“I know the story.”

“She misses him. Wants to connect with what she lost.”

“And does she really believe that the Process is the reincarnation of Richard Forthrast?”

“Is that what you believe, El?”

“I don’t know what to believe, since she is the sole toho, and she won’t share the data.”

“You know her position—and our position—on this. There’s not that much to share. Tracking the activities of the Process is akin to the problem that faced the Allies, during the Second World War, before they broke the Enigma code. Messages can be intercepted and copied, but they can’t be decrypted, so we don’t actually know what they mean. The most we can do is traffic analysis. It’s not useless, but—”

“But it’s not the Vulcan mind meld. I saw that talk. I agree with it.”

“To this very point,” Corvallis said, “Sophia mentioned to me recently that she had observed new traffic that was unfamiliar. To make a long story short, she thinks that you are uploading other scanned connectomes and that you are booting them up on the same systems.”

“Systems I built and paid for,” El said. “Sophia claimed all of Hole in the Wall’s processing power during the first year. The project would have withered on the vine at that point, if I hadn’t—”

“If you hadn’t built more of them. Yes.”

“Hole in the Wall was handcrafted. I made it mass-producible. By this time next year, we will be opening new facilities at the rate of one per week.”

“Leading to the question, why?”

“It sounds as though Sophia already has a theory,” El said. Corvallis guessed that if his facial muscles were working, he might have had a sly expression right about now. Maybe he’d have winked.

“You’ve made no secret of the fact that you’ve been scanning other brains.”

“I’m surprised at you, C-plus. Using such an outmoded figure of speech. ‘Brains’? Really?”

Corvallis decided to construe this as an attempt at humor. El couldn’t wink. There was no twinkle in that eye.

He was alluding to a hot topic from the conference: the mind-body problem.