Or they could have just booted everything up at full resolution on the equipment they had. This would work, on an engineering level. But the Time Slip Ratio would slow to a crawl. Years might pass in Meatspace while the babbling-brook and swirling-chimney-smoke calculations were performed to simulate just a few seconds’ elapsed time in Bitworld. Which would make no difference at all to a soul in Bitworld, since their consciousness would be slowed down as well. And so they would experience the qualia of the brook, smoke, etc. in precisely the same way as if everything had been running a thousand times faster. But for spectators watching Bitworld from Meatspace using ever-fancier versions of the Landform Visualization Utility, it would be boring and frustrating, like trying to watch a movie over a slow connection that stopped every few seconds to buffer more data. This would create what amounted to a PR and marketing problem, since, in marketing-speak, spectation was the main driver of customer acquisition. And that was how SLUZA took in money—which was how it paid for more, faster equipment.

According to people on El’s side of the pond, phased embodiment was the answer. Souls could be booted up immediately in a far more resource-efficient form that was similar in many ways to the Wad. The original Wad, developing on its own, had been very expensive, with a lot of wasted cycles. But El’s engineers had figured out a way to make similar systems that were far more efficient; for example, they could communicate directly instead of simulating the biological processes of speech and hearing. Having a simplified form, and communicating through data packets, might not have been how most customers envisioned themselves spending all of eternity, but it was better than being dead, and it would give them some time to exist in a kind of fluid, embryonic, less-than-fully-embodied limbo for a while, during which they could perhaps explore creative alternatives to the one-size-fits-all humanoid plan that the morpho-teleological elites were foisting on them. The human fetus, floating in amniotic fluid, wasn’t yet a fully realized human. But it wasn’t a bad existence.

Keen was the interest of Maeve in morpho-teleology and the related topic of idiomorphs—souls, mostly from the Mag 0–2 era, that had nonhumanoid forms. It took Corvallis some time to understand just how keen, and by that time, their relationship was pretty much doomed, at least if you defined “relationship” as “anything even remotely like a traditional marriage.”