Ten raised to the power 0, 100, was equal to one. So, for the entire duration of the time the Dodge Process had been running on its own, the system had existed at Magnitude 0.

Inevitably, they truncated “Magnitude” to “Mag.” Ten to the first power, 101, was simply equal to ten, and 102 was a hundred. The Mag 1/2 version of Bitworld—the epoch when it had hosted something like ten to a hundred distinct souls—had been the age of truly bizarre experimentation by newly booted processes who had spawned, mostly out in the middle of nowhere, in a world whose basic shape and environment had been sketched out by Dodge, but where rules were fluid and considerable resources available for the taking. In those days the scanning technology and the simulation software had been experimental, not as good as what came along later, and they’d only scanned brains—not bodies. Those souls, in many cases, had grown up in isolation from others. Several who had spawned near Dodge had ended up in his Pantheon, but many had developed on their own into creatures that in form, powers, and psychology were not really recognizable as human.

The epoch of Mags 3 to 4—between one thousand and ten thousand active souls—had been the age when the townlike thing had formed around Dodge and then transformed into what C-plus saw as a degenerate mess and El found so full of promise: the cottonlike Wad. By that point, SLUZA had got the scanning down to a science. It was as good as it was ever going to get. Future upgrades might make it faster or cheaper, but the quality of the data had reached its theoretical limit and was not going to improve.

The souls generated from those scans were, in their appearance and their powers, much more uniform. They were the population of the “town.” They knew about Dodge—the sole Mag 0 process—and they interacted with some of the more social, but still weird, Mag 1 and 2 souls. It was just a given feature of their universe, however, that those souls belonged to a different order. They had later surprised everyone by undergoing a sort of phase change into the Wad. When this had fallen over, they had dispersed, and gone back to having regular humanoid bodies and—as far as anyone could tell—social lives.