“The scenes are a screen projected onto the surface. They aren’t the information: they conceal it. She called the pictures ‘the scrim’—like the semitransparent screen in a theater set. The scenes project an image. A metaphor, as you said, for a generalized state. But underneath the scrim is the real pattern, the full pattern, which can only be seen when the dioramas are linked up to the full system Lilia invented. Then they allow us to look into a person’s skull. To read the state of their entire connectome.
