Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,301

the young Corvallis had had two vaguely similar sports to choose from, both of which were characterized by long spans of nothing happening with just enough sudden bursts of excitement to keep the fans from wandering off.

That all came in handy during the year or so following Maeve’s death and the weird visit of the Metatron with its portentous and vaguely threatening talk of the REAP. Something was most certainly going on that involved the “Adam” and “Eve” processes. They didn’t move around much once they had settled down, but they interacted frequently with the Maeve process, and after a while they made babies. Something bizarre immediately happened involving one of Elmo Shepherd’s winged minions. There was what could only be described as an altercation between it and an old Mag 1 process that had decided to embody itself as an animated pile of rocks. Weird flows of mana had occurred. Accountants and lawyers from Zelrijk-Aalberg had taken the unusual step of flying to Seattle to yell at their counterparts in person. It was bad enough, they complained, for the “children” of Dodge and Verna to consume resources from Buildings and Grounds. It was worse yet for them to spawn more of their own kind. But now they were somehow absorbing mana directly from servers that the Zelrijk-Aalberg people had, at staggering expense, set up in orbit.

They were cheating. Or, at least, the powers that be in Zelrijk-Aalberg felt cheated. Viewing the aftermath in the LVU, it just looked like raising babies and chopping down trees. Pointing that out did not in any way calm down the bean counters from Flanders. On the contrary, they saw it as C-plus’s willfully refusing to acknowledge facts obvious to them. They hinted that he was, at some level, smirking. This notion that C-plus was a secret smirker enraged them. Enoch Root had to be brought in to mediate.

During those days the Time Slip Ratio had swung back and forth around approximately one, which was to say that sometimes the denizens of Bitworld appeared to move slowly and other times quickly, but they never just froze up, or dissolved into blurred streaks. On average, Bitworld time, as tallied by day/night cycles, was not far off from that in Meatspace. Fluctuations seemed to be tied not to what was happening in Bitworld—which didn’t change much—but rather to the progress of, or setbacks in, huge engineering projects being run out of Flanders, most notably a big habitat that the Zelrijk-Aalberg people were constructing in geosynchronous orbit.

That had all stopped being true at the moment of the Grand Slam, as Corvallis thought of it.

It was a baseball analogy. Sometimes in a baseball game a situation would gradually develop, over the course of a long, slow inning, where the bases became loaded, and the batting team was down to its last out, and the count had gone full, the manager had made a couple of trips to the mound, a replacement pitcher was warming up in the bullpen, the batter was fouling off one pitch after another, the crowd was about to piss itself—and then in a moment something happened that changed everything.

Some such thing happened one day in Bitworld. Adam was dead. Eve was on the move, pregnant, following a member of the Ephrata Eleven that had incarnated itself as an enormous humanoid made of boulders and dirt. They were traveling across a chunk of the landform that had snapped off and was drifting out to sea, fragmenting as it went. New souls—apparently spawned from scratch, not based on scans of dead people—were issuing from El’s spire in the center of the Landform and taking up residence in strategic locations and, to all appearances, bossing around the souls that had got there in the usual way.

It was all terrifically expensive, mana-wise. The events that triggered it—the chopping down of a tree, the awakening of a giant, the inundation of a town, the murder of “Adam,” and most of all the fission of the continent—took place over the course of a few days as experienced by the souls of Bitworld. Simulating all of that, however, ended up taking almost a year in Meatspace. Millions of spectators lost interest in the Landform Visualization Utility. Those who stuck with it had to find new sources of enjoyment, such as zooming in on individual flowers, gazing upon mountain vistas from various angles, going on virtual hikes through frozen landscapes where birds hung nearly motionless in the air.

This intermission, if you wanted