“It came as a surprise that the other processes launched out of El’s network gravitated to the first one and glommed on to it rather than growing independently,” Corvallis said, nodding.

“Okay,” Marcus said. The skepticism in his voice was clear. “So Sinjin’s going to claim that El merely wants the authority to rein in out-of-control processes. Build some fences around them. Impose the normal quotas and so on that Sophia never put into place.”

“There’s other stuff he could do, like erect barriers around ‘our’ processes to limit their interaction with ‘his’ processes,” Sophia said, air-quoting.

“Which sounds reasonable. But we can’t give him the ability to do those things without at the same time giving him the power of Atropos,” Marcus said, holding up two fingers and making a snip.

“I would have to do some research on that,” Sophia said.

“How does it look to you, based on this morning?” Zula asked Marcus.

“Sinjin’s constructed a pretty airtight box around us,” Marcus admitted. “Until the Wad happened, nothing was resource-constrained. The world’s supply of quantum supercomputing clusters, bandwidth, and storage were able to keep abreast of the growth.”

“Which is no accident,” Corvallis put in. “El built all of that specifically to support all of the processes he was launching.”

“Of course,” Marcus said. “But he was making the assumption that each new process would add only a certain amount of load to the system. All of those assumptions went out the window when the Wad began to take shape. The amount of computation in that thing is an order of magnitude larger than what we saw in the old scheme where the processes weren’t so tightly linked. The system’s threatening to burn itself out.”

“You know my opinion on this,” Corvallis said. “It’s degenerate activity. A lot of these things have just gotten caught up in infinite loops. Race conditions. There’s no meaningful computation happening in the Wad.”

“But it’s just your opinion,” Marcus reminded him. “Imagine you’re in front of a jury in a civil case, trying to get them to believe that. You need to be able to say with a straight face that all of the computation associated with Dodge and the Pantheon processes is legit, but everything in the Wad is ‘degenerate.’”

Sophia was nodding her head. “It’d be a different story if we actually knew what those processes were thinking. But all we have to go on is traffic analysis and burn rate.”

“I disagree,” Corvallis said. “We have plenty of track record indicating that the result of the Pantheon’s computation is the Landform. What’s the result of all the computation in the Wad? Nothing that we can discern.”

“Again. Jury,” Marcus said.

“We can’t enter Critique of Pure Reason into evidence?” Maeve cracked.