"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.
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