Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,258

they did those things very fast and sometimes very slowly. When SLUZA had more than sufficient mana to throw at Bitworld, it could run faster than reality. The dead people in those towns became blurs. Buildings went up and forests were cut down as if in a time-lapse movie. When ALISS—AfterLife Infrastructure and Systems Support—sagged under the load, Bitworld slowed to a crawl. You could sit there for hours watching your dead grandmother walk across a room. As SLUZA had got good at manufacturing quantum computers and laying down fiber, the Time Slip Ratio had shot up. Time in Bitworld had leapt forward. But this had attracted more uploads and created more demand, slowing it down again until more capacity could be added, and so on and so forth. Back and forth that pendulum had swung a few times since Sophia and El had gone into the afterlife. On average, though, time in Bitworld had run faster. Hundreds of simulated years had passed. Their view of it had looked like a time-lapse. You had to slow it down in order to see what was happening. Lately, the pendulum had been swinging the other way and it had been running slower—approaching parity, meaning that time in the two worlds was progressing at about the same pace. Zula had checked in on it from time to time, out of idle curiosity, and out of a hope that she might glimpse her daughter.

So it was with spectation on the activities of the dead in Bitworld. In many ways, these were as mundane as they could be. Except that there was one difference, which was psychologically important to living spectators: the dead were dead. They had once been flesh-and-blood humans. Now their bodies were gone, and by any biological standard they were dead. But there was no doubt that they had gone on to an afterlife. And there didn’t seem to be any limit as to how long they could stay there.

The awareness that death was not permanent and that everyone could potentially live forever was the most momentous thing that humans could possibly have learned. The only things that might have rivaled it would have been proof of the existence of God, or the discovery of alien civilizations in other star systems. But neither of those had actually happened.

One of the funny things about it, in retrospect, was its slowness, the lack of any dramatic Moment When It Had Happened. It was a little bit like the world’s adoption of the Internet, which had started with a few nerds and within decades become so ubiquitous that no person under thirty could really grasp what life had been like before you could Google everything. In retrospect, the Internet had been a revolution in human affairs, but one that had taken place just slowly enough that those who’d lived through it had had time to adjust in modest increments. But, centuries from now, people—if there were any—would see it as having happened in the blink of an eye.

Lying there in the gutter with her blown-up knees, Zula felt ignored by everyone: her ex-husband and her dead uncle and her dead daughter as well as the living humans all around her too wrapped up in the mysterious activities of the dead to look out the windows of their cars or apartments and notice her predicament. She was carrying electronic devices that she could have used to summon assistance, but the accident had put her into a strangely placid frame of mind, and she was content to lie there and relax for a minute or two. Then water began to soak up through her clothing and her knees really began to hurt.

A cop car pulled up and turned on its red and blue flashing LEDs. All other traffic vanished from the block as word got out among the civilian vehicles. Zula couldn’t tell, from her pavement-level viewpoint, whether there were any humans in the cop car. It disgorged a robot about the size of one of your larger microwave ovens, which ambulated over to her on elaborate triangular devices that sometimes worked like tank treads, sometimes tumbled vertex-over-vertex like ungainly wheels, other times elbowed along like old-school GIs belly-crawling under barbed wire. A couple of aerial drones showed up to supply even more unflattering camera angles. She had a brief conversation with a face on a screen, the purpose of which was to establish that she was not crazy or dangerous. She couldn’t really make out whether