El could be heard sighing. His Metatron didn’t have the ability to deflate its chest and drop its shoulders. But the little puff of white noise came through clearly. “I think they got stuck,” he said. “Look. The best and the worst thing that ever happened was Sophia turning on Dodge’s Brain prematurely. She just went for it. If we’d left it in the hands of the academics, a hundred years might have passed before that was done—and it would have been done wrong. So it’s good on the whole that she took that initiative. But the Process must have woken up in a confused, disoriented, ill-informed state. I think it just started groping around, trying stuff, not thinking about the big picture, just reproducing whatever qualia brought it comfort. With the results we have seen. The system is stuck in a kind of attractor lock—a reproduction of the old world—that is so much less than it could be. It’s because the new processes that came along in the wake of the first one just glommed on to what DB was doing and created a feedback loop that reinforced it.”

“You want to break out of that,” Zula said. “Shake things up, start from scratch again with a bigger scope.”

“An open mind, at least, to the possibility that these souls—I’ll call them souls—could be doing something other than reproducing what they experienced and did and thought in their past lives.”

Corvallis said, “So what is it you are asking us for, El?”

“What I should have insisted on at the beginning,” El said, “which is full, coequal toho status. I want to be a token holder with unlimited administrative privileges on all aspects of these processes.”

It actually wasn’t an unreasonable request from a man who—it had to be admitted—had done more than anyone else to make all of this happen. Which explained the long silence that followed. If he’d asked for something ridiculous, something unfair, they could have scoffed at it.

Corvallis spoke first. “El, just to be clear. Right now, for historical reasons, the only toho with that level of power is Sophia. She used it to launch the Process that, as you’ve pointed out, now dominates everything else. She has the power to shut that Process down. To kill it. If you had equal privileges to hers, you could do the same.”

“Look, C, think for just a second about what is going on with Verna and the little processes she is spawning. Which is about to become your problem, because the Forthrast Family Foundation is footing the bill for all of those. What happens when a trillion of those get spawned and you run out of money?”