Creating an entire simulated reality is a tricky business. In the letter known colloquially to Mindjackers as the Wall is an especially complicated business: one if the unique properties of the Wall is that it is impossible to generate enough computational power there to create another tier of reality beneath it, due to its physics model having an aggressively accelerated drop-off in its weak interaction.

The reality of tessellated shapes that had created the Wall had implemented a variety of bodges to prevent the Wall from simply unraveling, and many of those bodges were exploitable. Take Xlar, a resident of the Wall who discovered that the exact right configuration of motions in the fifth dimension gave it access to a pool of strange liquid; when it fully submerged it’s mandibles in that liquid it experienced vivid, extended hallucinations, but consistent ones, to which it could return. It was a hypersquid; as a hypersquid it could be part of an advanced single-cell civilisation, or a great psychic net that spanned all of reality.

It suspected that it could go further.

But the problem with the bodges in the Wall is that anyone making their way through them likely did so accidentally; naively, perhaps, or even just clumsily. Xlar - or, so give its proper n-dimensional coordinates, Gigantic Blurry White Jewel - never even recognised that it had attracted the attention of a being millions of years of evolution more primitive than it, but which was, crucially, cunning and driven by a desire to survive.

So, as it dreamed one day of machines that ferried consciousnesses across the vast rifts of space, it did not notice a very ordinary, very physical hand open the door to its organic preservation pod and jam a neutral shunt roughly into the base of its spine; it just noticed its world elongated, become briefly noisy, and then dark.

absolutely brilliant job with the flavour text, josh

I wish I could edit the typos though