“Who says we’re blowing it?” Zula asked. “We don’t know what’s going on on the Landform. Maybe it’s the Garden of Eden. Maybe it’s terrific there.”

“Maybe it’s a digital North Korea,” El countered. “Whatever it is, it looks like a simulation of an Earthlike environment. We can’t really tell what goes on there. People—processes—seem to be concentrated in a thing that looks like a town. They communicate with each other, or so it appears. Other processes locate themselves in other parts of the Landform. If you’ll let me have the table, I’d like to show you the results of some network analysis that one of my teams has been running.”

“Take it away,” Zula said.

The Landform faded. One of El’s techies, physically in the room, gestured in the air and brought into being an abstraction: a constellation of colored objects hovering in the space above the table. Thousands of small white blobs, like aspirin tablets, were crowded into the lowest few inches of the display, just above the surface of the table. These were webbed together by countless gossamer strands. Above them floated perhaps two dozen larger balls, color-coded according to a scheme El hadn’t explained yet. Surmounting the whole thing was a big yellow sphere about the size of a grapefruit. Radiating down from it were many fine golden rays linking it to some of the big objects hovering just below it.

“We can’t eavesdrop on the actual content of messages being exchanged between processes,” El said, “but we can get a general idea of which talks to which. What you’re looking at is the output of a network analysis system. It shows who talks to who, and how often. And some trends are obvious.”

“Forgive a basic question,” Corvallis said, “but each of these objects represents a different process? A soul, as it were?”

“Yes, and the lines drawn between them show what we believe to be communication.”

“Why are some so much larger than others?”

“Their size is proportional to how many resources they use—how much memory, how much processing power.”

“Okay. So, clearly, we have a whole lot of little tiny ones that talk to each other all the time,” Corvallis said, skating his hands through the lower stratum, which looked like aspirin tablets trapped in a cobweb.

“Yes. The vast majority of individual processes fit that profile. But above it you see the fat cats. The resource hogs. The huge yellow one on top is the first Process that Sophia spawned back at Princeton.”

“Dodge’s Brain,” Zula said.

“Yes—though its connectome has changed so much since then that, for all we know, it might have very little in common with Dodge at this point.”

“But it built the park, with the tower . . . ,” Zula pointed out, then shook her head impatiently. “Sorry. Go on.”

“In between you’ve got the Pantheon.”

“Come again?”