Diaspora

Scape: A simulation of some physical or mathematical space, not necessarily 3-dimensional.

Tesseract: A four-dimensional version of a cube. A three-dimensional cube has six square faces, twelve edges, and eight vertices. A four-dimensional tesseract has eight cubic hyperfaces, twenty-four square faces, thirty-two edges, and sixteen vertices.

Penteract: A five-dimensional version of a cube. A three-dimensional cube has six square faces, twelve edges, and eight vertices. A five-dimensional penteract has ten tesseractic super-faces, forty cubic hyperfaces, eighty square faces, eighty edges, and thirty-two vertices.

Yatima smiled serenely. "The wonderful thing about hope is that it has absolutely no effect on anything. Just throw the switch."

Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything.

The implications rebounded between the symbols, models of minds mirroring models of minds, as the network hunted for sense and stability.

Then it constructed a signature for the new citizen—two unique megadigit numbers, one private, one public—and embedded them in the orphan's cypherclerk, a small structure which had lain dormant, waiting for these keys. It sent a copy of the public signature out into the polis, to be catalogued, to he counted.

it ceased to be an abstract message and became a part of the machine.