Humanity had been using the jump logic for almost seven decades, but since the initial, incredible discovery of the code that could bend spacetime, there had been no other notable progress. Cartographers now learned the same rules as they did sixty-odd years ago; the equipment still did things that didn’t make sense with alarming regularity. The inhuman thinking that produced the original code was as incomprehensible to the scientists as the concepts behind their function.

Screens lit up with the code we’d seen so much of now, a fluid syntax shifting from language to language with merely arbitrary adherence to any programming or cartographic rules. All four engines woke, scaling up from ground state to full operational capacity. This was unlikely, given the damage to starboard two, but oddly enough I wasn’t as fazed about that as I could have been. The overseer pinged the console with a request not recognised by the system.

Everyone looked at me expectantly.