Less agreeable was Surprise Number 2: a late-model Metatron, seated across from him and engaged in conversation. Telepresence robots weren’t surprising in and of themselves. But most of the people who did business with the Forthrast Family Foundation understood that sending a Metatron was just plain tasteless.

The look that C-plus gave her, when he spied her through the glass wall, told her that she should come in and get a load of this. So she entered. The robot had its back to the door. Of course, robots did not actually need to sit down in chairs, but it was conventional for them to do so. Zula circled halfway around the table and gave C-plus a warm shoulder squeeze as she slipped behind him. Then she sat down to look at the robot. Its face was blank. C-plus was, therefore, talking either to a human who (somewhat rudely) wished to remain anonymous, or to some artificial intelligence advanced enough to be worth treating as human.

Something about the whole vibe, in other words, told her that this thing must have issued forth from the center of all El-like weirdness in Zelrijk-Aalberg.

Last time she had bothered to check numbers, the server farms owned by El’s part of ALISS had consumed 31 percent of all electrical power generated on the planet, and they’d begun building solar power stations in orbit. Which she’d have found astonishing, were it not for the fact that Forthrast-related entities consumed 11 percent of all power on Earth, and had funded a lot of the research on orbital energy supply.

Generating all of that mana took a lot of electricity, not just for the computers but for the cooling systems needed to keep them from overheating. Technology existed for that, and new tech could be invented, but new laws of thermodynamics couldn’t. All cooling systems needed to reject waste heat somewhere—which is why the back of a refrigerator is warm. Thinking on a planetary scale—which, looking ahead to a future Mag 10 system, was the only way you could usefully think—the world was going to become a large spherical refrigerator hurtling through space. It would get energy from the sun and it would eject heat into the universe by aiming vast warm panels into the dark.

Working in space was difficult for humans but easy for robots. So robots too had to be built, maintained, powered, and cooled. When stacked up against mana production, fleets of rockets, swarms of orbital power stations, and armies of robots, the energy budget needed to keep Meatspace’s dwindling human population fed, clothed, housed, and entertained was looking more and more like a mere round-off error.

All of that was sorted. The consortium had been running smoothly for a long time now. Long enough to hire consultants who pointed out that SLUZA was a terrible name and talked them into using ALISS in all customer-facing communications. C-plus kept tabs on ALISS with his counterparts in Zelrijk-Aalberg, and when weird problems came up—which was increasingly rarely—they could usually wait to be ironed out at the next ACTANSS.