read it here on Greg’s website

Seriously, just stop what you’re doing and read it yourself, it’ll take 20 minutes. This short story checks all my boxes: characters/dialogue is great, the setting is intriguing without getting bogged down up its own ass, the plot contains drama which transcends the setting. Throughout, Egan demonstrates a creative command of technology, physics, mathematics, and most importantly language. The story spans 3 and a half or so Carl Sagan-esque expositive scenes, and, while exploring a supremely well-scoped sci-fi idea, also tackles some philosophical disputes between humanities and science.

Some banger excerpts:

Everything meaningful about an individual citizen could be packed into less than an exabyte, and sent as a gamma-ray burst a few milliseconds long. If you wanted to simulate an entire flesher body – cell by cell, redundant viscera and all – that was a harmless enough eccentricity, but lugging the microscopic details of your “very own” small intestine ninety-seven light years was just being precious.

and

There are billions of light years laid out in front of us – the entire history of the hole’s interior, converted into space – and it’s expanding as we approach the singularity.”

and

Tiet said, “Nothing was at risk of being lost. Information about the Dive is being broadcast to every polis, stored in every library.” Tiet’s icon was like a supple jewelled statue carved from ebony.

Prospero waved a hand dismissively. “A stream of technical jargon. In Athena, it might as well have been the murmuring of the waves.”

Tiet raised an eyebrow. “If your vocabulary is impoverished, augment it – don’t expect us to impoverish our own. Would you give an account of classical Greece without mentioning the name of a single city-state?”

“No. But those are universal terms, part of our common heritage—”

“They’re terms that have no meaning outside a tiny region of space, and a brief period of time. Unlike the terms needed to describe the Dive, which are applicable to every quartic femtometre of spacetime.”

Prospero replied, a little stiffly, …

and

Sachio cut him off impatiently. “They’re the product of a few chance attractors in flesher neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex or subtle story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once writing was invented, they were only ever created deliberately by fleshers who failed to understand what they were. If all of antiquity’s greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheroidal pebble the pinnacle of the artform. What you’ve created is not only devoid of truth, it’s devoid of aesthetic merit.”

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