“What are you?” Everett breathed. He tapped the icon twice. The tulip blossom unfolded into digital petals. The screen filled with moving translucent veils of light, folding around each other, merging like slow waves breaking, passing through one another, spilling off sprays of ghostly silver pixels. Everything was movement and change. As soon as Everett began to grasp a pattern the banners of light morphed into something unpredictable and new. Everett thought of dragonfly wings, eerie jellyfish, translucent flower petals, the clouds of interstellar gas you saw in photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, ghosts of ghosts. He thought of the shimmering, flickering curtains of the aurora borealis high above the Arctic night. Then he saw the scale, a hair-thin cross at the centre of the screen. It drew three dimensions: left to right, down to up, front to back. A small palette of tools hovered at the edge of the window. Everett picked the magnifying glass and zoomed in on the horizontal axis. At each level of magnification, the images were the same: veils of light, like wings, or angels, or the glowing tendrils of vast space gods. In and in: the same. It looked no different. Big patterns were made of smaller patterns were made of tiny patterns. It was veils of light all the way down.

He'd seen this before. It was when he was a kid. He'd been on the home computer when he'd opened a programme because he'd liked the look of a word: Mathyka. It sounded like a book of spells or a gateway to a magic world. It had opened up a gateway, not into a mystical realm but into forever. Everett now knew that the black beetle-like object at the centre of the screen surrounded by halos and streamers of brilliant colours like lightning bolts was called a Mandelbrot set. He could programme one—it was easy. He'd seen that the bolts of colour that cracked off from the points of the black beetle-thing contained little black specks in them. When he zoomed in on one of those specks, it was another little black beetle, complete with coloured halos and lightnings, complete with specks, which when he zoomed in, were black beetle shapes, with haloes and lightning bolts and specks that became beetles with…In and in and in and in. He had a scream-dream that night. He was falling through the dark eye at the centre of the Mandelbrot set, falling through a lightning storm of colours and black eyes that opened into whole new Mandelbrot sets, on and on and on.

“How far does it go?” he'd asked his dad.

“All the way. It never ends.”

This wasn't a Mandelbrot set, though he could see now that it was built from that same Mathyka software that Tejendra used to model his theories of how the universe worked. This was…