Which were, when you came down to it, close copies—reproductions—performances—of the bodies people had in Meatspace and the way those bodies related to one another and to the world.

And you couldn’t have that without mortality—or at least morbidity. So amortality—both as a philosophical abstraction and as a feature pitched by service providers to their customers—was that your soul would always be rebooted if something went badly wrong. And it wouldn’t be a totally fresh start. It wasn’t as if the new memories accumulated during the afterlife that had just ended were erased. Efforts would be made to preserve some continuous thread of identity connecting the new life just being rebooted back to the one that had been cut short by the falling tree, or whatever.

Besides amortality, other big topics addressed by the sages of SLUZA included morpho-teleology and phased embodiment.

“Morpho” meant form, “teleology” meant something that was preordained, determined in advance, frequently used as a scare word by people who believed things ought to develop on their own, without constraints. In this case, the notion was that the industry had actually taken a wrong turn when it had started to heed the advice of the neurologists and gone over to full-body scanning. Because of course if you scanned nerves all the way down to the toes and simulated interactions of gut bacteria with the cells of the intestinal lining, why, the resultant processes in Bitworld wouldn’t feel complete until they had created digital toes and digital stomachs and everything in between. Digital life had the potential to be so much more than bio-life and yet the morpho-teleologists were going about it in a basically flawed way that ensured that the souls of Bitworld would remain trapped in a tiny, crowded, and not very interesting corner of the space of all possibilities. They could no longer become gods or angels.

Phased embodiment was a proposed solution to both (a) morpho-teleology and (b) the reality that sustainable infrastructure couldn’t be built on Earth fast enough to immediately give every single dead person a full humanoid body and a nice plot of land in Bitworld. Simulating the clear stream running past your homestake, babbling merrily over rocks, not to mention the smoke coming out of your chimney, was expensive. It was doable at Mag 7 but couldn’t be ramped up fast enough to keep pace with the death rate. Dead people could still be scanned and the scans could, of course, be archived—maybe even booted up as new processes—but giving them fancy places to live, with high-grade qualia, was not physically possible, and might not be for a few decades—which, as the computing centers bogged down under all that load, could correspond to centuries in Bitworld.