Even Flatter Than Kansas

If you want to study serious metric engineering, you do it at Selintri-Andracanth. It’s the only place going.

Oh, come on, you say. They have metric engineering classes at dozens of universities, and besides, Imogen Andracanth didn’t need a VFSL!

Well, yes, they do, but even those universities would admit up front that the faux-flat spaces they can produce by carefully offsetting mass against mass and paragravitationally combing the remaining space aren’t good for much more than toy simulations.

And no, she didn’t, but Our Lady of Gates wasn’t practicing modern cosmogami, either, back when she was inventing the Mark One. What she did need, on the other hand, is the VFSL of its day, Anakata Station, ‘way out there at the Déirae L5 point, where Lumenna is barely a pinprick and Déirae’s well is a shallow beach. But today? Anakata’s the home of theorists and the grumpy engineers turning prototypes into practical applications that have to work down in the crumple.

So for fine experimentation, it’s the Selintri-Andracanth Very Flat Space Loreworks, or nowhere.

Tomorrow, this Interstar arrives at Axiom Station, and I transfer to the lighthugger. (If you’re the Lady, or just have Numbers money and a good reason, you can burn tangle for a mindcast out there, but the rest of us need to haul our bodies along.) Selintri-Andracanth’s a few light-orbits out of the Vector, sitting a little void ripped in the cometary cloud, in the very convenient location where the nearest stars cancel out and space is smooth enough to use as a god’s mirror.

Tissaia flies an endless loop, ferrying researchers and supplies from the Vector out almost to the VFSL – they don’t want even a small lighthugger moving at low-relativistic speed to put a ripple in their space-time.  She’ll drop us off at an exchange station a light-day out, at the edge of the rip, and then slow-shuttle over to the VFSL proper.

That thousand-mile long skeleton of light-structure habs and workshacks that’s going to be home and workplace for the next couple of dodecades.

Heck of a way to organize a research fellowship, but then, it’s the only way.

- from the journal of Annis Cieng, metric researcher