Simple enough in theory. There was—as always—a catch, which was that you couldn’t just boot up a fresh copy of the original scan from scratch. Or even of the virtual body at the moment the tree hit it. The techno-philosophical arguments were hyperarcane, but a straightforward analogy familiar to every consumer who had ever had to reboot an out-of-whack device was that these things were unfathomably complicated, with a million subsystems that had to be interconnected just so. If only one of those interconnections was wrong, the whole thing didn’t work. In theory, anything could be debugged and patched up, but in practice it was quicker and gave better results if you just shut the whole thing down and started again from a clean slate.

And Enoch wasn’t pretending he had all of the answers to these questions. That wasn’t the point of his talk. The point was to ask them.

A few people Sophia knew and liked were lounging around in the big hot tub out on the deck, so, after she had got her fill of amortality, she shut down the treadmill, pulled off her wearable, poked it into an external pocket of Daisy, and carried it out and set it on a nearby shelving unit used to store terry-cloth bathrobes. She peeled off her clothes and enjoyed a dip for fifteen minutes or so, turning down the offer of a hit on a cannabis pipe that was making the rounds. But the social scene was winding down, and she was tired, so she climbed out and grabbed one of the thick bathrobes from the shelves. After putting it on, she wrapped Daisy up in her workout clothes. She padded back along the resort’s web of footpaths, boardwalks, and covered walkways to the little cottage that had been assigned to her as her lodging. This comprised a small living/working/dining room with a kitchenette and a bedroom, both of which had views out over the waters of Desolation Sound through glass doors. Just outside was a flagstone terrace barely wide enough to accommodate a couple of deck chairs and a coffee table. The cottage had been sited close to the brink of the steep drop-off to the waterfront, so a waist-high glass barrier had been erected to prevent drunk or sleepy guests from plunging over it. An opening in that led to a wooden staircase that rambled down to the complex of docks and boardwalks about ten meters below. The most prominent feature down there was the resort’s helipad, a surprisingly tiny platform that projected out over the turbulent strait.