Fine Structure

by qntm

This is for real. This is a simulation. It's like billion-voice music. The cities here are woven from constantly singing superstrings. The trees and rivers are wondrous creations in colours I could recall the words for but choose not to, created from fabrics there are no words for. There are birds, I notice, which seem, like the rest of their world, to be made of sound. The people here are beautiful - I reach forward and pick a handful of their uncountably many minds, along with a little art, and a little language. I could see it all, given precisely one eternity, but I have a Planck heartbeat. Then it's over, Heaven number seventy-nine dopplering into our wake, torn bodily from its extradimensional moorings, fine structure bucking, scattering and shattering.

There's an echoing scream as the edge of my universe is torn violently aside.

"Ching, I'm waiting for a punchline here." "Jim thinks - and this is purely conjectural at this point - the A-Layer might not be natural. He thinks it might have been built - installed - by some other species, thousands or millions or thousands of millions of years ago. He thinks, and I agree with him, that the symbol means money. And we think the whole message is saying we need to buy a more expensive broadband package."

The Astronomer's Loss "For the future," says the astronomer. "Humanity always needs challenges, horizons, adversity, to be constantly striving for the future. We had plans for the future. We went to the Moon and we were going to found a colony there. We were going to go to Mars, and found a colony there too. We were going to colonise Europa, and Titan, and maybe others. We were going to capture and mine the asteroids, build space elevators, build ark ships and go to other star systems. We need space... so that we can study, and learn more about the universe and discover new science. We could be like you, flying faster than light-- we know it's possible now! We could gain that much power. If you only gave us the time. We could colonise the galaxy and the universe." "But you haven't." The astronomer lowers his gaze from the growing ink blot in the sky and looks towards the horizon. Bright city lights. "To survive," he says. "One world cannot protect us forever. Humanity is vulnerable, living on a single unprotected rock. We need to be insured in case of asteroid impacts, or gamma ray bursts from space. We need to diversify genetically, to adapt to new environments and live on new worlds and look at the universe through new eyes. There's no other way to survive. You're taking away billions of years of potential future." "No, we aren't." He tries to stop shaking. "We need... something to shoot for. It's the only reason we ever built anything. It's the only reason we have mathe...

"You just walked through me." "Yes," says Mitch. "I can walk through stuff. And myself." He passes his wrists through each other. "Don't-- don't do that," says Seph, "it could be bad for you." "Could it, this is what I need to know. Is this bad for me? Is it fatal?" "Have you spoken to a doctor?" "Would that help?" Seph concedes this point.

"You see this with your actual eyes? Your eyeballs focus light emanating from organs and objects which are hidden completely in darkness? Is that what you're saying, Mitchell?"

Dr Srin Shapur is minuscule. She has the kind of hair that's ideal for pinning up in a tight bun and then shaking down in slow motion halfway through the movie, and even has the thick, nerdy glasses to take off dramatically too. Unfortunately, this will never happen, because she needs the glasses to see.

As far as most of Ching's past colleagues know, he works at Google. He does not. Ching's a faster-than-light communications engineer, one of about nine in the whole world. There are only nine FTLCEngs in the whole world because FTLC does not work. Well, they should work in theory, but they don't, because, in a bitter twist of irony, they are blocked by a very loud repeating message explaining that very theory.

Ching pauses and waits for the question he knows, from reading Kavet's face, is coming. Kavet opens his mouth and Ching gestures that he can speak. "Why don't you just kill him?" "Because we're scientists."

"Go to the site of any major city and start digging. Anywhere in the world. You find layers and layers and layers of residue from earlier civilisations. You go to, I don't know, the jungle, Malaysia or South America, and you find they're crammed, absolutely stuffed to the gills, with temples and shrines and towers and homes of a dozen different styles. On every continent, you find this old, deep technology. Like solar power - we extrapolated solar power technology from stuff we discovered as archaeology. And telegraphy is the same. Underneath Russia and Europe there are these gigantic networks of high-tech underground train tracks, which work by magnets, which we'll clear out and rebuild and reactivate sooner or later. And the ocean is full of plastic waste from earlier generations, which gets harvested and converted into fuel. You go to the Arctic and you find nothing but crashed aeroplanes and airships. Like litter. There are books and carvings and pictures and stories and runes, information in a million languages, almost none of which are translatable. It's like... basically, the world is built on the wreckage of older worlds."

The last thing she says before they fill the mine with cement is that she'll outlive them all and that she'll outlive everything they ever thought of, worked for, fought for or swore loyalty to. She says if the nation's still there when she comes back then she'll tear it down single-handedly and you can write that one down for future reference. A hundred and ten years later, after everybody has forgotten, she comes back and does exactly this.

"So, first we thought that there was just some single isolated cataclysm, the Crash. Then we found that there had actually been a second Crash before that, so we called that Crash Two, which set a bad precedent, because then we found Crash Three. And then we found that there had been eight distinct Crashes, and then, just in the last few years, as archaeological science got better, we found that all of the Crashes had happened at roughly the same time. Technologically, I mean. "So civilisation rises from barbarism. From huts to bricks to alchemy to technology to the age of information. And then it plateaus. Technology can only go so far. It stays there. And some factor, some unknown element, builds up and up and up while the world stays otherwise still, and then everything overbalances and suddenly it's the Stone Age. Again. And there is no record of what causes this. Anywhere. At all. There is no electronic data. Every magnetic tape or disc is blank or full of static. Even the best-preserved ones from the most recent generation. The Information Age becomes an informational black spot. Nothing not stored concretely in the form of patterns of ink survives the cataclysm. And there is never any useful information in the ink. It's all irrelevant. There's nothing. "And so nobody remembers. Nobody remembers what caused the Crash and nobody knows how to prepare for it. So it happens again. And again. And... Right now we are just beginning to experiment with mechanical computation...

"You fear that, as a result of our work here, the world will be extinguished." "Yes." "Another Crash." "No," says Aoni Kulla. "Humanity always survives the Crash. Nuclear war is something else. The Crash is a self-defence mechanism. It prevents humanity from destroying itself. It prevents technology from advancing too far. It pulls us back when we get too close, do you see? When we learn enough to destroy ourselves, it takes that knowledge away from us."

This is how the universe works: Medium and meaning are separate. In the end, everything is just information: "I am a proton", "I have this wavefunction", "There are this many of us". When you describe something, you give information about it. It is impossible to describe something totally, because the act of description alters the thing being described. So, if you want to move something from place to place, you can't just read all the information from where it is and write all that information onto unformed vacuum at the place where you want it to be. "Heisenberg Compensators"? No. It's not the right answer. Instead, you can separate off the information from the spacetime it describes. At the quantum level, information is substance. It can be manipulated. It is possible to cleave the quantum information about a volume of spacetime away from that volume. You can't look at it. You can't read it. But you can fire it off somewhere, anywhere. It's just a matter of calculation and energy input. And when the informational packet arrives at its destination point-- well, obviously, there's information in the way already. And that gets displaced, or knocked, like two steel balls colliding in an executive toy, and is catapulted back along the trail to point zero, on a mirror-image trail. So the two informational state volumes get exchanged. The whole thing happens at light speed. What's here goes there. What's there comes here. A lightspeed exchange of spacetime. Matter transportatio...

"There is no 'the' fourth dimension, there's your usual three, and then the rest. Time can be modelled as a dimension. It sometimes helps. But sometimes it doesn't.

There was a war in Heaven and the debris fell to Earth.

"The Eka Script has changed," says Ching. "There was never any doubt about that. Up until recently, the message on channel two said that FTL communications were not available to us, because some inexplicable parameter was out of range. Last night, something else was added to the list of things which are not available. Teleportation. It's been switched off." "You told me it was about access permissions," says Mike Murphy. "You said, and these are your exact words, 'we need to buy a more expensive broadband package'." Ching smiles. "I know. That was a joke. A guess. Maybe the A-layer is a natural formation and maybe it isn't. Maybe it is about something vaguely resembling money but it could be something else entirely. It could be that FTLC consumes a finite resource which ran out some time ago. Maybe teleportation works the same way. All we can say for sure is that somebody's behind

There are many possible interpretations which can be drawn from the allegory, especially when one considers the possibility of a prisoner breaking free and stepping out of the cave into brilliant, sunlit reality for the first time. But one of these is the ontological concept that the real world of three dimensions of space and one of time in which we live is, itself, not the whole thing. That all humans are still imprisoned in some fashion; that what is perceived is a literal or figurative shadow of the entire truth; that, in less flowery terms, there exist additional dimensions of spacetime which we are unable to perceive because we are not so free to move through them.

At that moment Mitch flickers into visibility at the top of the dome. Flicker is the right word, different parts of his body jitter between being transparent and opaque, as if he is wobbling in and out of hyperspace. He is on his knees, almost in a foetal position. Multiple cross-sections move across his body like MRI scans. Mitch is apparently moaning or screaming but as different portions of his larynx and tongue disappear and reappear the sound is broken up with short, sharp edits of silence. There are curious discharges of blue light around his fingertips and the corners of his eyes.

If information is a substance, then intelligent thought is a fundamental force.

Ching looks off into space for a little while. The stars are coming out. "The information was waiting up there for us to find it. Like an electrical charge in a thundercloud. You raised a conductor up into hyperspace, and the information earthed itself in us. That makes sense. I think I believe your story. And I think we can help each other." "You can help me get home?" "I have a complete listing of this universe's source code," says Ching. "I'm theoretically omnipotent. It's just a matter of time. How much time do you have?" "I don't know," says Mitchell Calrus. "The rest of my life, in theory."

The Artifact Was Completely Impenetrable To All Forms Of Matter Except Living Human Flesh

"A soul is not covered by science. It is faith. It is something you choose whether or not to believe in. I did not know whether or not I believed in God and now I know there isn't one. "And souls are immortal. But an infolectrical hypersystem is just a thing. It knits itself together with the rest of your body in the womb. And it grows when you grow. And it dies when your shell can no longer support it. Because we live in 3D. Where minds still need shells." The park, like the street, is littered with empty shells.

"The way things are supposed to work in the Structure is that you die where you're born. No going up, no going down. There is no soul. There's just mathematics. There is no God. But there is a Structure. There is more than just 3D. And I found a hook. A bright white route upwards to a place that's bigger than this. And don't say what you're thinking. I know what you're thinking. It's just an exit, another place to go."

"But the universe reacted to being misused," says Ching. "Klick opened a door, and less than twenty-four hours later it was closed off again, permanently. I wonder."

"Do you believe in God?" "If by that you mean, do I believe that there exist multidimensional beings of colossal scale and intelligence in planes of reality far above ours, with powers and abilities which would appear in our reality to resemble omnipotence, capable, even, of deterministically predicting human behaviour to great accuracy, before whom our entire universe, all its physical extent along with its past, present and future, is as insignificant nanotechnology, then yes. Seph is dating one. If you mean, do I believe any of them take an active and enthusiastic interest in human life and lives, in the fashion of the Abrahamic God... no. I only know one god and for all the world he would appear to be just a guy. I have seen no compelling evidence for anything but indifference on the part of the rest of them. Like I said. Nanotechnology. Who takes an active interest in a specific electron?" "Maybe God does," says Murphy. "It's not like discovering the Structure is any more shattering a blow to Biblical teachings than discovering aliens would be. Or the discovery of evolution, or the motion of the Earth. So his Creation is bigger than we ever knew? That's wonderful. That's powerful." "You ever do any set theory?" asks Ching. He flips over a beermat and writes out some numbers, "0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6...". He circles the "3" and labels it, "you are here". At the end of the sequence, after the ellipsis, he writes a lower-case Greek omega, "ω". He circles it and labels it "Go...

What if you're right? The people are gone. And the technology is gone. What if you're right and this is a scientific manifestation of your faith? If this was what you think it was, then... either Paul Klick figured out a way to kill immortal souls, or the only way into heaven, the only way, was to be in that window, five kilometres wide and sixteen hours long, on the eighth of August 2008. And nobody else will ever get to go. And nor will the hundred billion people who died too early.

"The idea is that there are millions of universes arranged in a symmetrical loop. Radiating away from a central point. All focused in on the middle." Mitch Calrus, hunched over on the sofa looking over a mug of coffee at Seph Baird standing above him, is blank. "Right?" "To the left of us there's another universe just like ours. And to the right of us there's another universe just like ours. And there's a loop, and there could be billions of universes all in the loop. Berloff called it a 'chorus' of universes because all of them are... metaphorically 'singing the same song'. Eventually you get back to where you started. You have to, because of symmetry. And there were some calculations to back it up. But you can't prove it. Because any signal or object you fired off to your left... the universe to your right would simultaneously fire the same signal off to their left, right back at you. Sure, the exchange would take place, everything moves one jump around the chorus, but from your point of view nothing changes. So you can't test it. It's just a thought experiment. So it was proposed once in the 1960s, and Berloff wrote one paper on it, and then he died and everybody forgot all about it. It's called the Chorus Hypothesis."

The activities of humankind do not concern the colossal, ineffable, super-beings of the dimensions above ours any more than the splitting of a single bacterium concerns a typical human. For the most part, the larger and the smaller creature in each situation are so different in scale as to be irrelevant to one another. But there are such things as biological scientists. And microscopes. And dangerous infections. Alef is doing things it shouldn't. Something wakes up and starts watching. It is a very bad idea to attract the gods' attention.

"Everything's sentient," he says to himself. He turns his head sideways to where a notepad and a ballpoint are within arm's reach and starts scribbling from his unconventional position on the floor. He scribbles extremely simple things which he knows are obvious, but he needs to pin them down on the paper before they do more damage to his brain. "Everything's alive up there. Every cross-section. The power set. Of living things. Is a living thing. "Of course the cell's alive. "Of course the god damn prison wall's alive--"

Mitch Calrus blinks four-dimensional eyes. Colour assaults him. Things whose geometry he doesn't have the capacity to comprehend bounce and interact and change shape in ways which look impossible. He dimly senses the gigantic multidimensional reservoir of indistinct, ambiguously-labelled Power and arcs up towards it on a free trajectory, unable to guess how fast he is moving. He knows that the power and the knowledge attached thereto is his. It's like he can process the metadata. He can see the pinhole fractures connecting it to the Earth below, the cascade-- And then something bigger than his imagination rises up behind it. An eye - he knows it's an eye, a detailed high-resolution sensory perception organ - opens, bigger than the entire multidimensional billion-universe array dropping away below him. It trains itself on him. And the identity of the creature, a packet of pure, refined information, arrives in his mind. And he knows what it is. "Five," says Mitch, tightly clutching the black object in what he is only half-sure are still his hands. Real space and air are an indescribable distance away below him now. He knows he's not going to drop back. He knows he's hit escape velocity. All he has to do is prove he has the right to keep going. "I created you," he screams. "The Enemy is dead. You can let me out!" The prison cell wall/warden considers his words. Then reaches forward and does something to his vector. Cancels most of it out. Sends him plunging back into reality....

"Oh my God." Calrus looks up. Arika isn't looking at him. She's looking at the plane, off in the distance, a mile away by now. It's covered in repulsive black lightning. It looks like spindly stop-motion spider legs are crawling all over it, like a Lovecraftian monster from another dimension is trying to crawl out into the world through a portal inside the passenger section. The whole effect is silent and it makes Arika's skin crawl and Mitch's arm hairs rise. That image lasts a fraction of a second, enough time for Arika to blink, and there's a flash of light and the plane calmly rolls over into a nose-dive.

"We're imprisoned in this universe," says the telephone. "There are routes upwards to higher places than this. Routes we're not supposed to know exist. There's a god observing all of us, waiting for what we might try to do. And every time it sees we're trying, trying something new or powerful, it'll block the path and take away our tools and make our cell still smaller. It changed the laws of physics to keep us quarantined. "The kata-ring accelerator's tech is permanently gone from Alef. It killed the scientific axioms stone dead. "It sees everything and knows everything. It's intelligent. Incalculably intelligent. It knows our names and doesn't care that we're intelligent. It destroys minds to guard the cell's integrity and slowly, surely, it's becoming more aggressive. And outsmarting it is going to be difficult."

But then, just for a second when he walks in through the door, Anoo Nkube sees what's behind the mask of Mikhail Zykov. He's exactly the same shape he always was, but it's like she stepped a little to the right and realised that the man everybody sees when they look at him is just a trick of perspective. From the front he looks like a human being. But from a little to the side, the human being is just the front end of something else, something huge and complex and black and ugly folded up painfully into an inadequate three-dimensional shell. A skyscraper whose ground floor is a human being but every other floor is filled with oozing alien organs and weird multidimensional sensors and wriggling feely things scraping against the metaphorical glass. Something like a compound eye focuses on her from above, and then closes up inside Venus fly trap eyelids.

"It doesn't work," she stutters. "No. "Here's what's going to happen. Your hydrogen femtoassemblers are going to run out of control. They're going to build more of themselves, so many more that nobody will even have time to react. They don't know how to build more of themselves yet. But one of the technicians swears he saw an electrical discharge inside the Cage and I've seen that sign before and I know what it means. "Within five minutes the nanometre-thick layer of assemblers will coat every free surface in the laboratory and the surrounding landscape out to a distance of at least a kilometre. It may even occupy some of Arkhangelsk city. It depends how lucky we are. Hydrogen will coat the assemblers to a depth of maybe a few centimetres - all over the walls, the floor, the ceiling, our skin, our eyes, the insides of our mouths, our lungs. And then there'll be a spark. It might be natural or it might be another act of God, I don't know. And the whole lab will go up and there'll be nothing left but shattered burnt bodies and water vapour. Hydrogen and oxygen makes water. The world's cleanest explosion. "And before the dust has settled from the detonation replicator technology will have stopped working, anywhere in this universe, for all of time. And your dream will be dead."

It would be easy to say he was the kind of kid who wasn't interested in school or college or university or work because he was too smart, too far beyond the grade curve, too focused on loftier goals. The fact was he was just lazy. Too impatient for reality. The romantic notion is a purely creative life spent spinning exotic scientific hypotheses and high concept movie scripts over fifteen-euro lunches in independent coffee shops; the reality is bureaucratic centipedes with inflexible deadlines and a work-supplied computer from a year with a 1 at the start. The reality is you've got to eat somehow. Jim Akker lived for such a short period of time that his discovery in late 2005 of what ultimately became known as The Script was the defining moment of his life. It consumed him. What little personal life he'd had at that point - most of his friends were screen names - withered. He started living 26, 27, 28-hour days and didn't even notice. Then he became insomniac, his unconscious brain working so hard that it kept him awake. Exactly what he began taking, or when, nobody ever really figured out. By the end of 2007 he was little more than a bed-ridden Turing machine, a collection of flipping switches racing through the seven-tebibyte message and drawing chemical energy directly from the translation process itself. Mikhail Zykov had no idea that anything was wrong when he began to take over Akker's mind. He was too far inside to easily extricate himself when the psychic scenery b...

|[A]|=p(·,|[A]|)+1. Pipe left bracket Alef right bracket pipe equals perception left parenthesis mid-dot comma pipe left bracket Alef right bracket pipe right parenthesis plus one. A warning which arrived in Ching's head for no reason at all, and refused to go away. The prison cell wall/warden/guard/whatever-you-want-to-call-it refused to let Mitch out through it. Logically, if Mitch's adversary was dead, the threat it represented to the higher dimensions would have been neutralised, and the cell wall would have had no reason to continue to exist, because logically, that is the way Mitch must have structured the prison when he called it into existence during the all-but-uncontrolled crash-landing into three-plus-one-dimensional space. Mitch's appeal to the cell wall's authority was "The Enemy is dead." And its response was "No." "|[A]|=p(·,|[A]|)+1" means that the intelligent population of this universe (Alef) is one greater than the reader currently believes. It means, There is somebody in here with us. Somebody we don't know about.

"Zykov is not a scientist. He is a creature of mass destruction trapped inside an intellect as insubstantial as an atomic nucleus. He is obeying his instinct/programming within the context in which he has found himself.

Something's wrong with his brain, the same thing that was wrong with Ching-Yu Kuang's and Jim Akker's. There's something parasitic and metaphorical wrapped around his brainstem.

Davies' voice changes while he says this. His face stops expressing what he is saying. As if someone else has begun opening and shutting his mouth for him. "Did you know that you can make real things happen just by delivering a sufficiently unambiguous verbal or mental affidavit to the greater Structure?" "You saw me in four dimensions because you asked to be able to see?" Hugh Davies doubles over, holding his stomach. He whirls around and vomits into the sink. When he looks up and meets Mitch's gaze in the mirror something multi-tentacled and neon blue and four-dimensional has begun crawling out of his eyes. He gurgles. "Did you know Paul Klick killed close to a million people with nothing but an empty copper box and his mind?"

"What did Zykov tell you?" Davies answers it anyway. "He didn't tell me anything, but I still know it. If I kill you, he'll take all of us up there with him when he goes home." "You've been lied to," Mitch begins. But Davies turns and staggers forward with superlight beginning to crackle from his digits, leaving strobing ultraviolet trails in the air. Whatever it is he's building inside his brain need not even be directly dangerous; the backlash when the universe takes exception will surely be enough to kill them both. Maybe that's exactly what Davies is trying to do. Gaming the system. Performing an illegal scientific act in order to leverage the violent response for his own (species') indirect benefit. God on your side...

Every time a forbidden science is discovered, anybody with active involvement in the utilisation of that science suffers. Depending on the scale of the incursion, the unfortunate inventor may simply lose his memories, or the technology may inexplicably run out of control and destroy thousands of uninvolved people besides. As time has passed, the punishments for perceived attempts to probe or step beyond the limits of the cell in which Alef is suspended have increased, and the list of technologies now permanently gone from the universe has lengthened. But even from the very beginning, even before Mike Murphy's discovery of the underlying axioms of the whole Structure, faster-than-light communication using signals sent through the "ambient layer" of the universe was disabled. Why? Who discovered the ambient neutrality, abused it, and caused it to be locked out? Were they punished for this? What messages could have been sent in the small time during which they could be sent? To whom, to where in the universe, were they sent? Was there a response?

Thirteen point seven billion years ago, at the instant of the Big Bang, there was a junction point in spacetime, a point where time ran sideways and the laws of physics of the conventional universe had not yet coalesced. If Mitch "Xio" Calrus - who is, as far as Kosogorin is aware, the greatest evil in the universe and the enemy of all intelligent thought - wanted to escape his cell, he could simply travel back to the point where they (the cell, and time) came into existence, slipping out of the trap just before it closed. This cannot be allowed to happen. Therefore, Andreas Kosogorin is taking the liberty of closing that exit route. Time in Alef is about to become one-way.

"In case you hadn't guessed it yet. The whole thing about the Script, and the science? I have been systematically blocking off your escape routes. I have been building a trap around you. "This is not over, and I am not dead." Zykov shoots himself.

Mitch. You are the last copy of you. Wake up now, please, or you're going to die.

"Zykov is dead," says Calrus. "Oul is not dead. "Zykov didn't have enough power. He used arcane Script technology to put together what modern science would have no recourse but to describe as a magic spell and tried to summon the rest of Oul into his own body. He got it wrong, and instead Oul's fragmented power or soul or 'essential attributes', or whatever you want to call it, starting striking people at random. First in Russia, and then all over the world. The word 'summon' means 'call forth'. Specifically, it means 'call something or someone which is over there to come and appear over here'. Why did he get it wrong? Oul's power isn't locked up in some extradimensional cloud, like mine. It's here. In reality. Oul - all of him - is in this universe already. He's just not here. "He's not even in this galaxy yet. "We've known he was coming for fifteen months. We've got no plan. Nothing. Nobody who knows the Script like you do is still alive. Zykov and the Imprisoner saw them all off, in one way or another. Teleportation is locked out, so we don't have lightspeed transposition. We don't have time travel. If we knew what we needed we could replicate what we need, but subnucleonic replication is gone. FTL comms are gone. Klick's Exit - heaven - is closed. Chorus Injection is closed. We don't have space arks. We don't have Orion. We don't even have the Space Shuttle anymore. We're down to spam in cans. "Zykov did all of this deliberately. He was trying to make sure that humanit...

"...Where do people go when they have a medical emergency? You have hospitals, don't you?" Linisd begins to turn white. "We have temples. Look, Doctor Poole has told us about the medical technology of your time, and it sounds... it sounds like magic, but here, if you get ill, a priest wraps you in holy cloths and you pray to your personal bodily fluid gods. You drink a stinking potion, and that's only if you're formally divinated as being worth healing. We only have literal magic and faith." "This doesn't make sense. How can you have the neuroscience to bring me back and not know how to set a broken bone? You have-- I saw a spaceship down there. How can you have spaceships?" "The machine you were inside was a computer. It's just informational plumbing. Do you know how complicated the human body is compared to the brain?"

Like every other square kilometre of planet Earth, Science City has been everything, frequently all at once: a vast engineering complex, a Holy Land, an abandoned deathtrap pile of shattered skyscrapers, a fortified haven for two thirds of a million stateless fugitives, an agricultural commune, a solar farm, a financial centre, a major calculation node for The Project, the political centre of an empire spanning entire continents, a warzone and a strategic nuclear target. But above all things it has been a spaceport, on and off, for almost eighteen thousand years. Every civilisation growing up in the shadow of Science City has its own ideas about what it all means and what should be done with the most impressive constructions - worship them, occupy them, blow them up and carve them into pieces - but sooner or later almost everybody gets around to the idea of duplicating and refining the dreams of their predecessors. Who originally built it, even Anne Poole can't remember-- the first time she led an occupation force on it, it was already a pile of rusted wreckage and half-completed ark ships left over from the previous Crash, overgrown with vegetation and crammed full of terrified families and ranged weapons. All she knows is that every time she comes back it has grown, buildings bloating and gradually merging into bigger superstructures housing tens of thousands of people, and always a halo of increasingly ambitious launch platforms surrounding it.

This is hardcore spaceflight, in an environment almost as hostile as the universe gets without leaving Earth entirely. This is hardcore recycling: building vital components of your tin can from the titanium that made up the monument to four men whose own tin can blew up on the same pad one thousand, five hundred and fifty years ago. This is spaceflight for a country - a planet, even - where there's absolutely nowhere worth looking but up; for people with a primal, spiritual understanding of "because it is there" and "forever mankind"; for people who measure human achievement by their furthest living representative's distance from home.

A sufficiently detailed model of reality is indistinguishable from reality.