It was a cloud of green points, just as before, but these depicted a different landscape: a hill rising from a flat plain. Atop the hill was a structure made of straight lines and vertical walls, seemingly man-made. On the plain below was a sparkling grid pattern, reminiscent of a cityscape viewed from an airplane window at night: clearly gridded, with neat boxes rising from the grid.

“I could not be more confused as to what we are looking at right now,” announced Gloria Waterhouse. She was a philanthropist, connected with her family’s foundation, nontechnical, and always the first to stand up and request commonsense explanations when the discourse became too academic. She’d assigned herself that role and she did it well. “We’ve seen what looks like an imaginary island, with beaches and rivers and mountains, I guess. Now this is a small part of the island with a town on it. I get that. But what the hell is it? It looks like it came from a computer graphics experiment four, five decades ago when everything was primitive.”

“This configuration of points is the only way to make sense of the data emerging from the New Allocations,” Matilda said.

“And it’s consistent?” Gloria asked.

“This has been built up over months,” Sophia answered. “It changes a little from moment to moment, but it’s generally stable.”

“What are the red sparks?” asked the Metatron. Here and there, the green point cloud was flecked with momentary red sparks, like tiny lightning bolts.

“We use red as a debug tool to mark new data coming in,” Sophia explained. “Real-time stuff.”

“Then perhaps there is some error in the model,” said the Metatron, and pointed with its open hand to the black void above the town grid. A cloud of red sparks was suspended there, a bit like a fireworks burst, no spark enduring for longer than a fraction of a second. But the cloud as a whole persisted, and as they watched, it began to move through space toward the large structure on the top of the hill.

Chapter 30

Chapter 30