Comp sci Ph.D.s and, yes, philosophers and theologians had now gathered together at ACTANSS 5 to talk about the nature of the problem. Today Enoch Root had taken it upon himself to stake out a position on all of this. He was trying to get out ahead of people who were saying, “Fortunately there’s an easy solution to this—failed processes can simply be rebooted!” He wanted to bring to their attention certain complications that were perplexing, verging on disastrous. Given the reverence in which he was increasingly held, both in South Lake Union and Zelrijk-Aalberg, his was now the dominant, or at least the default, position—the one that all of the competing service providers might end up writing into their EULAs. It was big and complicated but it was summarized under the term “amortality.”

“If a tree falls on a forester, does it hurt?” had been the opening line of his talk today. The answer was “Yes, because otherwise the system falls apart.”

The Dodge Process, for whatever reason, had covered the Landform with trees. More recently arrived souls had begun chopping them down and using them for things such as shelter. Tree pieces were useless—you couldn’t make houses of them—unless they had physical properties such as weight, hardness, and stiffness. So far so good. But if a tree happened to fall on a person, it couldn’t suddenly turn into a pillow. Or rather it could—you could do anything with a computer program, after all—but what kind of a world was that, really? Our brains—be they flesh-and-blood Meatspace brains or their carefully husbanded digital simulations in Bitworld—weren’t hooked up to make sense of a universe where trees turned into pillows the moment they became dangerous. Once you made a special carve-out for falling trees, there was no end to it; very soon the whole universe stopped making sense, or “decohered.”

There was only one way out of it, and that was amortality. Not immortality—because when a tree fell on a forester, that forester had to get hurt, and maybe to die. But “to die” here did not mean to be extirpated forever. The form—the body—in which the soul had been clothing itself up until the moment when the tree hit it, that had to take damage and the damage had to have real consequences. If it was severe enough, then it was best for the soul in question to abandon that body and get a new one.