“If I lose the ability to verify my identity—my ownership of the PURDAH—if the mysterious AIs somehow stop recognizing me as me, then the authority vested in that toho is lost forever.”

“And what does that cash out to, on a practical level?” Maeve asked.

“Surprisingly little,” Sophia said. “I am Atropos.”

“For those of us who haven’t boned up on our D’Aulaires’ lately, could you explain that?” Zula asked dryly.

“Atropos was the Fate who had the power to cut the threads of life. I have the power to terminate processes by typing ‘quit’ or ‘kill’ or whatever into a terminal window—I’d have to look up the man page to know the exact command. If I became disconnected from the relevant PURDAH, no one else would have that ability.”

“But creating new processes is a different story,” Maeve said, half statement and half question.

“Because it’s an open protocol for exchange of messages,” Corvallis said, “anyone can launch a process that participates. Of course, only a few people have the know-how to launch a process that’s actually interesting. Basically that power is limited to us and to El Shepherd.”

“This places Sinjin’s demands in a different light,” Marcus said. “To hear him tell it, all that El’s really asking for is the same root-level access that Sophia has had from the very beginning. Shared authority. But if the only special ability Sophia has is that of Atropos, then why does he want it?”

“He wants to kill Dodge and Verna and the others,” Maeve said.

Sophia shrugged. “I may have oversimplified it. I can perform some other administrative functions that El can’t. Basically having to do with limiting resource usage. In retrospect, if I’d thought all of this through at the beginning, I’d have imposed some limits on how much memory the Process could allocate for itself, how much processing power it could use, and so on.”

“That’s what a system administrator would normally do as a matter of course,” Corvallis explained, for Zula’s benefit. “Like, back in the old days, if I were installing a piece of software on a system with a one-terabyte hard drive, I’d set a quota saying that the software wasn’t allowed to allocate more than, say, half a terabyte for its own use—otherwise it’d crowd out all of the other processes and crash.”

“I never did that,” Sophia said, “because Jake and later El threw resources at the Process faster than it could consume them. Everyone was so fascinated by its growth that they just wanted to let it run unfettered, as an experiment.”

“I see,” Zula said, “and later El came to regret that choice because of the dominance that the Process had achieved.”