumed a few schedule slots and conference rooms at ACTANSS. But if you talked to one of the purportedly responsible parties after hours at the bar, he or she would freely admit that they knew as little of what would happen in such an eventuality as Cold War civil defense officials trying to plan for global thermonuclear war.

Thus the problematic Mag 0–2 processes. When Enoch, as the eminence grise of people whose job it was to think about this stuff, proposed that everyone just give up on any hope of trying to fit those weird old souls into a systematic picture, most of them were hugely relieved and excited by the prospect of buckling down to work on a project that actually might have some hope of success, or at least discernible progress: namely, trying to make sense of the vastly more numerous recently uploaded souls and their relationship to “life and death,” or as Enoch had dubbed it, “death after death.” Those more recently booted-up souls had enough in common with one another that one could at least begin to think about them systematically. They all consumed about the same amount of resources. Their virtual bodies all had roughly the same shape and size and they all affected one another, and the inanimate things around them, through the same kinds of interactions.

Which were, when you came down to it, close copies—reproductions—performances—of the bodies people had in Meatspace and the way those bodies related to one another and to the world.

And you couldn’t have that without mortality—or at least morbidity. So amortality—both as a philosophical abstraction and as a feature pitched by service providers to their customers—was that your soul would always be rebooted if something went badly wrong. And it wouldn’t be a totally fresh start. It wasn’t as if the new memories accumulated during the afterlife that had just ended were erased. Efforts would be made to preserve some continuous thread of identity connecting the new life just being rebooted back to the one that had been cut short by the falling tree, or whatever.

Besides amortality, other big topics addressed by the sages of SLUZA included morpho-teleology and phased embodiment.

“Morpho” meant form, “teleology” meant something that was preordained, determined in advance, frequently used as a scare word by people who believed things ought to develop on their own, without constraints. In this case, the notion was that the industry had actually taken a wrong turn when it had started to heed the advice of the neurologists and gone over to full-body scanning. Because of course if you scanned nerves all the way down to the toes and simulated interactions of gut bacteria with the cells of the intestinal lining, why, the resultant processes in Bitworld wouldn’t feel complete until they had created digital toes and digital stomachs and everything in between. Digital life had the potential to be so much more than bio-life and yet the morpho-teleologists were going about it