The ray was not made of light.
It was made of non-being.
Four hundred thousand miles away, the tightly packed needle of the Arch-Segfault discharged.
There was no flash of fire, no blast wave, and no thunder.
As the needle-thin beam traveled across the void at the speed of light, space-time along its path didn’t shatter or warp. It simply ceased to have physical map points.
Stray asteroids, floating debris, and the thick sapphire struts of the work-yard simply blinked out of existence the instant the beam brushed them. That left behind a razor-thin tunnel of total zero-map point empty pocket.
It was a total, kernel-level command of wipe-out:
FREE(0xROOT);
