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“It was all a matter of other souls and their ability to perceive the changes that he was wreaking upon the world. Alone, he had the freedom to make changes at will. And with as little effort as it took to imagine the desired result. When other souls were watching, however, it became much more difficult. He guessed it was because any changes that he made, for example in raising a tower, were wreaking concomitant changes in the minds of all the souls that were perceiving it. And souls it seemed were powerful things in their own right with a kind of inertia about them, not easily moved. Particularly when all of them had to be moved in a kind of unison, all agreeing as to the shape of what was being made despite seeing it from many different points of views, as if all things in the world were webbed together by bands that had to stretch or break in order for change to occur, and those bands were woven by the perceptions of souls.” — Neal Stephenson