“The fact is,” Marcus said, “that the Wad plays directly into El’s hands by creating a shortage of computational power that never existed before. And he can use that shortage as leverage against us. What could be more reasonable sounding than to say it’s time to impose some limits?”

“It didn’t take him all morning just to say that,” Zula pointed out.

“Everything else is just Sinjin sending the message that if we don’t agree to El’s request he can make an amount of trouble for us that’s big enough that it’ll be easier to just change our minds.”

Food was served, and conversation stopped for a while as all reached into the middle of the table to tear the injera bread and pinch up mouthfuls of spicy food. Once Maeve had taken the edge off of her hunger, though, she wiped her hands on a napkin and spoke: “I draw the line at giving El, or anyone, the power to terminate a process. I’ve already lost my sister once. If the process we’ve named Verna is in any sense Verna, then I want her protected. And the same goes for any little nieces and nephews.”

The others took a minute or so to process that. Verna, who was Maeve’s only sibling, had died childless. Corvallis was an only child. It was an impossibility for Maeve to have any nieces or nephews. One by one, the others got puzzled looks on their faces until Corvallis turned to her and said, “You might want to unpack that for them, sweetheart.”

“We’re seeing evidence that a new process is being assembled. Connected with Verna.”

“That’s been going on for a while now, right?” Marcus asked. “That’s what makes the behavior of Verna different from all the others: she has figured out how to spawn processes that run on their own.”

Maeve held her thumb and index finger barely apart. “Wee ones. Little ‘hello world’ contraptions that run on their own. They don’t do much. Don’t consume a lot of resources.”

“They all get billed to our accounts,” Corvallis added, “so we can track them. They are too tiny to matter.”

“Until now,” Maeve said. “Now Verna’s working on spawning two big ones.” She looked to Corvallis, who nodded in confirmation. “The new process looks to be on a similar scale to a scanned human connectome. It’s been a-building for a few months.”

Marcus nodded, getting it. “So that’s what you meant when you were talking about nieces and nephews.”

“Maybe that’s another reason El’s gotten so cranky,” Zula said. “If our processes figure out how to make new copies of themselves, it could go viral in a hurry, and crowd out his.”