“That is my term for a group of twenty or so processes that impose a disproportionate load on the system—they consume a lot of resources. Most of the nine MFN processes are there, including the one simulating Verna Braden’s connectome, which is second only to Dodge’s Brain. They, and some of the Ephrata Eleven, got an early start. They grew rapidly.”

“Pluto?”

“The big purple one,” El said. “And, to be fair, a few of mine are in there too.”

“Of yours!?”

Zula got up and walked around the table, viewing the display from different angles. “If this is correct, I’m seeing that Dodge talks to Verna, to Pluto, to the other members of what you’re calling the Pantheon. But he almost never talks to the little guys.”

“The little guys talk to each other a lot,” Corvallis observed, “and they have some contact with members of the Pantheon.”

“Some more than others,” Jake observed. “Verna’s not talking to the little guys at all but some of the other angels have lots of contact.”

“Angels?” El asked sharply.

Jake smiled. “My preferred term for what you are calling members of the Pantheon.”

Zula was holding out one hand toward Jake, as if holding him back—beseeching him not to plunge into a debate about angels vs. gods. But El broke in: “Zula, I notice you’re standing pretty close to the green shape now.”

“The one you identify with Verna, if I’m not mistaken,” Zula said, nodding. “What about it?”

“Take a close look and let me know what you see.”

Zula leaned in close and wrinkled her nose. “Around Verna I can see a bunch of tiny little motes. Just pinpricks of green. Like fruit flies hovering around a watermelon. Faint lines connecting them to the Verna blob. What do those represent?”

“I don’t know,” El said, “and that is what concerns me. Actually it’s one of many things about the overall situation that is concerning. But this is new, and strictly a Verna-related phenomenon.”

“Verna was a hacker. Underappreciated. Never really got her feet under her before the cancer took over her life. Maybe she’s up to her old tricks,” Corvallis said.

“Meaning what?” Jake asked.

“Those tiny motes—the fruit flies—are independent processes that have been spawned recently,” El said. “Mind you, they are in no way as complex, or as capable, as those processes we’ve set in motion based on full human connectomes. But they run on their own and we didn’t make them. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Verna did.”

“To ask a blunt question, who’s paying for the computational resources consumed by these new processes?” Zula asked.