At the same moment, someone in El’s Meatspace headquarters metaphorically threw a huge Frankenstein blade switch to the On position and activated a lot of computers that they had apparently stockpiled in advance. Which they more or less had to, since El’s process consumed power comparable to Dodge’s, and he brought with him an entourage of scanned and cached souls who were all booted up at the same time. Each of them was a Pantheon-class soul in his or her own right. So El didn’t show up alone, weak and tentative like most new processes; he was a big deal from day one, and he had help, and he had vast amounts of new processing power and memory to draw upon.

When El moved from Meatspace to Bitworld, all of the weird drama seemed to move along with him. Zelrijk-Aalberg (Z-A) calmed down and began to work more constructively with South Lake Union (SLU).

They had no choice but to get along, if they were going to keep the Afterlife up and running. Tens of thousands of processes had already been booted up. In the Land of the Living, millions of persons had paid deposits and signed paperwork obligating Z-A or SLU to scan and reboot them upon death. They had a business to run.

A decade passed in Meatspace. Yet more computational resources came online. Half-facetiously, people in the know started referring to those as mana: a term that Dungeons and Dragons types had, decades earlier, culturally appropriated from Polynesian religion. In some role-playing games, mana was a kind of magical fuel that characters accumulated, stored, and then burned when they performed magical spells. In its new usage, it referred to all of the computational infrastructure needed to make Bitworld run: the CPUs, which nowadays were all quantum devices; the memory storage systems; the networking gear that sent messages back and forth between various subprocesses; and all of the electrical generating equipment and cooling gear needed to keep that stuff running. The more of that that came online, the faster and better Bitworld ran. Investments that they’d made years ago began to pay off. The amount of mana climbed at a rate that would have seemed impossible a few years ago. It easily outpaced the rate at which people were dying, and being scanned, in Meatspace.

Accordingly, the Time Slip Ratio sped up. That was a way of saying that the simulation was running more rapidly than real time. Years, as perceived and counted by the dead, were passing faster in Bitworld than they were for the living in Meatspace.