“You got here just in time!” someone exclaimed. It was Eva, a younger staff member whose mere presence and energy always made Zula feel very much like Uncle Claude. But she was a lovely person and Zula really didn’t mind.

“Just in time for what?” Zula asked. Her voice cracked and rasped; she didn’t use it much nowadays. She was maneuvering sideways trying to get a better angle; Fronk was respecting her overall dictates but doing so in a way that didn’t violate any safety heuristics. Zula, left to her own devices, would have used her little-old-lady prerogatives to elbow her way through the crowd. So progress was safe, polite, and slow.

She was piecing together glimpses. The display had been zoomed and panned to a part of the Landform that was not immediately familiar to her. She had a strong Uncle Claude feeling of not being able to make sense of what she was looking at. Then she spied a detail that helped her understand that this was the vicinity of the region once dubbed Escherville, exactly because it did not, in fact, make sense. It was a zone where notoriously the Landform Visualization Utility had never been able to pull together a coherent geometry. For decades, Ph.D. students and postdocs had tried to debug it. They had concluded that there was no bug; the LVU was working perfectly; the Landform hereabouts actually did not make any sense and so it just had to be shown in a suggestive and unstable way.

So Zula was looking at Escherville: the baroque castle-like structure that Dodge had built in the middle of it, the unsightly additions that El had made to it later. Not far away, the verdant zone where Verna tended to hang out with one of the new processes she had spawned—the one that looked female—inevitably, Eve. Probably, come to think of it, the namesake of the young woman at Zula’s elbow.

“What’s been going on?” Zula asked.

“Time Slip Ratio has been dropping—big processes using a lot of mana, loading the heck out of the systems,” said Eva. “It is actually approaching one now. That’s the lowest—”

“Lowest it has been in decades,” said Zula.

“But earlier today—in Meatspace time, that is—Sophia and the people she’s with teleported from the extreme southwest to an area north of here. Later they teleported a second time—not as far.”

Eva was so freaked out by that that Zula felt obliged to let her know, “Pluto used to teleport, way back when. We haven’t seen much of it since he moved to Landform Two.”

“Well anyway, they’ve been on the move southward ever since.”

“They?”

“Sophia and a group of other processes—including Corvallis and Maeve! And guess who has been hot on their trail?”