Depending on the current value of the Time Slip Ratio, sometimes they did those things very fast and sometimes very slowly. When SLUZA had more than sufficient mana to throw at Bitworld, it could run faster than reality. The dead people in those towns became blurs. Buildings went up and forests were cut down as if in a time-lapse movie. When ALISS—AfterLife Infrastructure and Systems Support—sagged under the load, Bitworld slowed to a crawl. You could sit there for hours watching your dead grandmother walk across a room. As SLUZA had got good at manufacturing quantum computers and laying down fiber, the Time Slip Ratio had shot up. Time in Bitworld had leapt forward. But this had attracted more uploads and created more demand, slowing it down again until more capacity could be added, and so on and so forth. Back and forth that pendulum had swung a few times since Sophia and El had gone into the afterlife. On average, though, time in Bitworld had run faster. Hundreds of simulated years had passed. Their view of it had looked like a time-lapse. You had to slow it down in order to see what was happening. Lately, the pendulum had been swinging the other way and it had been running slower—approaching parity, meaning that time in the two worlds was progressing at about the same pace. Zula had checked in on it from time to time, out of idle curiosity, and out of a hope that she might glimpse her daughter.

So it was with spectation on the activities of the dead in Bitworld. In many ways, these were as mundane as they could be. Except that there was one difference, which was psychologically important to living spectators: the dead were dead. They had once been flesh-and-blood humans. Now their bodies were gone, and by any biological standard they were dead. But there was no doubt that they had gone on to an afterlife. And there didn’t seem to be any limit as to how long they could stay there.

The awareness that death was not permanent and that everyone could potentially live forever was the most momentous thing that humans could possibly have learned. The only things that might have rivaled it would have been proof of the existence of God, or the discovery of alien civilizations in other star systems. But neither of those had actually happened.