Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,263

processes we’re talking about now were much more ambitious. It took her forever to make them. Dodge was somehow involved.”

“Can we track them?”

“That’s all we can do.”

“Who’s paying for them?”

“I think it’s coming out of Buildings and Grounds, right?” Meaning the budget ALISS used to pay for simulating the Landform, its birds and bees and winds and waters. It was split between Zelrijk-Aalberg and South Lake Union according to a formula that, when all was said and done, was pretty simple.

“I’ll have to go back and review it,” Corvallis said. “But yes, the general spirit of the deal was that self-replicators were part of Buildings and Grounds. Maybe that’s why El’s people are pissed off.”

“How do you figure?”

“The two processes in question—the ones that wandered out of El’s backyard a few weeks ago—are comparable in sophistication to humans. I mean, to scanned human simulations. Assuming they are capable of self-replication, they could make more like themselves . . .”

“And so on and so forth, exponentially,” Zula said with a nod. It was beginning to make sense now. In the physical world where she and Corvallis lived, there were only so many humans. Actuarial tables predicted how long they would live. This made it possible to plan further expansion and maintenance of ALISS. The money side of things was likewise predictable. Most people nowadays bought into financial packages—complicated insurance policies, in effect—ensuring that they’d be scanned and simulated after death, in exchange for regular premiums that they were obligated to pay as long as they lived, followed by balloon payments that would come out of their estates when they died. People who lacked the means to pay for such policies could buy into the system in other ways, for example by serving in the workforce of security guards, maintenance staff, and construction workers. In any case, it was all predictable based on known population statistics and other data, and so it could be financialized and properly bolted down. Buildings and Grounds was a fairly predictable part of this scheme. Yes, birds and bees could self-replicate, but they weren’t that expensive to simulate.

Self-replicating entities of human complexity could be an altogether different matter. None of the dead had the ability to create new life and so this had not been an issue until now.

“This has been nagging at me for a long time, actually,” C-plus admitted. “I check in on those two every so often. Like a good uncle. Take a look at their burn rates.”

“And?”

“For a long time it was a totally monotonous sawtooth waveform. Like we saw in the early days of Dodge’s Brain.”

She’d spent enough time with geeks to get it. She thought of sawtooth waves as Sisyphus waves. Which reminded her of the D’Aulaires’ book of Greek myths, which reminded her of Sophia, which made her sad. “So these two processes would ramp up to a certain level and then collapse to zero.”

“Over and over. I stopped paying attention.” But Zula could tell by the gestures he was making, the movements of his eyes, that he was paying attention now. He was using his spectacles to visualize the latest burn-rate stats. She let him have a moment to take it in. The memory pang had made her nose run. She pulled a tissue from her bag.

“Yup,” C-plus concluded, “six weeks ago they both burst through the ceiling. Became much more resource hungry. They’ve been growing ever since. They moved out of the Garden, down to the Spawn Point, and then west. And—”

“What!? What!?” Zula demanded. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I think I have,” Corvallis said. “Maeve’s with them. She can fly.”

They invited the Metatron to rejoin them, now uncertain as to how much it—and its remote operators—knew. Could it track their elevated respiration and heart rate? Had it overheard them through the wall? When C-plus had checked the stats on the runaway processes, and cross-correlated them with Maeve’s, had he left a bread crumb trail in the network that El’s minions were now following?

Had the entire point of the Metatron’s visit been to elicit just such behaviors?

“Why are you here? What do you want?” Zula asked it, before Corvallis could make things more complicated than they already were.

“As a representative of El’s interests,” said the Metatron, “I am here to make our position clearly known.”

“And what is that position?” C-plus asked. “We would appreciate it if you just stated it outright.”

“That the recent activities of the REAP are—”

“Excuse me, the what?”

“Renascent Egdod-Associated Process.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

“That those