Losing your child was the opposite of that. A perverse twist in the story, where the wrong person gets hit by that bus, leaving behind, alone on the stage, survivors who never expected and never wanted to be in the spotlight. It wasn’t the worst thing about losing your child, of course, but it was a part of the dismal picture.

A decade and a half after Sophia’s death, the tears still came to Zula at the strangest moments. In many ways, the consequences to her and Csongor, and to their relationship, had been typical. They had gone for a week, then a month, then a year without having sex. Csongor had moved out of the condo, unable to bear its associations with the daughter they’d raised there, and Zula had become almost a recluse inside of it. After two years they had gone through the formality of a divorce. They didn’t hate each other. They didn’t not love each other. But the entire basis of the marriage seemed to have been erased.

As years had gone by, however, Zula’s grief had come less frequently. More often she had felt emotions akin to those that had vexed her so when Sophia had gone away to college. For they had, of course, scanned Sophia’s remains when they’d pulled her out of the water. She hadn’t been dead that long, and the brain had been well preserved by the cold. A new process had been launched, in accordance with detailed and unprecedented instructions that Sophia had left behind in a last will and testament that she had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare in the weeks before her death. Corvallis Kawasaki had been the executor of that will and he had seen to it that everything was done.

The resulting process had, from time to time, interacted with the granddaddy of all processes—the one that Sophia herself had launched out of Dodge’s Brain—until the latter had mysteriously ceased functioning. Around the same time, observers in Meatspace had begun to lose visibility into Bitworld. Until then, the whole Landform had been an open book, containing nothing that was hidden from the all-seeing eye of the Landform Visualization Utility. But the new place that had been established by Dodge, Sophia, and the Pantheon—Landform Prime or Landform 2, as some called it—was obfuscated by some kind of trickery. “Obnubilated,” according to Enoch Root—a word that had forced everyone to go to their dictionaries. It meant “hidden under clouds.”

Sophia had coinvented the Landform Visualization Utility and so it seemed most unlikely that this was a mere coincidence.

Her process left enough of a data trail in the system that they could be certain it was still up and running. But it never phoned home—never made any effort, so far as they could discern, to communicate with those left behind. In the offices of the Forthrast Family Foundation, Zula and other mourners had watched, as best they could, the flows of data and inscrutable shiftings of money and of mana associated with the Sophia process. But they heard nothing.