in a basically flawed way that ensured that the souls of Bitworld would remain trapped in a tiny, crowded, and not very interesting corner of the space of all possibilities. They could no longer become gods or angels.
Phased embodiment was a proposed solution to both (a) morpho-teleology and (b) the reality that sustainable infrastructure couldn’t be built on Earth fast enough to immediately give every single dead person a full humanoid body and a nice plot of land in Bitworld. Simulating the clear stream running past your homestake, babbling merrily over rocks, not to mention the smoke coming out of your chimney, was expensive. It was doable at Mag 7 but couldn’t be ramped up fast enough to keep pace with the death rate. Dead people could still be scanned and the scans could, of course, be archived—maybe even booted up as new processes—but giving them fancy places to live, with high-grade qualia, was not physically possible, and might not be for a few decades—which, as the computing centers bogged down under all that load, could correspond to centuries in Bitworld.
Or they could have just booted everything up at full resolution on the equipment they had. This would work, on an engineering level. But the Time Slip Ratio would slow to a crawl. Years might pass in Meatspace while the babbling-brook and swirling-chimney-smoke calculations were performed to simulate just a few seconds’ elapsed time in Bitworld. Which would make no difference at all to a soul in Bitworld, since their consciousness would be slowed down as well. And so they would experience the qualia of the brook, smoke, etc. in precisely the same way as if everything had been running a thousand times faster. But for spectators watching Bitworld from Meatspace using ever-fancier versions of the Landform Visualization Utility, it would be boring and frustrating, like trying to watch a movie over a slow connection that stopped every few seconds to buffer more data. This would create what amounted to a PR and marketing problem, since, in marketing-speak, spectation was the main driver of customer acquisition. And that was how SLUZA took in money—which was how it paid for more, faster equipment.
According to people on El’s side of the pond, phased embodiment was the answer. Souls could be booted up immediately in a far more resource-efficient form that was similar in many ways to the Wad. The original Wad, developing on its own, had been very expensive, with a lot of wasted cycles. But El’s engineers had figured out a way to make similar systems that were far more efficient; for example, they could communicate directly instead of simulating the biological processes of speech and hearing. Having a simplified form, and communicating through data packets, might not have been how most customers envisioned themselves spending all of eternity, but it was better than being dead, and it would give them some time to exist in a kind of fluid, embryonic, less-than-fully-embodied limbo for a while, during which they could perhaps explore creative alternatives to the one-size-fits-all humanoid plan that the morpho-teleological elites were foisting on them. The human fetus, floating in amniotic fluid, wasn’t yet a fully realized human. But it wasn’t a bad existence.
Keen was the interest of Maeve in morpho-teleology and the related topic of idiomorphs—souls, mostly from the Mag 0–2 era, that had nonhumanoid forms. It took Corvallis some time to understand just how keen, and by that time, their relationship was pretty much doomed, at least if you defined “relationship” as “anything even remotely like a traditional marriage.”
She’d always been cagey. The one time in her young life she’d really bared her passion to the world’s scrutiny had been the founding of Sthetix, which hadn’t gone well and had driven her into a reclusive life in the canyonlands around Moab. After meeting Corvallis she had spent several years as an Internet hate speech lightning rod, which had been fascinating in a way—but it was an essentially passive role, a work of performance art the whole point of which was to obliterate her real identity and bury it a million miles deep under fake news. Any thinking person who paid attention to that spectacle would end up asking, “But who is this person really?” To the extent that the project had succeeded, it had only made her real identity that much more enigmatic.
Under that cover, she had, with Corvallis, raised three children in weirdly normal urban-soccer-mom style. They had never made a decision that he’d work full-time