Once that fact had been noticed, it was the work of a few days to run statistics. The results were too striking to be argued with. The earlier a process had been launched—the older the scan on which it was based—the less likely it was to have a conventional humanoid form. Weirdest of all were Dodge, the Most Favored Nation processes, and the Ephrata Eleven. Of those, Dodge had been booted up first and the others, beginning with Verna and soon numbering a few dozen all told, had been launched only after Dodge had existed in Bitworld for a while.

And it wasn’t simply the case that their bodies all started out humanlike and got weirder over time. In the stats it was possible to see a crisp fault line that coincided with the advent of full-body scanning. Processes that entered Bitworld with full information about the bodies from which they were derived ended up living in digital simulacra of those bodies. Those that had come into the world from severed heads showed a wider range of morphologies. But they also had a much higher failure rate, and some left no trace in the system at all. If they were alive, they were not discernible.

Chapter 31

Chapter 31

Sorry to see you here under these, uh, circumstances,” Corvallis said.

“It’s okay,” Zula returned. “It’s my job or something now to be the Angel of Death.”

Zula and Corvallis, along with two ambulance crews, a fire engine, several sheriff’s deputies, three lawyers, a mortician, and a doctor had all, during the last forty-five minutes or so, convened, between a house and a garage that was nearly as big as the house, in the countryside northeast of Seattle. The buildings were at the end of a quarter-mile-long driveway—the private extension of a county road that snaked its way up into the foothills of the Cascades from a river valley patchworked with dairy farms and horse barns. Snow-covered mountains rose up into the mist only a few miles away. Cold wet air drained out of them, encouraging people to stand in the lee of Pluto’s garage.

Which might have been seen as ironic given that Pluto’s garage was much, much colder yet, at least on the inside.