(An In-Character Meta Explanation)
“This metal is unaffected by entropy over time? How does that work?”
“We taught the atoms to sing time-refusal.”
“Oh, come on. That’s not… what does that even mean?”
“You see those thirty fat volumes of technomagical equations to make the sanest man go mad?”
“…atoms that sing time-refusal. Got it.”
Relevant older shitpost:
The big question this makes me think about right now, of course, is what do ontotech equipment, such as vector control devices and kinetic barriers, or the stuff that makes muon metals stable, look like inside? What sort of physical process lets you interact with this stuff?
“No User Serviceable Parts Inside”
What does it look like?
It looks like a box. It has some pretty chonky power feeds, and a standard data connector, and maybe some coolant lines, and if you lift the panel on the side, the manual override controls.
Now, if you open up that box, you’ll find that most of its volume is taken up by boring old fairly standard components whose job is more managing the systems than anything else. Racks of nanocircs, electronics boards, heat sinks, that sort of thing. And a few small components here and there, plastered with warning labels.
But you want to know what it looks like inside those?
It looks Wrong.
It looks Wrong in all the ways that an optical illusion can look wrong, except you know it’s not an illusion. It’s a six-dimensional solid designed by the love-child of Escher and Cthulhu that stubbornly refuses to look as flat as reality, fashioned from a trillion tiny crystals etched with patterns taken from the mycelial dreams of Vernor Vinge and HP Lovecraft’s telepathic joint trip. It sounds like God rocking out on a cosmic-string guitar while angels throat-sing a microtonal arrangement of the music of the spheres in counterpoint. It feels like cosmic understanding half a beat away, and smells like ozone, petrichor, and for some reason, mint.
Don’t touch it. Didn’t you read the warning label?
“We can do this one of two ways. Either you can handle the gross physical effects…”
“Or?”
“I can give you the sort of lecture that will require you to roll a 10D10 on your SAN for every second of discussion. When you hit zero SAN, your head explodes backwards in time.”
“…gross physical effects it is!”