Rainzi had clearly been delegated to put the NuclearQuestion to her, because no one else broached the subject. Cass foundit slightly galling that they wouldn’t even suffer a moment’sembarrassment when they took up their superior vantage point. Theywouldn’t depart, they wouldn’t abandon her; they’d simply clone theirminds into the nuclear substrate. With no expectation of recovering theclones, the originals would have no reason to pause, even for apicosecond, while their faster versions ran.
The target graph appeared on the wall in front of her.The four distinctive node patterns they’d tried in every othercombination were all present now. Just as virtual particles stabilizedthe ordinary vacuum — creating a state of matter and geometry whose mostlikely successor was itself — Cass’s four patterns steered thenovo-vacuum closer to the possibility of persistence. The balance wasonly approximate: according to the Sarumpaet rules, even an infinitenetwork built from this motif would decay into ordinary vacuum in amatter of seconds. At the Planck scale, that was no small achievement;a tightrope walker who managed to circum-navigate the Earth a fewbillion times before toppling to the ground might be described ashaving similarly imperfect balance. In reality, any fragment ofnovo-vacuum they managed to create would be surrounded from the startby its older, vastly more stable relative, and would face theinevitable about a trillion times faster.