(Also because “soul” was so fraught with unwanted philosophical and religious baggage. But the reality was that when scanned brains were booted up as new processes, with the ability to draw upon computing resources and to interact with the other processes, they took on seemingly personlike attributes: they existed in one place, not all places; they moved about in a way that seemed physical; and they dealt with other processes in a way that seemed social. And you could try to dodge around the hard questions by sticking to neutral terminology like “process.” But they weren’t selling the service to their customers by offering to spawn processes. Every customer who paid into the plan while alive, and who had their remains scanned after their death, was doing so in the belief that the resulting process was in some sense a continuation of their existence in a sort of afterlife. No amount of dancing around could really dodge the fact that what was really being talked about here was the soul. And part of the deal—the expectation—was to keep it going indefinitely.)

It was clear that there were processes that had been spawned in the system that had taken root, grown, thrived, done things, related to others of their kind, dug holes, chopped down trees, built houses, and spanned time, and then, for one reason or another (being murdered by Dodge was only one example), ceased. You never wanted to say “ceased to exist” because the data were always squirreled away somewhere. But the process itself stopped changing and surrendered its resources to the cloud. And that included the resources needed to maintain a virtual body.

This raised a number of issues that in the flesh-and-blood world of Meatspace were categorized as “life and death” but in the business world fell under the heading of customer service. If a service provider had extracted money from a customer by promising them that they would live forever (perhaps not in so many words—but this was what most customers understood and assumed); waited for them to die; scanned their remains, and in so doing vaporized them; uploaded the scan to the cloud; brought it to a kind of life; given it qualia, experiences, a social life, memories, all of the other things that souls in Meatspace had; then allowed that to be extinguished for whatever reason, was the service provider then not guilty of letting its customers down? Friends and loved ones of the dead would notice that they were now dead again and make a stink about it and demand satisfaction. They might take their business and entrust their brains and souls to competitors who claimed they had eradicated the death bug from their systems.

In the old world, death had led to endless philosophical ruminations and spawned religions, but in Bitworld it led to one-star ratings from furious bereaved and threats of class-action lawsuits.