“You are,” El said. “Because your foundation launched the Verna process. And these subprocesses that she has spawned all carry the same holographic signature. The billing therefore goes to you. In a larger sense, though, I support all of this by bringing new computing centers online every day. Supporting the R & D, paying the overhead.”

“Well, this is fascinating data, if it’s for real,” Zula said. “I thank you for showing it to us, El. What conclusions do you draw?”

“To begin with, it is clearly a hierarchical structure.”

“You’ve certainly made it appear that way by arranging it in a hierarchy,” Zula said dryly.

“Which can be backed up statistically. This not just me playing games with pictures,” El snapped. “The overall picture is that resource usage is utterly dominated by a few mega-processes. They’ve established the Landform. Everyone lives on it. It’s . . . it’s just . . .”

“It’s just like the world we’re living in now, is that what you are saying?” Corvallis asked. “Nothing has changed.”

“That is my concern,” El said. “We had an opportunity to start all over again. To build a new universe in which consciousnesses—entities based on human minds, but bigger, better, deathless—can dwell and do whatever they want, free from the constraints imposed by the physical world. Instead of which the Process—the first Process—got a huge head start and just blindly, stupidly re-created something very much like the world we all live in now. A world that looks to have geography and physics based on the ones that imprison us.”

“Maybe we need it,” Zula said. “Maybe our brains can’t make sense of things otherwise.”

“It’s the Kant thing all over again,” Corvallis muttered.

“C, you’re going to have to speak up,” El said, “the microphones on this thing still aren’t as good as human ears.”

“Oh, years and years ago I had a conversation with Dodge about Kant. Whom he had never heard of until that point. It was about Kant’s idea that space and time were ineluctable to the human mind—that we simply could not think without hanging everything on a space-time lattice. That any attempt to think outside of that framework would produce gibberish. He used it to take down Leibniz.”

“Do you think it sank in?” Jake asked.

“It got him to Google Kant,” Corvallis allowed.

“It is a common preoccupation of people who think about the idea of heaven,” Jake said. “What exactly would it be like to live forever in a realm where physical constraints don’t apply? Where there is no evil, no pain, no want? Being an angel, living on a cloud, strumming a harp twenty-four/seven/forever—that could get old. Old enough that it might become indistinguishable from being in hell.”