Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,409

the pinnacle. Time was speeding up again as things stabilized. Even so, covering that distance took them a little while. Spectators went out for bathroom breaks or snacks, leaving Zula largely alone. She stood there for a long time watching Dodge, who was tending to something very small and faint that he had cupped in his hand.

Mars and Mercury landed atop the palace without opposition. Meanwhile, back in Escherville, Dodge flew to the top of his castle, then dove into the crack that ran beneath it. Zula, getting the hang of it, swiveled her head toward the Landform 2 display. Sure enough, Dodge emerged a bit later from the round lake in the middle of the city. He beat his wings to gain altitude, then spread them wide to come in for a landing on the top of his dark tower.

At the same moment, in a strikingly symmetrical way, back over in the middle of Landform 1, Mercury rose up into the air above the white tower. In one hand he was holding a thing that looked like a horn. He raised this to his lips, and blew.

They could not hear the sound of it, but they could see it spreading outward like a shock wave. Above, this dissipated into the sky like one of those ice halos sometimes visible around the sun on a cold day. But below, as it propagated downward along the sheer shaft of the pinnacle, it seemed to touch off a disturbance in the hivelike cellular structure that had grown around the rock. This was a little like seeing a trail of gunpowder flash into smoke. Or one of those things atomic scientists used to see the trails of subatomic particles through vapor. A cloud chamber. But too it put her in mind of buds unfurling in time-lapse.

It propagated quickly down the skinny part of the pinnacle where the hive was thin but slowed dramatically as it reached the lower stretch where it broadened to include many more cells.

And at some point, the display simply froze up. She turned toward Landform 2 and saw it frozen as well. She heard a man, an older chap, making a joke about needing to reboot the projector—a reference that meant nothing to most of the people in the room.

“It’s not actually frozen,” someone explained. “The Time Slip Ratio has dropped to ten to the minus three. And still dropping.” Meaning that a thousand or more seconds had to elapse in Meatspace to simulate one second of time in Bitworld.

“I see it changing though!” Eva exclaimed. She sounded so convinced of this that Zula maneuvered closer to where she was standing, trying to see it. Eva was gazing at “Mercury,” suspended above the palace with wings spread wide, horn pressed to his lips. And something about him created the most extraordinary impression in Zula’s mind. He was not moving. And yet he was changing all the time. Changing for the better. His wings, his hair, the expression on his face: the display simply couldn’t update itself fast enough to capture all the detail.

Zula was remembering her early days working for Dodge’s video game company, when the graphics cards that drew the pixels on your screen sometimes just didn’t have the oomph to get the job done and so you would have to turn down the resolution, slow the frame rate, get rid of the fancy textures, just so you could play the game at full speed. It made everything look bad, but sometimes you just had to do it. When you turned that stuff back on, it was striking how beautiful, how real, the graphics could look.

What was now clear to her was that all her seeing of the Landform up until now had been with the graphics turned down to the fast-but-crappy setting. It had to be that way, for the LVU to keep up with the pace of events in Bitworld.

“Ten to the minus four,” someone intoned. “Just unbelievable.”

Ten thousand seconds—about three hours—now had to go by to simulate one second of time in Bitworld. The system was overwhelmed.

“But everything’s still basically working, right?” Eva asked.

“Perfectly.” Meaning that the processes who inhabited Bitworld were not experiencing it any differently than they had been before this slowdown. The flow of time, the qualia they experienced, were all the same.

And what qualia! Zula stepped in even closer. Every hair on Mercury’s head was now being rendered by graphics algorithms that suddenly had a lot of time on their hands