did all of the connections it had to other nodes. This process had the effect of remodeling the Network and, with it, both its topology and the dynamics of its information transfer. Just as importantly, the free energy within each node that flashed out of existence was liberated so that it could be recycled and used to power the rest of the Network’s activities. Mr. Gregory likened the process to using the energy from the braking of a rolling car to charge its battery for future use.
When he was finished modifying his machine, Mr. Gregory was able to survey the Network’s nodes and classify them according to the spectrum of their emissions. He then went on to establish thresholds for identifying which ones contained enough information to be approaching their saturation points. That was the key, because when that happened, they would soon need to either disgorge some of their information to the other nodes they were connected to or break up into their more basic parts.
Next, he coupled the device to a power source so that he could focus beams of photons with varying energies on particular collections of nodes. He knew that he didn’t need to deliver much energy to change the information distribution of the Network; the trick was to get it to just the right nodes at the right times—that was what it took to have the proper messages filter through the Network to get them to where they needed to be so that they would have the effects he wanted. That permitted him to do one of two things: either react preemptively to what was about to happen in four dimensions or provide inputs to the Network to change the course of what would happen before it ever did.
Still, in order for him to use the machine properly, he needed to address the Network’s enormous number of nodes and connections. Because they were so tiny, trillions of different elements fit into every cubic millimeter of space—and that was just in the four dimensions everyone knew about. Moreover, all of the nodes and their connectors were layered both on and through what existed in four dimensions so that additional strata within the higher-dimensional Network were intertwined with them in complex ways. That resulted in the Network having a highly convoluted topology that spanned a dizzying range of scales and dimensions. As a consequence, there was no such thing as a one-to-one correspondence anywhere in the Network other than at a local level—that of so-called nearest neighbors. Beyond that, the correspondences and relationships became progressively more complex and difficult to comprehend.
Of course, there were too many nodes in the Network for Mr. Gregory to scan them all the time, so the approach he took to monitoring its activity was pragmatic: he focused in on areas that were of particular interest based on what was happening in four dimensions. For that, he concentrated on nodal regions that contributed to near-term effects involving local manifestations that were either of particular interest or problematic. There wasn’t much reason to do more, because if everything else that occurred in four dimensions was acceptable, there wasn’t a need to exert any influence over those portions of the Network that were responsible for generating those particular features. Accordingly, Mr. Gregory took a problem-oriented approach to his interrogations, with the trigger being that something in the layers of the Network close to what was happening in four dimensions either wasn’t developing along the proper lines or needed to be known in advance. It was in those particular instances that regions of the underlying Network needed to be monitored and modified, at least potentially.
Up to that point, the portions of the machine that Mr. Gregory had created represented the front and back ends of what he needed. Like many scientific thinkers before him, he kept a notebook in which he recorded his successes and failures. That day, he wrote,
The machine is finally coming together. Its front end is now complete, which is its sensor portion. That part monitors the Network to get information about the states of its nodes. Its back end is now also operational, which is its effector arm. It’s what allows photons to be injected back into the Network to be absorbed by nodes in a targeted fashion to modify the trajectory of where the Network is heading and what the results of its projection in four dimensions will be. But still missing is the intervening portion between the two, which is the guts of the machine—the processing layer between its front- and back-end elements that analyzes the incoming information about the Network and directs the machine’s outputs to influence its states in the ways I want.
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