[Now you get it], says Eleven.
“Yeah,” says Sarya softly, staring wide-eyed through the suit’s transparent walls. She is breathing hard, and she can feel her heart pounding in her chest. “I get it.”
Except she doesn’t. Her mind struggles, trying to make sense of what her eyes are seeing. At first it looks like Riptide is afloat in a gauzy white mist. It moves around the ship in patterns so slow they are almost still, in swirls, in slow-motion whorls. And then with a start, she feels her perspective expand. This isn’t a fog just outside the ship, this is a field of particles more massive than her mind can grasp. In every direction dance innumerable points of light in every conceivable color, so many that they blend together into a haze of white light.
“Lydies, gentlexirs, fuzzies, creepy androids, legal and sub-legal intelligences, so on and so forth,” crows Ol’ Ernie. “Allow me to introduce y’all to the family.”
“They’re ships,” she whispers. “Every single point of light is a ship.”
[Not ships], says Eleven. [My holo system doesn’t have that kind of resolution. Some of these points represent a million ships.]
A million ships per point. “How many—” Sarya begins, but her voice fails her. “How—”
[Exactly.]
It’s mind-blowing. It’s beyond anything Sarya has ever imagined. And yet, after a few moments of slack-jawed observation, she realizes that it’s also strangely familiar. “We’re backstage,” she breathes.
[Pardon?]
Sarya can’t take her eyes off the lights outside. Trillions of them, moving in such purposeful patterns, never with the slightest chance of a misstep or collision. “On Watertower,” she says—quietly, as if she could disturb this vast choreography with nothing more than her voice. “That’s how I thought of it, as backstage. You could get between any two places on the station if you went sort of…behind the scenes. There were so many intelligences back there, making things work. They moved exactly like this. Together, like one…thing. Thousands of them, all connected together, like this gigantic mind or something.”
[Thousands], says Eleven with a derisive rumble. [This is trillions. And that’s not even counting the Blackstar itself.]
The Blackstar itself. The thing she came here for. She peers out into the haze, searching. You would think it would be bigger than a point, though. It’s a whole station. It has to be many times the size of Watertower, but with trillions of points to choose from—
“Now y’all’s tiny l’il minds prolly won’t believe this,” says Ol’ Ernie, “but y’all are closer to a star now than you were on the other side. The only star in this l’il pocket o’ spacetime, believe it or not. Think of it like a transit station, if that helps y’all’s puny intellects.”
But Sarya sees no stars at all, only the field of shifting twisting lights. “Wait,” she says. “So if we’re right next to a star—”
[Then why can’t you see it?]
“Right. I mean, the sun was huge. This should be…” She searches for the word. “Huger. Right?”
[Spoken like a true high-tier.]
Sarya takes a breath for a retort, but again Eleven’s display interrupts. A simple diagram begins to draw itself over the drifting multitude of lights outside. Markers appear, then labels. Circular highlights trace the entrances to hundreds of subspace tunnels like the one they just came through. The openings are arranged as if on the inner surface of a sphere, though Sarya could not begin to imagine how large that sphere must be. In the center, another line begins to form—no, it’s another circle, it’s just too large to see the whole thing. It’s another sphere, an inner sphere dead ahead, so large that Sarya has to crane her neck in all directions to see the whole thing. From its surface, she can pick out faint lines of activity, stronger lines of light that lead out from this massive glowing thing to the hundreds of subspace tunnels.
“That’s a star?” she asks. “I thought a Blackstar was a station.”
[It’s both], says Eleven.
Something has suddenly clicked in Sarya’s mind. “You’re not saying they built a station—”
[Around a star.]
“What?”
The suit rumbles. [It’s just the Network], it says.
Sarya doesn’t even attempt to argue. In her mind, a sudden realization has taken hold. “What’s the…population of that thing?” she asks.
Eleven hums. [Three hundred ten trillion], it says after a moment. [And this is just a little one, out on the edge of the Network.]
“Three hundred ten—”
[You think that’s something, you should see one of the big ones], continues Eleven, oblivious to her distress. Against the lights, its diagram expands into still more lines and symbols. [There are stations that connect Blackstars together like Blackstars connect individual solar systems. See that tunnel up there, the biggest one? That tunnel connects this Blackstar—and all its solar systems—to the Network. There are things on the other side of that tunnel that make our little Blackstar look like an asteroid, but you have to be higher tier to visit them. Maybe to even understand them.] The suit rumbles. [Even higher-tier than you.]
The jab passes through Sarya without effect, because she cannot process it. Three hundred ten trillion. Three hundred ten—
And now Ol’ Ernie is speaking again, but his harsh voice has faded to a buzz. He is probably giving them a schedule or telling them what to expect. Sarya hears the rhythm of the words, but they pass through her mind without leaving an impression. She stares into the diaphanous glow surrounding Riptide, into a sphere many times larger than a sun. Somewhere in there, among three hundred ten trillion intelligences, is the one she’s looking for.
Maybe.
[Nervous?] asks Eleven, one of its straps squeezing her shoulder. [Don’t worry. I’ll come with you. If Sandy lets me, I mean.]
But Sarya cannot answer. Three hundred ten trillion. No, she’s not nervous.
She’s hopeless.
The following is greatly abridged from the original Network article, in accordance with your tier.
NETWORK FOCUS: BEHOLD THE BLACKSTARS
Given the utter reliability, ubiquity, and ease of use of the galaxy’s only legal faster-than-light system, it’s easy to forget that the Network hasn’t always existed. In fact, it’s only been about five hundred million years since the first Blackstar came online. In the short time since then, the Network has grown from that single station to a gigantic superstructure built upon over a million Blackstars—all connected through subspace!