“The Process that I launched at Princeton may be very complicated, and powerful, and expensive to run,” Sophia said, “but it’s still a computer program that responds to some very simple commands. And one of those commands is ‘exit.’ Or maybe it’s ‘quit’ or ‘shut down.’ I don’t actually know because I’ve obviously never invoked such a command against it. Or against Verna or Pluto or any of the others.”

“You as the token holder have the power to terminate the Process—or any subprocess—at any time,” Marcus said.

“That’s basically how it works,” Sophia answered, looking to Corvallis. He nodded in confirmation.

“Do you also have that power, C?” Marcus asked. “Since you were the one who issued the token to Sophia?”

Corvallis shook his head no. “You’re thinking I’m like the superuser or the sysadmin. This is different. The token I issued to Sophia gave her the access and the authority to establish a new system altogether. On that system she is root—she has total authority over all of the processes and I have none whatsoever. Nor,” he added, “do I want it.”

Maeve had been tracking this intensely, suggesting that she’d been curious about it for a while but had never found the right moment to ask. “To be blunt, honey, what happens if you get hit by a bus?”

“Nothing,” Sophia said.

“In other words,” Marcus said, “you haven’t made arrangements for that token to be transferred to someone else in the event of your demise.”

“I wouldn’t even know how,” Sophia said. “I’ve never thought about it. But I will now.”

“To ask the same question in a less loaded way,” Zula said, “since we are talking about my daughter here, what if you forget the password?”

“We don’t use passwords.”

“I know. It’s connected to your PURDAH. I get it. Work with me here.”

“There’s no ‘it.’ You can’t understand this in terms of passwords. We got rid of passwords exactly because they had these defects: if you forget yours, you’re screwed. And if someone steals yours, they become you, they suddenly have all of your power, all your privs. The point of the ‘H’ in PURDAH—‘Holography’—is that you have to prove your identity from one moment to the next—”

“With your face, your voice, the way you type, the way you walk . . . ,” Zula said. She knew all this.

“Back in the day, yeah. It was clearly traceable to face recognition or whatever. Now we don’t even know how it works. We’ve handed it over to AIs that just know when it’s you, based on—who the hell knows?”

“So, getting back to the point of my question,” Zula said, a little heated, “suppose this mysterious AI, the gatekeeper, couldn’t recognize you anymore. Which is what I was trying to express with the archaic expression ‘forget the password.’”