The Fenris Principle, a.k.a. the Mad God Rule (which had never actually been invoked), envisioned a Mad God and laid down some rules of thumb for coping with same (Fenris was a giant wolf of Norse mythology who, it was prophesied, would return one day to fuck everything up, and such were the ground rules of that mythos that there was nothing the gods could do about it). The closest they’d ever come to a Mad God scenario had been Dodge destroying the hive, and El ejecting Dodge and the Pantheon. The classic Mad God hypothetical was: what if El tried to revoke the law of gravity? It would affect everything in Bitworld at once: not just B & G (rivers would stop running downhill, etc.) but every single soul at once (they would all see rocks, and themselves, floating, their perceptions and thinking would undergo radical shifts, they would talk to one another about it). In the space of a few seconds the resource usage would jump up by orders of magnitude. Cooling systems would overheat, circuit breakers trip; previously undetected bugs would make their presence felt. The whole system would likely go down. In theory it could be rebooted; in practice no one even wanted to contemplate what a cold restart would entail and whether it would work at all.

So there was a general consensus that Mad Gods needed to be checked if their actions created such existential risks, and there were committees and task forces and draft policy papers that always consumed a few schedule slots and conference rooms at ACTANSS. But if you talked to one of the purportedly responsible parties after hours at the bar, he or she would freely admit that they knew as little of what would happen in such an eventuality as Cold War civil defense officials trying to plan for global thermonuclear war.

Thus the problematic Mag 0–2 processes. When Enoch, as the eminence grise of people whose job it was to think about this stuff, proposed that everyone just give up on any hope of trying to fit those weird old souls into a systematic picture, most of them were hugely relieved and excited by the prospect of buckling down to work on a project that actually might have some hope of success, or at least discernible progress: namely, trying to make sense of the vastly more numerous recently uploaded souls and their relationship to “life and death,” or as Enoch had dubbed it, “death after death.” Those more recently booted-up souls had enough in common with one another that one could at least begin to think about them systematically. They all consumed about the same amount of resources. Their virtual bodies all had roughly the same shape and size and they all affected one another, and the inanimate things around them, through the same kinds of interactions.