The Plug-uglies were interacting with the same system, she could tell, and it was something far vaster than they were. Something with its own agency, that granted them access to its vast depth of computational power—the same permissions that it granted her. What she touched was only a fraction of its profundity, just as the end finger joint was to the whole human body, but she felt awed and dwarfed by it nonetheless. Not only by its reach and power, but by its ability to read her and create an interface she could comprehend.

She could see worlds stacked sideways, extending out in a direction human beings had never needed a name for until now. Not just worlds but Earths—each radically different…catastrophes, prodigies, monsters. The system-entity she was touching originated in one Earth, the Plug-uglies in another. And at her unspoken request she saw a model in her mind’s eye: not quite the branches of a tree, because there was no central trunk, but a series of forks, showing each Earth diverging from its next neighbour. Should she ever have time to reflect, the implications would swamp her. But right now, she was lost in the adrenaline high of knowing, and that left her proof against the crash of revelation.

She analysed what the Plug-uglies were doing. At first she thought they were inviting all these other Earths into hers, that they were agents of chaos and that this was a terrorist attack by hitherto unthinkable means. But she could follow something of their method, now. They were exploiting pre-existing weaknesses between the worlds, interconnections which had spread like fractures through the interstitial spaces. These had once, she was shown, been hard barriers. Her kidnappers were trying to order and master them, not to exacerbate the problem but to mend. True, that mastery was something that could become a weapon, and who was to say that wasn’t their long-term goal? Right now, though, they were trying to categorize and enumerate these breaches. They were trying to incorporate them into a schema or system which would allow them to solve all the equations with a single transformation. By this means, they could patch the wounds between their worlds. It was an experiment, she understood. Using their own science and the great icy computer she was losing herself in, these interlopers could gain purchase on the slippery faces of reality. Would that allow them to sew up each rent and tear by hand, technology being their needle and mathematics their thread?

She had just come to the bleak realization—as they had—that the answer was “no” when Julian’s yell snapped her out of her reverie.