At their peak, the Dodge and the Verna processes had controlled more computational resources—they had spent more money, had a higher burn rate, however you chose to phrase it—than any thousand ordinary souls put together. Actually the figure was much higher than that if you considered the Landform itself to be part of the Dodge process. But since it didn’t really seem that Dodge was personally looking after each cresting wave in the ocean and each tree in the forest, SLUZA’s high council of elders decided to bucket that kind of thing separately, as subprocesses that Dodge had spawned but should no longer be billed for. So those, as well as Verna’s myriad subprocesses, were covered in what eventually came to be known as the Buildings and Grounds budget, which was split between SLUZA’s membership according to a complex and ever-shifting formula.

Which didn’t change the fact that Dodge and a number of the other old souls were just different in so many ways that merely cataloging the differences would be a lifelong task for a researcher. All bets were off when it came to those. And yet there were so few of them that devoting a lot of attention to them seemed like the wrong way to allocate resources. They had to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

Now, admittedly this was simplified quite a bit by the fact that Dodge, incomparably the most powerful, had, for lack of a better term, died. You couldn’t point to a body, but he had surrendered all of his resources, and no further billable activity had since shown up on his account. Sophia for her part seemed to flit in and out of existence. It was hard to tell since she seemed to have tricky ways of cloaking her activities.

Meanwhile the second-most resource-hungry Mag 0–2 process—the one associated with Verna—spawned two completely new processes of humanlike complexity, then dropped off the radar, reducing her level of activity to something not much out of line with a typical soul.

Maybe Verna would ramp up again later. And maybe her “children” would spawn more children, et cetera, and those would one day pose an insupportable burden on the computing infrastructure of Meatspace. But none of them was posing a problem now. The Verna process had so many interactions with Buildings and Grounds—the shared account for simulation and maintenance of the Landform’s geography, meteorology, and biology—that it was pointless trying to tease them apart. So, from an accounting point of view, the best way to manage Verna was to keep an eye on B & G’s burn rate and watch for weird upticks. Which they did. And there were indeed weird upticks. But they came and went faster than humans could schedule meetings to talk about them and never created enough of a problem to demand a response.