One region of the Landform had always been troublesome: up in the mountains, some distance north of Town, was a place that had somehow failed to cohere as an intelligible three-dimensional shape. Some of the researchers had taken to calling it Escherville, after the artist M. C. Escher, who’d been good at making pictures of shapes that could not actually exist. Escherville had been around for at least as long as the LVU had been running and didn’t seem to change much. Traffic analysis made it pretty obvious that Dodge and Pluto and some of the other “Pantheon” processes had a lot to do with it.

Escherville was weird, but at least it was stable. The other problematic zone in the Landform was what they had used to call the Town Square, after Sophia had pointed out its similarity to the park in the middle of Richard Forthrast’s hometown. But the name was now obsolete, for of late the similarity had been obliterated. In the last few weeks it had become too bright to see clearly unless you dialed back the power on your wearable to the point where the rest of the Landform faded into darkness. All of the little green points plotted by the LVU had the same brightness level, so when a region of the Landform was generating that much light, it simply meant that a huge number of points were concentrated there. If the Landform was a shaped swarm of fireflies, then Town Square was a jar in which nearly all of the fireflies had decided, for some reason, to concentrate themselves. The LVU was doing its best to track all of the data and map it into a three-dimensional shape, but its system for doing so was now failing to make sense of the information flowing into it, or perhaps observers like Corvallis were having trouble mapping what they saw onto shapes and patterns that they knew how to recognize from lives spent in a coherent three-dimensional universe. Maybe these dead people had a different understanding of geometry, or maybe they weren’t making sense at all.

The other tool Corvallis favored was El’s system for displaying network traffic as a three-dimensional universe of colored blobs representing different processes, joined together by thin lines symbolizing messages passed between them. The first time he’d seen this, it had been dominated by a big yellow ball at the top, representing Dodge’s Brain, with the Pantheon spread out below it, and, at the bottom, thousands of tiny white balls suspended in cobwebs. When he looked at it now, many of the same features were still there, but the bottom layer just looked like a ball of cotton the size of a car. If he zoomed in close to it he could begin to make out individual concentrations, but the messages passing among them were flying so thick and fast as to obscure their identities.

“Now we’re getting somewhere.”