✴

You know just the shape. You think for a moment about some very interesting math, much more interesting than you’ve learned in Linear Algebra class. Strange attractors. And what could be stimmier than a three-scroll unified chaotic system? A chaotic attractor with a fractal structure, it’s perfect.

You mentally grasp the spatial boundaries of your familiar’s avatar and twist them around dimensionally into a strange sort of knot. Now æther flows through itself and spirals within and around this well in ætherspace you’ve torn open mathematically. It’s beautiful.

“Okay,” you say. “ÆON, keep your eyes on the time dimension for me. Little familiar friend, find me anomalies in the curvature of space, and I’ll look for visual phenomena. Let’s go.”

You open a gateway and execute a loop forming a chain of gateways beyond it that will efficiently take you through all the nodes you need to examine. The three of you enter.

Node by node you drift through the æther, holding the delicate balance of passively scanning the glow without letting your mind focus on it and be distracted. The destinations blend together as you dissociatively cycle through them. But suddenly something stops you, holding you back.

“Aydan, here,” ÆON says. “Such a fragment as you seek visited this node some time ago.”

“Great! Where did it go?” you say.

A beacon appears in your mind’s eye, overlaid on your conceptualization of the network structure. “There.”

“Thanks ÆON,” you say.