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 and that had been turned up to eleven. The sun was not only bouncing off of but refracting through every shaft of hair, making it both gleam and glow. The lenses of his eyes glistened with moisture, and she could see that he was just about to begin weeping. But the tear in the corner of his eye had not yet broken loose. She could see the world reflected in it.
He was beautiful. The whole place was beautiful.
“Makes you want to go there, doesn’t it?” asked a man’s voice, just next to her.
She turned to see that older chap who had made the joke earlier, and recognized him as Enoch Root.
“Did you really just ask me if I want to die?” she shot back.
He just got a wry look and said nothing. As if she had caught him out in some mischief.
“Why don’t you have a go,” she suggested, “and send me a message back from the next world?”
“I still have responsibilities in the previous one,” he answered.
“So this has happened before?” she asked. She began strolling over toward the visualization of Landform 2, where Dodge—Egdod—the REAP—whatever you wanted to call him—was poised, wings spread, above the top of his dark tower.
“Perhaps not this,” said Enoch, walking by her side, “but—”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“Ten to the minus five!” called True That. He was speaking a little distractedly, as he was fascinated by the appearance of Dodge.
“It’s all because of what is going on in the hive,” confirmed Eva. She’d been checking out some stats, evidently. “The processes in those cells are breaking loose—emerging into the world—like larvae coming out of their cocoons. Seeing the Landform for the first time, thinking, interacting. It’s like we’re uploading thousands of new processes every second. And it’s only going to get more so.”
“Ten to the minus six.”
“What are we going to do with all our free time?” someone joked.
“Look at basically freeze-frames,” Eva guessed. “Like illustrations in an old paper book, sort of.”
Zula had now drawn close enough to confirm that Dodge’s graphics had also been turned up to eleven. His face was not exactly that of Richard Forthrast, but his expressions matched what she remembered of her uncle. His gaze was intent upon the cupped palm of his hand, where nestled a tiny burst of finely structured light. In its complexity she imagined she could see the beginnings of a human form.
“I understand the speed of light!” she blurted.
Faces turned toward her, gawped, then turned away. A hundred years ago, someone would have taken her up on the gambit. Now people were too intimidated—or perhaps they assumed she was finally losing it.
Except for Enoch. “Explain it,” he urged her. “I’ve always wanted to understand.”
“Ever since I was a child, I’ve been hearing physicists insist that nothing can travel faster than light. That it would break the universe somehow. Something to do with causality.”
“You can’t have an effect until the cause has arrived,” Enoch said, nodding. “And causes can only travel so fast.”
“Never completely made sense to me when it was explained that way. Seemed arbitrary. Like a rule that had been imposed from outside the system.”
Enoch was nodding and smiling.
Zula went on, “But it’s what we are doing at this very moment to Bitworld! We are saying that according to the rules of the simulation, everything, everywhere, has to march forward in lockstep. As much as we might like to see how it all comes out—whether that tear is going to break loose from Mercury’s eye, for example—we may not. We can’t throw more mana at it and fast-forward that one part of the simulation, because then it would be out of sync with all the other parts. It would break the world.”
“And we can’t have that, can we?”
“No! We can’t have that, Enoch.”
Enoch looked over at the frozen god. “This is not going to change for a very long time,” he said, “for the reason that you just mentioned. There are young people here who may spend the next ten years of their lives managing the systems in orbit above us that will generate the next few moments of time in Bitworld. But you know what?”