Nectar was heroin plus shrooms plus steroids... and probably a dash of meth. Enough narcotic and psychedelic firepower to blow my brain’s restrictor plate clean off. You know how they say that humans only use ten percent of their brain?96 Well, now I was using all of it. Exhilarating, but also terrifying. Like at any moment my skull might spring a leak and annihilate a star.

Down the cord, I was able to park exponentially more pieces of the build in my short-term memory, retaining enough to see entire segments of structure that by this point comprised thousands of reflections. I spent longer inside. Being on the cord was the only time I didn’t suffer from withdrawal. I think that was planned.

I was no longer fitting pieces together and wondering what to do with them, I was constructing. Reflections became pairs, pairs layered on other pairs and became modules, modules matched and layered became chunks. Chunks grew into clusters that together formed sections. I soon realized that the blueprints weren’t for a machine or a ship. They were of a location. A place. A place I’d seen before. In my living room.

The LEGO monument from the coffee table. Not the LEGO version, of course. That was merely a crude translation of the thing I was assembling in the dredge, but there was no doubt they were the same. Patton and I sat on the couch for hours snapping pieces together, never thinking about what the thing was other than a way to pass the time while stoned. Thinking back, I must have known all along that it was more than that, because after he would go home or pass out, I routinely undid all of his work. His pieces didn’t fit the plan that I didn’t know existed. Something in my subconscious had been trying to push through.

The structure began to crystalize. Nothing about the fragments or their conglomerated forms provided any concrete information about what they were, but context of location, shape, orientation, size, etcetera, allowed me to deduce the function of the various sections I built. Some were operational units – where the orders and signals came from. I knew this based on their positions and the deduced functions of surrounding areas. This wasn’t some autonomous blob. It was a place for people – or someone. There were common areas and living quarters, energy generation, propulsion, climate management, transportation. Some were weapons. I built them up and understood their purpose even when nothing about the designs explained how they worked.

A city was the only thing it could be. Roughly spherical, and immense at that.97 It had something like buildings, tens of thousands of them, each many times taller than Earth’s skyscrapers. And they didn’t sit on foundations. They were joined together, forming the body of the studded sphere itself, with a hollow core made of open space.

Was this where the Scythin lived?