Two generations of entradistas  hacked their way in. That was a story in itself. Lost expeditions, weird fevers, death. Every side-tunnel  full of ancient  machinery  incubating  an  acute  sense of injustice. They contended  with fungus spores, cave-ins, passages flooded by non-Abelian  fluids at room  temperature.  They were driven mad by the feeling of being observed. Worse, the labyrinth, clearly some kind of experiment  in itself, had been constructed with such exquisite fractality that the term ‘centre’ could only ever be a distraction. The experimental space, through which temporal anomalies ticked and flared in direct response to events deep inside the Tract (‘As if,’ someone said, ‘it was built to tell the time in there’), would always contain more distance than its outer surface permitted. Eventually a team of maze-runners  from FUGA-Orthogen – an EMC subsidiary specialising in nuclear explosives, capitalised out of New Venusport on the sale of mining machinery somewhat older than the labyrinth itself – hacked its way into the vast, ill-defined chamber which would come to be known as The Old Control Room. Their shadows scattered, jittery and spooked, across its perfectly flat allotropic carbon deck. They gathered at a respectable distance. They cracked their helmets and let fall their thermobaric power tools. They admired the fluttering opalescence of the Aleph where it lay suspended in its cradle of magnetic fields. They knew they had struck it rich.

Fifteen years later, 3D images of this treasure trove filled Gaines’ dial-up: they were a little scratchy from distance, not to say the passage through three competing kinds of physics.

Around the time he was in the cloister with Alyssia Fignall, the Aleph had burst – boiling up from the nanoscale like a pocket nova, only to writhe, flicker, and, at the last moment, become something else. Where the containment  machinery had been there was only the deck. On it lay an artefact of unknown  provenance with the appearance  of a woman, just over life-size and wearing a gown of grey metallic fabrics. This woman was barely human. She was neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. A white paste oozed from the corner of her mouth. There was something wrong with her cheekbones. Gaines stared at her; the woman, her limbs and torso shifting in and out of focus as if viewed through moving water, stared blankly back, her eyes drained of emotion, her face immobile. Whatever she was seeing, it wasn’t in the chamber. Whatever effort she was making, it had nothing  to do with him, but went on in silence, bitter, determined,  undefinable, as if she would never understand what was happening to her yet never give up.She looked, Gaines thought, like someone trying not to die.