Enoch pondered it for a bit. “I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I think that the main thing it conferred on people was social mobility, so that if you were a smart kid growing up on a farm in Kansas or a slum in India you had a chance to do something interesting with your life. Before it—before that three-hundred-year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts—we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A lot better. Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.”

“But in order for the rich to get what they want, they also have to have a functioning tech economy, right? Because their wealth isn’t based on controlling land, like in the old days. It’s based on stock.”

Enoch nodded. “The system is selective enough now to identify those with the ability to contribute to the tech economy and bring them to places like this.” He waved out the windshield at Moab, which in a low-slung and easygoing way bore earmarks, for those who knew what to look for, of being the kind of place where smart people lived. They had traveled two thousand miles to end up back in Princeton. And once they left it in their rearview camera they would travel another thousand miles to end up in the same place again.

“So is it ever coming back?”

“The state of affairs that existed during those three hundred years?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. It’s the kind of big woo-woo topic your uncle Jake thinks about. You are free to think about it too, of course. Or to focus on the task at hand. Maybe one applies to the other.”

It took her a second to process that. “You’re talking about what you mentioned before,” she said, “that a brain, or a digital simulation of one, needs to be embedded in a world that agrees with itself as to what is what.”

“Yes. And it has to agree with any other brains that happen to be hanging around in the same world.”

“Not an issue for me,” Sophia said. “There’s just the one. Dodge’s.”

“Not for long,” Enoch said.