The question was largely academic, since El was going to attend whether or not they counted him. Assuming that it was really him controlling the robot, he came to all of the sessions, standing quietly in the back of the room. The Metatron had a built-in speaker, so he could have piped in his voice at any time, but he didn’t use it; on the rare occasions when he wanted to ask a question, he would send it in the form of a brief text. Sometimes, though, the robot could be seen standing in a quiet corner, apparently having a conversation with Sinjin Kerr, Enoch Root, or one of his other advisers.

Sophia’s ACTANSS 3 talk was co-presented with her collaborator Dr. Matilda Napolitano, a mathematical physicist at the University of Bologna. Its title was “Virtual-Space Cartography from Manifold-Based Traffic Analysis.” They staged the presentation on the resort’s tennis court, which was protected from cold and wet by an inflatable dome. They did it just before dinner, as the light was dying outside, but they chose not to turn on the dome’s powerful illumination system, which would have competed with what they wanted to display. Resort staff had taken down the tennis net and scattered a few faint, indirect lights around the place so that the attendees wouldn’t bump into one another. As recently as ten years ago it would have seemed a bizarre setting for a technical presentation, but now everyone understood what it meant: Sophia and Matilda were going to be presenting some visuals, and they’d be using augmented reality to do it, and this would all be easier if people could stroll freely through whatever three-dimensional imagery was going to be projected into this space.

The opening graphics were two-dimensional, however. Sophia caused them to appear on a virtual screen at one end of the tennis court, so that all of the attendees were at first facing in the same direction.

She started with a map of Europe, the national borders curiously wrong until a caption came up identifying it as the Europe of 1941.

“As a way of introducing this subject matter to people who, like me, are not mathematical physicists, I wanted to make an analogy to how the world looked to Allied codebreakers in the early part of the Second World War, before they had broken the German codes,” Sophia began.

The map began to move, panning and zooming to focus on Great Britain. Cartoon installations began to pop up at various locations on the island: little icons, each consisting of a small building with an antenna on its roof, swiveling this way and that, but mostly pointed east and south toward Axis-controlled Europe.

“They couldn’t read the actual content of the messages, but they could still copy them down. And through a technology called high-frequency direction finding, or huffduff, they could figure out where each transmission originated.”