Much more interesting were the contents of the Enoch Root bucket, which was brimming over with discussion of a talk he had given earlier today on the subject of amortality. Not satisfied with giving it only one clever title, he had titled it “Amortality; or, Death after Death.”

His recent work on this topic had come about in the wake of a weird interaction, some months ago, between the Dodge Process and another soul, which had seemingly led to the latter’s being completely annihilated. In the LVU they could watch replays of the event, albeit in grainy, herky-jerky style and with no sound. It took place in the “Town Square” and started with what looked like an altercation between a member of the Pantheon and a town dweller. The latter was armed with some manner of tool or weapon, which he used to strike the former and inflict damage. Dodge then showed up and did something very computationally expensive, at the end of which the assailant no longer existed.

Of course, the system administrators had a backup copy of his data. Certain token holders had the privileges needed to reboot the terminated process. But first some questions needed to be answered, and, as one of those tohos, Sophia needed to pay attention to them.

For they had never considered, when they had set it all up, that souls would die. Much less that they would commit murder.

(That was not quite the right way to put it, since there were so many things they had not considered—such a vast scope of unintended consequences. But little point in fretting about that. This was how things got started now. You either paused to consult all of the stakeholders and think through all of the possible consequences—in which case you’d certainly end up doing nothing at all, since complex systems had consequences that were infinite and imponderable—or you just went for it and pressed the Enter key.)