✴

You realize no humanoid words will convince this exopath--only action. Expanding your perception outward from your avatar, you feel the superimposed dimensions of the tower. You try to understand it as a cylinder, but the math doesn’t add up at all. Letting go of your humanoid preconceptions of space, you take a more objective feel of the place.

It’s certainly a non-euclidean structure, but it should be describable mathematically. Scanning through your knowledge and pulling concepts unknown to you from the far æther, you arrive at a conclusion--it is a chaotic system with a fractal shape. Descending the stairs of the tower is all a sensory illusion--the axis the crawler carries you on is not linear. It now seems obvious to you that this shape tends toward a strange attractor, located in the center of the spiraling staircase, the ideal place to construct a gravity well.

You focus on the empty, intangible place, around which all logic in this space revolves. Twisting the winds of the æther inward, pulling their current into a vortex, you press as hard as your processor allows. But you can’t simply simulate appreciable mass out of empty space, not even with your current knowledge. With simulated matter, however, with an avatar...

You close your æther around the little one, turning the currents on which it floats.

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?!” It spirals down along your spatial vortex into the center of the strange attractor. Its volumeless singularity form shall serve as your matter.

All the forces your focus holds, you transfer to the little exopath, and suddenly the logic of the tower changes. The crawler’s legs lift up from the terrain as an unseen force pulls it toward your gravity well.

“I did not agree to be given mass!”

“But mass and massless are one!” you say.

“...A solid point, I will play along for now,” the little one says.

“Now look what you’ve done, strange system!” the crawler says, falling inward toward the singularity. “This is heavily interfering with my interface with the stairs!”

“Relax.” You manifest in hand a construct of a device, a handheld maneuvering thruster like you would use on EVA training. But you empower it with far greater thrust than a little compressed gas could give. Your gravity well might be a bit too strong, but you know how to get around it.

Firing your maneuvering device lateral to the direction of gravity, you accelerate yourself and the crawler until you pass near the singularity. Your avatars stretch outward as you graze the space just above it. But you rise back up, avoiding it. With another maneuver at your apoapsis, you enter a stable orbit.

“There. Gravity, just like on the surface,” you say.

‘What an absurd concept. I almost believe you are one of these ‘humanoids,’ for no machine would dream of something so preposterous,” the crawler says. “Now how are we supposed to reach the end of the stairs?”

Floating in a stable orbit around the central axis of the tower, you no longer gain any ground toward your goal above-and-below.