A prison that attempts to simulate physical reality must make exact compromises.
Lin Tao stood in the sharp-angled center of the one hundred-meter cube, his hands resting lightly in his pockets. The white light remained unchanging, casting no shadows from his boots or coat. The total stillness of the room was oppressive. It was broken only by the steady, steady pace of his own breathing and the rhythmic pumping of blood through his temples.
He reached into his left pocket. Then he pulled out a small brass shaving, left over from repairing the collar of his traveling lantern three days earlier.
The metal curl weighed less than two grams. It was three inches long, twisted into a loose spiral that gleamed with dull yellow luster against his pale palm. It was ordinary, raw mortal brass, forged by human smiths over charcoal fires in the southern foothills. He carried the dense physical weight of real earth.
Lin Tao held the brass shaving at eye level, exactly one hundred and seventy inches above the white floor.
A true physical continuum calculates motion through smooth differential curves, Lin Tao analyzed silently, his left eye narrowing as his test sight array locked onto the yellow metal. A simulated guest environment, constrained by finite floating-point compute cycles, must approximate motion across discrete tick intervals. To save processing power, the test model must take shortcuts.
