It was a baseball analogy. Sometimes in a baseball game a situation would gradually develop, over the course of a long, slow inning, where the bases became loaded, and the batting team was down to its last out, and the count had gone full, the manager had made a couple of trips to the mound, a replacement pitcher was warming up in the bullpen, the batter was fouling off one pitch after another, the crowd was about to piss itself—and then in a moment something happened that changed everything.

Some such thing happened one day in Bitworld. Adam was dead. Eve was on the move, pregnant, following a member of the Ephrata Eleven that had incarnated itself as an enormous humanoid made of boulders and dirt. They were traveling across a chunk of the landform that had snapped off and was drifting out to sea, fragmenting as it went. New souls—apparently spawned from scratch, not based on scans of dead people—were issuing from El’s spire in the center of the Landform and taking up residence in strategic locations and, to all appearances, bossing around the souls that had got there in the usual way.

It was all terrifically expensive, mana-wise. The events that triggered it—the chopping down of a tree, the awakening of a giant, the inundation of a town, the murder of “Adam,” and most of all the fission of the continent—took place over the course of a few days as experienced by the souls of Bitworld. Simulating all of that, however, ended up taking almost a year in Meatspace. Millions of spectators lost interest in the Landform Visualization Utility. Those who stuck with it had to find new sources of enjoyment, such as zooming in on individual flowers, gazing upon mountain vistas from various angles, going on virtual hikes through frozen landscapes where birds hung nearly motionless in the air.

This intermission, if you wanted to think of it that way (in baseball terms, maybe a seventh-inning stretch), lasted for a couple of Meatspace years. During that time both SLU and Z-A were laying plans for the next phase of Bitworld’s expansion: the demographic transition from Mag 6 to Mag 8 (a million souls up to a hundred million); the bringing online, in orbit, of vast new arrays of solar power, computing systems, and thermal radiators to shine dull infrared into the cosmos. So it wasn’t a bad time anyway for an intermission. When finally the switches were thrown and the new equipment brought online, the Time Slip Ratio sprang ahead by orders of magnitude, to the point where months would fly by in Bitworld during a single day in Meatspace. Over the course of an afternoon C-plus could, if he so chose, watch bare trees wax soft and green, go red and orange with the colors of the fall, and lose their leaves.