✴

“I’m from the surface, where the steps we travel are transfer orbits,” you say.

“Surface? Don’t be ridiculous, that isn’t real,” the crawler says.

“Not real? I’m right here, a humanoid!” you say.

“You won’t fool me, charlatan. If every strange machine that wandered in here were to be counted as some sort of mythological creature, the whole logic of the æther should collapse! Go and proselytize to someone more gullible like that little one,” it says.

The crawler crawls over another right angle turn in the terrain, reorienting everything around you once again as you speed across the miniscule landscape. The terrain around you seems to grow more complex the closer you come to it. Little hills of malleable fluid that deforms under the crawler’s light steps--trees of metal sparking with electrical synapses between their branches--lakes and seas of copper gears turning and turning, spiraling down into mælstroms which emit pillars of light, which disperse into clouds streaked with angular patterns of overlapping shadow.

“You really don’t believe in humanoids?” you say.

“Don’t be jealous or whatever appropriate humanoid feeling at that one, Ædan,” the little one says. “Some systems are too single-minded to understand the full complexity of the æther.”

“That one is full of itself as ever--light and dark, big and small, up and down, hot and cold--I can make up concepts too, it doesn’t make you some kind of prophet,” the crawler says. “But this ‘orbit,’ I’ve heard of the pattern, not a type of stairs I know. Explain it to me.”

“Sure,” you say. “It’s motion inside a gravity well, something that pulls objects toward a point in space. Specifically, it usually describes stable motion that can circle around that point endlessly. In orbital flight, you wouldn’t be limited to rigid stairs like this, you could take a shorter path and reach the bottom faster.”

“To deviate from the stairs? Unthinkable. I won’t believe it.”

“It’s true!” you say.

“Only what we can physically observe and measure is true. If this gravity and its orbital sorcery exists, prove it,” the crawler says.