As such it became impossible to really track the stories of individual souls. The audience could no longer follow it like a Mexican soap opera or a Russian novel. Now the fans were all like psychohistorians, seeing history unfold in broad sweeps.

The new race of souls that El had invented in his tower continued to issue forth in waves, and it seemed clear that El had given them the task of making things run smoothly, seeing to it that the customers—the much more numerous souls spawned from scanned biologicals—didn’t run rampant. They rarely crossed the widening channel that separated most of the Land from the chunk that had split off. This continued to fragment over time, gradually turning into a close-packed archipelago. Sooner or later most of the Mag 1–3 souls ended up there in various guises. The later children of Eve had sex with each other and made more of their kind.

Centuries passed in Bitworld, years passed in Meatspace. C-plus felt himself undergoing a slow transition from young-old to old-old. He spent less and less time trying to track events in Bitworld, only checking in occasionally on Maeve, Verna, and a few others. Metatrons showed up occasionally to lodge complaints about alleged further activities of the REAP. C-plus heard them out patiently, as one did with a distant relative who has gone off his rocker and begun fulminating about the Illuminati. Dodge was here, Dodge was there, Dodge was everywhere in disguise, something had to be done about Dodge. Eventually they seemed to fix the problem and then they stopped complaining.

He didn’t care, because he was flying.

When he had been a child, ninety years ago, Corvallis Kawasaki had dreamed of flying. Not in a daydreamy way, but in really convincing night dreams in which he had spread his arms like wings and taken to the air above the town that was his namesake and banked and wheeled above his school playground, looking down on the other kids on their teeter-totters and jungle gyms. All of which had been just as exhilarating as you would expect.

As with so many other things that seemed, in a child’s imagination, like they would be awesome, the reality of flight was more complicated, and how you dealt emotionally with the mismatch between the little-kid dream and the grown-up truth of the matter said a lot about you and basically kind of determined what you were going to do with your life. He had also, for a while, wanted to be a fireman, a ninja, and a private eye. But when he had come to understand what those occupations were really like, he had changed his mind. Being a Roman soldier had been fun for a while too, but past a certain age you couldn’t dig those ditches anymore.