“Izairis,” said Naecia, now wearing the black circlet but largely ignoring it. “Look: there is nothing special about our constituent parts. If they are reproduced exactly, does it matter if the original ceases to be?”

“I sort of feel that it does, yeah,” said Izairis.

Oush removed Aptat’s helmet from his head and tucked it below an arm. “So, you send data through the Fray to some distant location via entanglement: a spaceship, let’s say. You’ve got the data. How do you get the spaceship?”

“I don’t think that’s very complicated, actually. All matter is made of the same panel of subparticles. It’s all in the arrangement. Payne suggested the Fray was formed of protoparticles – like balls of clay that can become any number of things based on the input of outside information. It makes sense. The Fray is the raw material of consciousness, but it isn’t yet a thought, right? So, the machine catalogues the matter, that data is transferred to the end point via entanglement, and then reproduced. Think of it as a trillion, trillion, trillion dials being turned in one place, which instantly turns sibling dials somewhere else.”

Aptat flipped through the holographic readings for Naecia’s coherence. “How, exactly, does the machine tell the Fray what to replicate?”

“Uh,” said Naecia, absentmindedly adjusting the diadem, “it doesn’t. The machine isn’t conscious. It can’t interface with the Fray. It has to communicate the data through something that is.”

“Meaning?” asked Oush.

“A person has to be the hub – the link.”

“So, all you have to do is think of something and an exact copy will be created somewhere?” Oush doubled over laughing. “I’m starting to agree with the space parasite. Let’s run.”

Naecia sidestepped the criticism. She understood things now. “If, theoretically, you had the capacity to catalogue and record the position and spin of every single particle making up that something and hold it in your head, then yes, I believe you could ‘think it’ into existence. But because you – because all of us – lack that capacity, the answer is no. Something far more capable than our minds has to do that. It’s an immense amount of computation – and that’s where the machine comes in. But our consciousness serves as the access point. We’re the gateway.”

“How did these primitive humans achieve it then?” said Aptat, scrolling through readings. “I spent four days immersed in their technosphere. Mostly they just care about taking pictures of themselves and asking other people to endorse those pictures. Even today, they couldn’t do what you say they did generations earlier.”