“I see it changing though!” Eva exclaimed. She sounded so convinced of this that Zula maneuvered closer to where she was standing, trying to see it. Eva was gazing at “Mercury,” suspended above the palace with wings spread wide, horn pressed to his lips. And something about him created the most extraordinary impression in Zula’s mind. He was not moving. And yet he was changing all the time. Changing for the better. His wings, his hair, the expression on his face: the display simply couldn’t update itself fast enough to capture all the detail.

Zula was remembering her early days working for Dodge’s video game company, when the graphics cards that drew the pixels on your screen sometimes just didn’t have the oomph to get the job done and so you would have to turn down the resolution, slow the frame rate, get rid of the fancy textures, just so you could play the game at full speed. It made everything look bad, but sometimes you just had to do it. When you turned that stuff back on, it was striking how beautiful, how real, the graphics could look.

What was now clear to her was that all her seeing of the Landform up until now had been with the graphics turned down to the fast-but-crappy setting. It had to be that way, for the LVU to keep up with the pace of events in Bitworld.

“Ten to the minus four,” someone intoned. “Just unbelievable.”

Ten thousand seconds—about three hours—now had to go by to simulate one second of time in Bitworld. The system was overwhelmed.

“But everything’s still basically working, right?” Eva asked.

“Perfectly.” Meaning that the processes who inhabited Bitworld were not experiencing it any differently than they had been before this slowdown. The flow of time, the qualia they experienced, were all the same.

And what qualia! Zula stepped in even closer. Every hair on Mercury’s head was now being rendered by graphics algorithms that suddenly had a lot of time on their hands and that had been turned up to eleven. The sun was not only bouncing off of but refracting through every shaft of hair, making it both gleam and glow. The lenses of his eyes glistened with moisture, and she could see that he was just about to begin weeping. But the tear in the corner of his eye had not yet broken loose. She could see the world reflected in it.

He was beautiful. The whole place was beautiful.

“Makes you want to go there, doesn’t it?” asked a man’s voice, just next to her.

She turned to see that older chap who had made the joke earlier, and recognized him as Enoch Root.

“Did you really just ask me if I want to die?” she shot back.

He just got a wry look and said nothing. As if she had caught him out in some mischief.