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Read an Excerpt From The Subtle Art of Folding Space by John Chu
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Read an Excerpt From The Subtle Art of Folding Space by John Chu
This isn’t your usual jaunt through quantum physics.
By John Chu
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Published on March 11, 2026
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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Subtle Art of Folding Space by John Chu, a science fiction novel that channels unhinged physics, generational trauma, and the comfort of really good dim sum—out from Tor Books on April 7th.
Ellie’s universe—and this one—is falling apart. Her ailing mother is in a coma; her sister, Chris, accuses her of being insufficiently Chinese between assassination attempts; and a shadowy cabal of engineers is trying to hijack the skunkworks, the machinery that keeps the physics of each universe working the way it’s supposed to.Daniel, Ellie’s cousin, has found an illicit device in the skunkworks—one that keeps Ellie’s comatose mother alive while also creating destabilizing bugs in the physics of this universe. It’s not a good day.If she can confront her mother’s legacy and overcome her family’s generational trauma, she just might find a way to preserve the skunkworks and reconcile with her sister…but digging into her family’s past is thornier than it seems, and the secrets she uncovers will force Ellie to choose between her family and the universe itself.
Chapter 1
“Attention passengers: The next Red Line train to Alewife is now approaching” echoes off the walls. Not only has the next Red Line train to Alewife arrived but its passengers have already flooded the station, a torrent rushing up the escalators, through the turnstiles, then down the concourse to spill out the doors to Cambridge. The deluge arriving as the PA system squawks catches Ellie off guard. It’s rush hour. When a train arrives on one side of the platform, the one on the other side leaves seconds later. She sprints, a beleaguered salmon racing against the current of bodies. Her pack sloshes between her shoulder blades, a sloppy fin batting the waves of people surrounding her.
No one has tried to kill her today—yet. Her sister, Chris, arranges something at random intervals. It’s to keep Ellie sharp, Chris claims, because, occasionally, skunkworks isolationists try. Not that Ellie believes Chris has her best interests at heart. Well, not anymore, but she doesn’t know how to stop the attempts on her life, and they do keep her sharp.
Maybe the mistimed announcement is part of today’s attempt. She’ll be caught in the rip current of bodies, a wave will overwhelm her, and a shark hiding in the swell will tear her to pieces. Compared to the attempt with the Mylar balloons, the jar of Marmite, and the US men’s Greco-Roman wrestling team, an ill-timed flood of people at Alewife Station is downright practical and likely.
None of that happens, though. The crowd flows around her as she plunges down the stairs toward the platform.
The car doors shut just as she reaches them. While the PA system blasts, “Attention passengers: The next Red Line train to Alewife is now arriving,” the train clatters away. The train supposedly now arriving sits already emptied on the opposite side of the platform. It beeps as its doors slide shut.
As the crowd streams up the stairs and escalators, the platform quickly clears, leaving a couple of people who must have, like Ellie, just missed the train. Some guy wearing shorts that stretch across his thighs, no shirt, and more self-possession than Ellie thought possible hovers in front of one of the train doors. Someone else sits on a bench, staring at her e-reader. A thin woman reaches for Ellie like a drowning person reaching for a buoy. Her luggage crashes to the floor. She asks in rapid Mandarin whether Ellie knows how to get to the Best Western. Her oboe-like voice skips through her words.
Ellie blinks. Strangers start conversations in Mandarin with her all the time at school. Not so much outside of school. The Best Western is only a short walk away. With luggage, though, the woman will want a taxi, but there’s almost always one dropping someone off outside the station. All the woman needs to do is go up the escalator and cross the concourse. She tells the woman all of this in Mandarin. Ellie’s response doesn’t draw laughs, her irrational fear whenever she talks to a stranger in any language that’s not English. In fact, the woman thanks her. Ellie decides she is not today’s assassin.
The woman doesn’t turn to the escalator. Instead, she freezes for a moment, then glares at Ellie.
People randomly start sounding like her sister way more often than Ellie would like. Some people text. Her sister commandeers convenient strangers. It’s never less than creepy, and it always catches Ellie off guard until the glare.
“If you’d quit school after Mom’s diagnosis like I’d told you to, you’d have moved back to DC,” the woman says in fluent English, her voice now husky and incongruously casual. “You wouldn’t need to worry about missing the Amtrak now.”
It’s not Chris’s voice, but it absolutely is. A childhood in Taipei clashed with an adolescence in Buffalo to give Chris an accent that’s all non-rhotic and flat nasal vowels. She’s always sounded like a panhandler in 1930s New York, albeit one who made unreasonable demands on your life rather than begged for a nickel. After Mom was diagnosed with glioblastoma, Chris became a 1930s New York panhandler who’s always promising to send Ellie to sleep with the fishes.
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The Subtle Art of Folding Space
John Chu
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The Subtle Art of Folding Space
John Chu
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Chris has always treated Ellie like this. Ellie was mostly through her undergrad when she had even an inkling that anything was different. None of her university friends have older siblings who talk to them like this. Granted, their older siblings are only a couple of years older, not practically a decade. Still, the idea that Ellie became a full-grown adult before realizing this is too embarrassing to think about, so she usually doesn’t.
“Even if I miss this Amtrak, it’s not like there won’t be another one tonight. What do you have to tell me that’s so urgent that it can’t wait until, at worst, tomorrow afternoon?” Ellie folds her arms across her chest. “You did not waylay some random stranger so that you can taunt me about missing the train.”
As Ellie says this, it strikes her that maybe Chris did. The obvious opening to needle Ellie is right there. Whenever Chris does it, she is, of course, always “ just joking.”
The woman only comes up to Ellie’s neck. She glares down at Ellie anyway.
“Of course not. Who do you think I am?” The woman folds her arms across her chest. “If I have to stay at home to watch Mom, you have to go to the skunkworks and repair the physics of this universe. Mom brought you with her so many times by now that you have to be dense if you can’t make a straightforward repair by yourself by now.”
Ellie ignores the jab. When Chris doesn’t have to play the good, dutiful sister around witnesses, Ellie has to ignore a lot of jabs to get through a conversation.
“What’s the problem?”
“Everyone’s wrong about why the International Prototype of the Kilogram is losing mass relative to its official copies. We’d see divergences between them even if the kilogram were defined by something more fundamental than a cylinder of platinum alloy. The notion of the kilogram, itself—”
“Has become unstable.” Ellie frowns. “Fundamental physical constants are changing—”
“Yes. Now the good news—”
“There’s good news?”
“—is we’ve found some hold-time violations in the skunkworks. Probably caused by some leaking valves. They must be why the kilogram’s unstable. Fix them and I promise I won’t judge you when you don’t get here until tomorrow afternoon. First time for everything.”
By “first time,” Ellie isn’t sure whether Chris is talking about repairing the skunkworks by herself or not judging her for being late. Probably the former. The skunkworks that generates a universe lives within the surrounding universe. She’s only ever assisted Mom, albeit more times than she can count by now. There are an infinite number of skunkworks and universes. Nothing in the matryoshka doll that is the set of nested universes can prevent Chris from judging Ellie. She would ask, but Chris has already gone.
The woman turns around as though she hasn’t said a thing. She goes to the escalator, trundling her luggage behind her.
At least someone gets to go where she wants to. Ellie doesn’t. Chris won’t let anyone else stay by Mom’s side. Mom lies comatose, the end stage of glioblastoma, on a bed in Chris’s den. She needs constant attention from Chris the way dolphins need tax advice. However, taking care of your parents is a filial obligation and no one is more Taiwanese than someone who no longer lives in the motherland. All of the relatives see Chris as the good daughter, the dutiful daughter. Even though Chris wants Ellie in the same house as Mom, she never lets Ellie do anything.
Ellie visits every weekend anyway. She does because she’s more like Chris than she likes to admit, just as stubborn and also someone who no longer lives in the motherland. Also, once in a while, Mom shifts in bed. She yawns. Her eyes open a crack and, for a moment, she stares right at Ellie, as though she’s about to wake from her long nap. Then her eyes close again, and she slumps back into oblivion. This seems like much more than random firing of neurons in a brain about to die. Ellie, even though she knows better, can’t help thinking that the next time might be the time she wakes for real.
The train beeps. Its doors slide open. Passengers stream onto the train. Ellie shakes her head clear, then joins them. Everyone else is headed toward Davis Square. Ellie, on the other hand, is headed to the universe that surrounds this one. She blends into the crowd, so no one notices when she disappears.
Chapter 2
The air in the skunkworks feels spackled onto her skin. It burns into her lungs like hot fudge, slow and slick, its aftertaste at once sickly sweet, bitter, and sour. It takes effort to force back out.
The skunkworks looks like the masterpiece of some mad plumber who failed perspectives class in art school. The labyrinth of pipes surrounding her make her dizzy at first. Standing on one of the broad swaths of transparent mesh stretched between pipes, she bobbles until she gets her bearings.
Fat pipes pass overhead. They form a de facto canopy hiding the rest of the skunkworks, which stretches for miles above her. In actuality, it stretches for miles in all directions. Fixes have piled on top of so-called improvements have piled on top of emergency repairs forever. Rust covers the gates and reservoirs at the intersection of pipes. Most pipes block each other’s way and have to zigzag around each other. No pipes are unscarred from dead welds of stubs where pipes used to join together.
Data pulses through the pipes in all directions. The pipes ripple, but stabilize in time for the clacking of valves and the burbling of reservoirs. Probably because she already knows which ones they are, the pipes that violate the hold-time requirement look out of sync even to the naked eye. Pipes are supposed to be stable from a little before reservoir valves clack shut until a little after. The pipes that violate the hold-time requirement start to ripple again too soon, corrupting the reservoirs they feed.
Someone stands on a mesh below her. Daniel. He’s a verifier, not an isolationist. None of the latter have found her yet. Ellie lets go of the breath she didn’t realize she was holding.
Even though Mom always pulled Ellie into the skunkworks with her, she never admitted, at least not to Ellie, to the existence of isolationists. She had to learn who they are from Chris. They believe whatever universe a skunkworks generates is by definition correct, even as a skunkworks inevitably decays. Any change introduces error instead of removing it. They’re what Chris used to scare Ellie into doing what Chris wanted when Ellie was a kid. Be good or the isolationists will get you.
Mom only ever talked about maintainers. They fall into three rough groups, with some overlaps. Architects design the configuration of gates and pipes that generate the next universe in. Builders, like Ellie and Chris, install those gates and pipes, translating the architects’ designs into reality. Verifiers, like Daniel, check whether architects have designed the right thing and whether they have designed the thing right. They understand the skunkworks better than anyone, to the extent that anyone really understands the workings of any universe. The first one to show up when the skunkworks has gone wrong is almost always a verifier. Or a generalist, who’s skilled at all three jobs.
Even looking down from above, no one can mistake Daniel. His long legs are proportionately too short for his torso, and his shoulders are too wide. He manages to be both lithe and stocky at the same time, as though he were the runt of a family of impossibly elegant giants. He was voluntold to play football in high school and, even now, he does not look like someone you want to tackle you. A black T-shirt is draped over his left shoulder.
The pipes beyond his gaze blur as though a giant thumb has smeared a broad swath of petroleum jelly on the air. He holds his hand out. The blurred air twists and swirls into a ball on his palm. It coalesces into an egg tart. Bright yellow custard sits inside a pale, blond serrated crust. The perfume of eggs and sugar hangs in the thick air.
Every verifier Ellie has met except Daniel generates equivalence reports as sheafs of something crystalline. Daniel’s, for reasons best known to Daniel, are always edible.
He studies the egg tart from every angle. His neck cranes and his hand twists. Crumbs fall when he lifts the tart to look at the crust’s bottom. He brings it to his nose to sniff. The custard jiggles slightly when he shakes the tart. He frowns.
Ellie bounces from mesh to mesh, swinging around pipes and ducking under reservoirs, landing next to Daniel. This mesh, already taut from his weight, barely registers her.
“Cousin! Your first time solo.” Daniel’s voice, despite being practically subsonic, is never the thunder she expects from an elegant giant. He speaks with the rustle of leaves and the rush of water as it smooths rock. “Congrats.”
“Chris mentioned hold-time violations, probably valves gone faulty. Should be an easy fix. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have sent me instead of coming herself.” Ellie’s arms wave in slow-motion semaphore as she steadies herself. “Your egg tart shows a mismatch between how the skunkworks that was built functions and how the skunkworks that was designed functions, right?”
“Yeah, no point calling in an architect. The design itself is fine. The problem is in the implementation. It’s all yours.”
She sets her backpack down, then walks around Daniel to a knot of intertwined pipes. Reservoir valves clack, and the pipes they feed ripple too soon. Data races through those pipes, corrupting the reservoir they feed in turn. All of the valves, however, are fine. Their actuators swing smoothly. Their seals fit perfectly against the pipes and reservoirs. Nothing leaks.
She could add some delays to satisfy the hold-time requirement, to make the data take longer to reach the reservoir they feed. That’s almost as simple as the leaky-valve repair Chris expected. That, however, would merely get rid of the symptom. Mom taught her better than that. She has to find the cause of the hold-time violation first.
The skunkworks predate humanity and, if she’s guessed the age of the hardware right, no human has ever made any changes to this section. Any mismatch in construction should have been found eons ago. She checks anyway, working through the checklist her mom taught her, hoping that’s what the problem is. If the design is fine and the hardware is correctly constructed, the remaining alternatives are all unthinkable.
She draws a large rectangle in front of her with her hand the way Mom taught her. A plane of air detaches and folds itself into an origami Black Forest cuckoo clock. The transparent, crystalline structure floats before her eyes. Its pendulum swings back and forth and the skunkworks fills with the sting of an offstage chorus whenever the pendulum stops at the peak of its arc. Light diffracts through leaves lining its sides. Color sprays across the pipes and Daniel. The egg tart still sits in his outstretched hand and he looks sillier than Ellie would have thought possible given his “I am deadly if you come within five paces” body.
The clock unfolds itself back into a rectangle, marked with creases where it had been folded. They divide the plane of air into facets that refract pipes behind them into something Syncretic Cubist. She grabs the newly retrieved blueprint. Its hard edges dig into her palms. She warps it, at first, into a dome, then into a sphere that seals her in.
Daniel splinters into “Man with an Egg Tart,” a Braque that Braque never painted. He’s all shards of black, gray, and brown flecked with grains of yellow. This piece of the skunkworks, however, resolves into something uniform and regular.
The multiple perspectives merge into one. Pipes straighten and meet at right angles. Ellie spins along three axes inside the sphere. Her hands and feet work their way up, down, and around the hard, cold sphere for support. Dense knots of machinery explode, laying bare their pipes and gates. The labyrinth of pipes has become now a regular matrix. The hardware matches the blueprints then.
That’s one possible issue eliminated. She’s not shocked. No problem as straightforward as a mismatch goes undiscovered for days, much less millennia. The sort of things that take forever to discover tend to be subtle. Fundamental constants shifting, even slightly, is not subtle. That implies a recent change. What she has to do now is find it.
The dataflow through the machinery is now perfectly straightforward. Pulses of data bulge from one pipe to another. They sweep in waves across the matrix, each wave a straight line traveling from one side of the matrix to the other. Whoever built this hardware followed the design rules derived from the physics for this universe.
That’s another possible issue ruled out. Again, a design-rule violation that makes the kilogram unstable was unlikely to stay undiscovered for millennia. So far, the lack of any mistakes in construction suggests that none of this hardware has changed for the longest time.
The waves propagate, however, faster than she expects. They should be regularly spaced. Each wave should be swallowed by a set of reservoirs that, a moment later, sends out a wave of its own. Instead, waves crash into each other. That’s bad. In fact, that’s not possible. It does, at least, highlight which paths are violating the hold-time constraint.
Daniel has verified that the design is correct. The hardware matches the design. It follows the design rules derived from the physics of this universe. It’s in good shape. There shouldn’t be any hold-time violations. It’s supposed to work, exactly as it has for millennia.
But it doesn’t.
While the skunkworks match the blueprint in construction, they don’t match the blueprint in function. She’s tempted to give up and just fix the symptom. A few buffers inserted into the relevant paths and the violation would be gone. Anyone with any training as a builder could do that. But she wants to know why a repair is necessary in the first place. Otherwise, she’s not really solving the problem.
“Fuck me.” She slams a foot against the sphere. It shatters with a chord from the offstage chorus. “The valves are fine. The design is fine. Everything is fine.”
She falls face up onto the mesh and thinks horrible things about Chris. Her backpack bounces above her, then lands on her stomach. Daniel seems to have disappeared. This completely tracks. Ellie was running bog-standard diagnostics. Three seconds of boredom and Daniel wanders off, sometimes to another universe. In this case, almost certainly back to their own, probably the instant she started doing her thing. It’s too bad because Ellie could use someone to talk through whatever is causing the skunkworks to fail like this.
Ellie knows the right thing to do. Chris probably has some idea of how to deal with this. Ellie should ask Chris for help. However, Ellie dismisses the idea almost before it crosses her mind. She can already hear exactly what Chris will say. Ellie doesn’t need a helping of “How can you be so useless? I ask you to do a simple bit of maintenance and you can’t even do that by yourself. And you wonder why I don’t want your help with Mom” before Chris finally deigns to offer a suggestion.
Instead, Ellie closes her eyes. Mentally, she ticks off entries on the checklist that builders follow when they troubleshoot. Mom walked her through it every time they were in the skunkworks together. Usually, though, they don’t make it as far as checking for design-rule violations before they have some clue of what’s going wrong.
There’s one entry on the checklist left, she realizes. Something happened that shouldn’t have in the skunkworks one universe out. That is, the skunkworks that generates the universe she is in now, which contains the skunkworks that generates her own universe. The recent change is there, not here.
In other words, she needs a verifier, say Daniel, to check out whether that skunkworks is working right. She keeps her eyes shut and listens to the valves around her clack open and closed with metronomic precision. Maybe a moment or three to clear her mind would be a good thing.
“I’m back.” Daniel’s rumbling voice shocks Ellie’s eyes open. “Did you miss me?”
Daniel looms over her, his hands behind his back. He smells like soy and ginger. An amused expression sits on his face.
“Egg tart?” He crouches, then places the pastry on the backpack. His other hand is still behind his back.
“I don’t need to study the equivalence report.” She pushes herself up by her elbows. “I trust your analysis.”
“I meant to eat. It’s a functional mismatch but still edible.” He nudges the backpack toward her head. “You haven’t had dinner yet, right? You’ll feel better with something in your stomach. Personally, I think that’s just a story my boyfriend tells me, but maybe eating really does clear the mind.”
She sits up. The backpack and egg tart slide to her lap. “Don’t you want your mind cleared?”
“Nyah. I don’t believe in emotions.” He notes her skeptical gaze and a grin lights his face. “I had a protein shake and a banana before I showed up.”
“I’ve checked everything else, so there’s only one thing left that can be wrong.” She takes a bite of the egg tart. It tastes sweet, sour, and… gamey. “Turkey and cranberries?”
“Hey, I said the report was a mismatch. I do what I can.” Daniel rolls his eyes. “So what’s wrong, cuz?”
“This entire universe.” She finishes the egg tart. It’s not bad if you know what’s coming. “It’s like someone secretly added lots of helium to the air and now we all squeak. Except less resistance rather than higher pitch. The skunkworks wasn’t designed for data to flow through pipes this easily. The properties of this universe can’t have changed much. Most of the skunkworks still works right or we’d be seeing—I don’t know—people diffracting through fences or something, but a few paths are now too fast.”
“Which is why we’re seeing functional failures even though what was built matches what was designed then functionally verified.” Daniel nods. “What next?”
“Check whether the skunkworks one universe out is working properly. I want to know whether just fixing the violating paths will solve the problem for good.”
“I popped out to check while you were assessing equivalence here. It’s fine.” From behind his back, he brings out a plate made of compressed, deep-fried rice that he must have been holding all this time. He puts it onto her backpack. Pieces of pan-fried fish coated in brown glaze sit on the plate. That’s why he smells of soy and ginger. “Also, I went to an archive and pulled a copy of the latest changes made to the skunkworks that generates the universe we’re in now.”
He digs a small, clear, iridescent dodecahedron out of the right, front pocket of his jeans and tosses it to her. Its facets are numbered. You could make an attack roll in an RPG with it. Fractures appear and disappear inside the die as Ellie rolls it around in her hand. She rotates the die from 20 to 1 and reads the shifting cracks. Her eyes widen at the sheer scope of some of the changes. These are not mere parts replacements or surgical bug fixes.
“So the maintainers of this universe intentionally changed their own physics? Why would anyone do that?” This goes against everything maintainers are supposed to stand for. “If you already knew that, why bother asking me what’s wrong?”
“I didn’t already know. Speculative generation.” He smiles. “You were busy and there was no reason not to check before you asked. I know what the builders’ checklist looks like, and it wasn’t impossible that you’d make it all the way down to the bottom. Sooner we get out of here, the less likely we’ll have to deal with any troublemakers. I saved us some time. And if it turned out you didn’t need me to do anything, no big deal.”
Ellie breaks off a shard from the plate to test the fish. The glazed fish’s crispy skin cracks against the deep-fried rice. She sniffs at this equivalence report. Then again, the egg tart smelled normal too.
“Is this going to taste icky sweet like 八寶飯 or something?”
Now Daniel looks annoyed. His gaze is sharp and his hands rest on his hips. “No, it’s going to taste like a deconstructed garlic fried rice paired with a soy-and-ginger-glazed tilapia. The skunkworks one universe out is fine. Eat.”
She lances a piece of fish and tries it. The tilapia is mild. Its triumph is that it doesn’t sit like cotton in her mouth. The glaze is lovely. Garlic, shallots, and a little brown sugar round out the soy and ginger.
Daniel simply shakes his head when she offers to share. She hasn’t had dinner yet, and she doesn’t have time, so it all disappears quickly. The glaze never cloys even when it coats her mouth. The plate made of rice clears the glaze away in any case.
“Show-off.” Ellie smiles before letting sparks flit from finger to finger on her left hand. She can show off, too.
The air becomes gauze that scatters the pipes, valves, reservoirs, even Daniel into mathematical points that then recombine. The machinery that generates the universe shimmers. When the gauze coalesces, it becomes cool, metallic, and malleable, not coincidentally the stuff that thickens into pieces of the skunkworks.
Her right hand extrudes a delay element out of the gauze. In time with the omnipresent clacking of valves, her left hand strikes the pipe in front of her twice. Sparks fly. The pipe splits into three pieces. Clean, parallel scars separate a ring from the pipe on either side of it. She removes the ring and replaces it with the delay element, her left hand sparking again to fuse the delay element into place.
One by one, she inserts extra delays to slow the paths that have become too fast. Click. Insert. Clack. Insert. She can only repair the skunkworks in the moment when the pipes are settled. It never halts. The skunkworks that lives in the innermost universe generates the outermost universe, whatever “innermost” and “outermost” mean when the universes are arranged in a loop.
Stopping one skunkworks stops all of them.
How you start them back up again is something she hopes she never has to figure out.
She dismisses the gauze and the skunkworks sharpen. The pipes grow and shrink in sync with the clacking of valves. Data no longer skids through paths causing pipes to expand or contract when they should be still.
“OK, Daniel, show me where to go. We need to flush out any speculative state before it’s committed, or we’re stuck with the results of a faulty skunkworks.”
The skunkworks is constantly speculating multiple possible futures. Ideally, only the correct one is committed to become the present, which becomes the past and what the skunkworks uses to speculate possible futures. The rest are all flushed away. Those futures never happen.
They, of course, are already stuck. Some mistakes of a faulty skunkworks have already been committed. Say a bug in the skunkworks causes fundamental constants to go out of whack. As a result, a beach ball tunneling through a brick wall is committed as the present instead of being flushed out. That’s now the state of the universe. Within the universe, whoever was looking at the beach ball saw it glitch from one side of the wall to the other. There’s no point to letting those errors compound, though. The universe should be generated correctly from as early as possible.
Daniel shifts his T-shirt across his back and ties it around his neck. It might look like a cape except it’s way too short. He appraises her, his face pensive.
“Anyone else might declare it close enough and leave. You really are Aunt Vera’s child.”
Ellie rolls her eyes. Mom’s reputation precedes her. “Considering how long you lived with us, you might as well be, too.”
Daniel looks annoyed again. “No, I mean her attitude about the skunkworks and the generated universe… Never mind. You have to see it yourself. Come on. Follow me.”
He leaps to a thick pipe way overhead. From there, he swings to a swath of mesh, he bounces, and off he goes.
“Hold up, you big lunk. You have over a foot of wingspan on me.” Ellie sighs too loudly, then follows him.
Excerpted from The Subtle Art of Folding Space, copyright © 2026 by John Chu.
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