Uncle Claude had stood there anyway and gamely tried to bend his old mind around it because he had known that the youngsters in that room were his kin and that this stuff was important to them. Likewise Zula was aware that during recent days (as time was measured in Meatspace) momentous things had been going on in Bitworld involving the processes that had been booted up there to simulate the consciousnesses of her daughter, Sophia; her friends Corvallis and Maeve; and perhaps others as well. They had been moving around the Landform rather a lot, and interacting with one another, and Sophia had terminated a few other processes. Zula was aware that this was all being watched with great interest by the dwindling population of living humans who still existed on planet Earth.
So she walked down to the office one lovely fall evening to see what all the fuss was about. She could walk—or run, for that matter—all day if she wanted. Of course, it was Fronk whose feet actually contacted the ground, whose joints took her weight, whose sensors and algorithms saw to it she didn’t keel over. She had been wearing Fronk for decades now and would die pretty quickly if she doffed it. She could not have walked, or even stood up, without it. She wore it to bed. It was her bed.
South Lake Union had held its own as a place where biological humans physically came together to work on things. Nowadays, mostly what they worked on was the high-level management of ALISS. Of course, the bulk of the actual work was performed by robots in space. None of those was even remotely humanoid. Their AIs were tuned to analyze space rocks and to solve conundrums relating to scheduling of tasks, logistical coordination, and resource allocation. You couldn’t talk to them, and if you could, it would have been like having a conversation with a shovel. The humans working below on the surface of Earth were just keeping an eye on things, looking way down the road, making sure that the robots could go on finding more space rocks and fashioning them into more robots until they ran out of space rocks. Then, if they needed to, they could begin busting up unused moons and planets, or go out to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where there were many more rocks. The end state of all this would be a Dyson sphere: a hollow shell of rock and metal that would capture all of the sun’s power, spend it in computation, and radiate the waste heat into the cosmos as dull infrared light. But it would take a long, long time to get to that point. Long enough for every human now living to die of natural causes, even if they all used as many life-extension technologies as Zula. Earth, or at least a patch of Earthlike ecosystem, would be preserved as a kind of park, and bio-humans could live on it, if that was what they were into.
Nowadays the building looked as it had in the very beginning, when the steelworkers and the concrete pumpers had roughed in the structure but the framers had not yet shown up with studs and drywall. The floor-to-ceiling windows still looked exactly like windows, but were now actually complicated robots in their own right, making all kinds of moment-to-moment decisions about which wavelengths, and how much of them, to let in or out of the building.
When she walked in, the place was crowded, more so than she’d seen it in years. The windows had figured out, or been told, that people wanted it pretty dark so that they could watch Bitworld. Of course, everyone had glasses that would show them whatever they felt like seeing. But at times like this there was a lot to be said for shared communal viewing, so they had fired up a larger and more powerful appliance, a stationary holographic projector that could pump out a lot of photons. So everyone was looking at its output with naked eyes, sharing the experience.
“You got here just in time!” someone exclaimed. It was Eva, a younger staff member whose mere presence and energy always made Zula feel very much like Uncle Claude. But she was a lovely person and Zula really didn’t mind.
“Just in time for what?” Zula asked. Her voice cracked and rasped; she didn’t use it much nowadays. She was maneuvering sideways trying to get a better angle; Fronk was respecting her overall dictates but doing so in a way that didn’t violate any safety heuristics. Zula, left to her own devices, would have used her little-old-lady prerogatives to elbow her way through the crowd. So progress was safe, polite, and slow.
She was piecing together glimpses. The display had been zoomed and panned to a part of the Landform that was not immediately familiar to her. She had a strong Uncle Claude feeling of not being able to make sense of what she was looking at. Then she spied a detail that helped her understand that this was the vicinity of the region once dubbed Escherville, exactly because it did not, in fact, make sense. It was a zone where notoriously the Landform Visualization Utility had never been able to pull together a coherent geometry. For decades, Ph.D. students and postdocs had tried to debug it. They had concluded that there was no bug; the LVU was working perfectly; the Landform hereabouts actually did not make any sense and so it just had to be shown in a suggestive and unstable way.
So Zula was looking at Escherville: the baroque castle-like structure that Dodge had built in the middle of it, the unsightly additions that El had made to it later. Not far away, the verdant zone where Verna tended to hang out with one of the new processes she had spawned—the one that looked female—inevitably, Eve. Probably, come to think of it, the namesake of the young woman at Zula’s elbow.
“What’s been going on?” Zula asked.
“Time Slip Ratio has been dropping—big processes using a lot of mana, loading the heck out of the systems,” said Eva. “It is actually approaching one now. That’s the lowest—”
“Lowest it has been in decades,” said Zula.
“But earlier today—in Meatspace time, that is—Sophia and the people she’s with teleported from the extreme southwest to an area north of here. Later they teleported a second time—not as far.”
Eva was so freaked out by that that Zula felt obliged to let her know, “Pluto used to teleport, way back when. We haven’t seen much of it since he moved to Landform Two.”
“Well anyway, they’ve been on the move southward ever since.”
“They?”
“Sophia and a group of other processes—including Corvallis and Maeve! And guess who has been hot on their trail?”
“I don’t need to guess,” said Zula. She had finally maneuvered to a position where she could clearly see El himself striding south across high territory toward Escherville. “All of this just happened in the last few hours?”
“Meatspace time? Yes.”
Zula glanced at a chronograph on Fronk’s arm. It was now eight o’clock in the evening. “How long is that in Bitworld?”
“Three days have passed there. But as you can see,” Eva went on, “it is slowing way down. And look! Now Verna is on the move!” Her attention had been drawn by exclamations from other viewers positioned farther to the east. Indeed it was possible to see a female form astride a horse, galloping as if to intercept El. The movement was too fast for the horse’s gait to look quite natural. But as Eva had pointed out, the Time Slip Ratio was dropping fast. So it got slower and more normal-looking as Verna drew closer.
“What is that woman carrying? It looks heavy!” Zula asked, pointing to a figure who seemed to be bent under a heavy load.
“We’ve been trying to categorize it. Grepping through ancient datasets. It seems to be the avatar of a cryptographic key. El made it a long time ago. Then he destroyed it. But not before Corvallis did something sneaky—used his privs to make a copy.”
“So, that’s the copy?”