Those events coincided more or less with the boundary between Mags 3 and 4 and Mags 5 and 6, which was to say the era when the population had expanded from about ten thousand souls to more like one hundred thousand, on a growth curve that would pretty soon take it to a million. So it was maybe fortuitous that, after the Wad had dispersed, the population had spread out to occupy more of the Landform. In a Wad-like configuration, population density could be very high. But most customers, observing all of this in the LVU, didn’t fancy spending the afterlife in something like an insect colony. Heaven for them had grass, trees, fresh water, and sunsets. Projecting the numbers forward, the Landform was easily large enough to afford such comforts to 107 (ten million) souls—maybe even 108 (a hundred million) if they kept clustering together in cities, as seemed to be the trend along the banks of the big river in the east.

Anyway, by that yardstick they were at about Mag 5 (hundreds of thousands of souls) when the paperwork was signed on the consortium that became known as SLUZA. Its engineers rolled up their sleeves and got to work on the big difficult issues that they were going to have to solve as the system grew from there to Mag 8, 9, and beyond. Eventually they’d have to get it up to at least Mag 10: ten billion souls, assuming that everyone alive on Earth in the middle of the twenty-first century wanted to be scanned and uploaded.

Beyond that, it was unlikely to get much bigger. Partly that was for technical reasons: planet Earth could only support so much computational activity. Partly it was because population growth had plunged through zero and become decline.

Making the management of all this much more difficult than it ought to have been was the extreme differentness of various souls. So, after a couple of years’ inconclusive wrangling and beard pulling, the people who ran SLUZA wreaked a vast simplification on the whole picture: they agreed to just ignore a couple of hundred processes that had been booted up in the early days when there had been no standards and everything had been in flux.