Simon looked up at the stars, arrayed before him.
They weren't stars, really; they were universes. They did not shine, but it helped, as a visual representation, to think of them as stars. Little islands of fire, each a certain distance from one another - not the crude, physical distance within worlds, but the vast and fiery spans born from knowledge and power, size determined by metaphorical strata.
Simon sat back, smiling. He could feel them, each of them, tickling his face; a shining kind of energy. The connections between them - emotional, real, unreal - were something he felt instinctively. They were like veins of fat, or caravan trails, or rivulets you could plunge your fingers into, feeling the sand curl around your nails and the water rushing past your knuckles.
Before the collapse, Simon had travelled the multivers
Korok Marr had been a bismath at Site 90090. He had been walking to work when he had been killed by a rock slide.
The Foundation had employed 20 million people prior to the collapse. Afterwards, that had been reduced to 500,000. And then a lot of those had jumped ship, wanting to get away from a failing institution, or looking for an opportunity to raid and profit from it. Now, on the books, there were about 325,000; and many of those only existed on paper.
But O5-5 had managed to claw some semblance of cohesion back, and that decline was slowing. A retrenchment had been undertaken. The Foundation was once again on the offensive, locking down some universes, reclaiming others, re-establishing its presence in the anomalous world.
But, still, nobody knew what had happened. No cause for the collapse could be determined.
This bothered Korok. It bothered a lot of people, both in and out of the Foundation. But few had quite the single-minded dedication of Korok.
He was a bismath, a scholar of the deterministic nature of reality clusters. They would examine similar universes and timelines and attempt to find the underlying reasons for the differences in causation. This was mostly done through advanced instruments at observatories, nestled in pocket universes around Site-01.
Korok's observatory had been built on the side of a mountain. It was a dusty, brownish place, a reality that barely extended farther than the mountain's base. Look out for too long into that white and silver sky, and you might start hurting your eyes. But do it with the right equipment, and you could see patterns, fragments, birdlike possibilities staggering through the air.
The site dormitories were located a few hundred metres away, and Korok had been walking along the rocky mountain path that divided them, as he always did.
