The compass didn’t spin. It ceased to understand the concept of a circle.
The bronze aimed needle on the Void Breaker’s bridge console bent into an acute ninety-degree angle, tied itself into an impossible knot. Then he snapped into three pieces with a soft clink.
Outside the watching quartz, the void had lost all pretense of shape.
Lin Ke stood at the steering dais, his freshly reset left shoulder strapped to his chest with leather harnesses and his out-of-joint wrist wrapped in stiff splints. Beside him, Apothecary He stood with a needle poised above Lin Ke’s neck. He watched his uneven pulse with narrowed, furious eyes.
They had crossed the threshold into the Field of Segfaults.
Eons ago, during a total universal recompilation that had destroyed an entire precursor epoch, the cosmic compiler had suffered an unhandled crash in this sector.
The laws of space-time had never been cleaned up.
Ahead of the ship, space rippled like broken stained glass. Jagged shards of dereferenced reality—mirror-like sharp-angled planes thirty miles wide—floated through the dark. Some showed inverted starfields. Others showed scenes of ancient cities burning backward in time, while others showed only flat, textureless grey voids that devoured light.
