The living, artificial island of Stateless was anchored to an unnamed guyot – a submerged, flat-topped, extinct volcano – in the middle of the south Pacific. At thirty-two degrees latitude, it lay outside the ocean resource zones of the Polynesian nations to the north, in uncontested international waters. (Laughable ambit claims by Antarctic squatters aside.) It sounded remote – but it was only four thousand kilometers from Sydney; a direct flight would have taken less than two hours.

I sat in the transit lounge in Phnom Penh, trying to unknot the muscles in the back of my neck. The air conditioning was icy, but the humidity seemed to penetrate the building unchecked. I thought about wandering out into the city – which I’d never seen firsthand – but I only had forty minutes between flights, and it would probably have taken half that time to obtain the necessary visa.

I’d never understood why the Australian government was such a vehement supporter of the boycott against Stateless. For twenty-three years, successive Ministers of Foreign Affairs had ranted about its “destabilizing influence on the region” – but in fact it had acted to relieve tensions considerably, by accepting more Greenhouse refugees than any nation on the planet. And it was true that the creators of Stateless had broken countless international laws, and used thousands of patented DNA sequences without permission … but a nation founded by invasion and mass-murder (acts demurely regretted in a treaty signed two hundred and fifty years later) could hardly claim to be on higher moral ground.

It was clear that Stateless was being ostracized for purely political reasons. But no one in power seemed to feel obliged to make those reasons explicit.

So I sat in the transit lounge, stiff from a four-hour flight in the wrong direction, and tried to read the sections of Sisyphus ’s physics lesson which I’d skimmed over the first time. They were highlighted in accusing blue, eyeball-track analysis gallingly right on every count.

At least two conflicting generalized measures can be applied to T , the space of all topological spaces with countable basis. Perrini’s measure [Perrini, 2012] and Saupe’s measure [Saupe, 2017] are both defined for all bounded subsets of T , and are equivalent when restricted to M – the space of n-dimensional paracompact Hausdorff manifolds – but they yield contradictory results for sets of more exotic spaces. However, the physical significance (if any) of this discrepancy remains obscure—