Zula had fallen out of the habit of watching Bitworld, because, by and large, it happened too fast to be really intelligible. She wondered if she was senile—or if she seemed that way. She had a memory of a Thanksgiving, more than a hundred years ago, when she and some of her cousins had been hanging out in the TV room of the Forthrast farmhouse in Iowa, passing the time with a video game, and she had looked up at some point to see Uncle Claude, spry and curious at eighty-three, standing in the doorway looking at the big screen perfectly aghast. It was hard to tell how long he’d been standing there trying to make sense of it all. But there was clearly a feeling that some combination of age and culture shock had shifted Uncle Claude into a lower gear than all the other people in the room, that his clock was ticking at a slower rate than everyone else’s.

When Zula—or anyone else in Meatspace—watched Bitworld, that was, of course, literally true. The Time Slip Ratio had veered all over the place during the century that Zula had been doing this job. But in the last couple of decades, since ALISS had gone orbital, the trend had been toward greater speed. Freed from earthbound limitations on how much power could be generated, how much heat dissipated, how much fiber laid, and how many resources quarried out of the ground (for they built everything out of asteroids now), they’d kept pace with demand and then some. Consequently time in Bitworld had, on the whole, sped up. It was no longer like watching a human drama acted out in real time. More like an ant colony.

So she had stopped looking at it. Oh, she could see it perfectly well. Presbyopia had given way to cataracts, organic lenses replaced with artificial ones. The retinas she’d been born with had been swapped out for new ones, grown in a lab, hooked up to her optic nerve by a microscopic robot surgeon. For a while, her brain’s visual cortex hadn’t known what to make of the new and improved signals coming in on that channel, and so she had had to learn how to see again—a difficult thing for one of her age, but made easier by neuroplasticity medication derived from the stuff Maeve had experimented with ages ago.

So now Zula could see every bit as well as she had been able to when she had been seven years old. It was just that she would rather use that faculty to look at things in the real world. When gazing into the land of the dead, she felt that same bafflement, the same disconnect, as Uncle Claude.