Chapter 16: What the Warden Was Before

The map on the table had been there for six hours.

Jax had built it in pieces — pulled strings of data from the station's incompatible record systems and forced them into the same coordinate space through a translation algorithm he'd written three days ago for a different problem and repurposed without ceremony. The result was a rendering that should not have been legible, because it was trying to represent four different ontological frameworks simultaneously, and ontological frameworks were by definition the things that made everything else legible, not the other way around.

It worked anyway. That bothered him more than he'd said.