Traveling the Vex information network means metaphor superimposed on the flat planes of reality. Techno-biological synesthesia. Merkwelt, wirkwelt, umwelt. I step through a portal held open by the calculations of a Gate Lord, feel it in its true form as my Vex do, even as the Human part of me grasps for interpretation: Fourier transforming down the crest of a wave, knowing the water is angry below.

The water stills as I walk upon it, harmless to its master. My laboratory and my royal court. I incline my scepter and my Vex leap to test another variable for me.

Somewhere within the network will be a record of the fulcrum I need, the power I require. If not within the bounds of my Collective's testing, then outside of it.

What I need is to observe without biasing the results.

PAY ME NO MIND.

The light of my mantle dims, and my footfalls grow silent. Around me, my Vex forget my presence. I walk between them, a queen unmarked by any sensor.

Layer upon layer of networked simulations part for me as easily as curtains brushed aside.

A world of glass cliffs reduced to glittering sand by the furious water below. Here the Vex test the limits of aquatic life and of Klein bottle manifolds.

Eighteen thousand and sixty-four simulations stacked like pages in a book, failed attempts to predict and replicate Light. Hundreds of thousands of prior attempts crumpled and burned.

An Exodus ship-sized Minotaur—a builder of builders—tests and iterates new chassis designs for its deputies, processing capacity, sensor networks, and physical balance on varying terrain and durability. One beta-build clad in mismatched bronze plating plays jump rope with its own tails. Another carries a mechano-organic fetus within its ventral tank, radiolaria adhering layer by layer to its surface.

Something trembling and vermiform darts through the ephemeral layers of hypothesis, followed by thought-predators feeding on the swarming krill of datapoints.

Torobatl falls, rises, falls again, in tactical simulations more concerned with access to the servers of its Athenaeum worlds than anything else.

I walk, farther from home than any human before me, into simulations of worlds lit by stars, the first gleaming of which have yet to reach Earth's skies. Millions of worlds connected at unexpected points, staked out by different Collectives for their own use.

All the distance, all the storehouses of data and simulated tactics run through my fingers. And somehow, it's on my homecoming that I find what I need.