It took less than a second to enter the other space. The shield around the ship that kept the hull from being eroded by the void rippled violently. The ripples interfered with and eroded each other, eventually turning into a shimmering expanse that made the optical display seem to fill with countless snowflakes in an instant. Such an intense reaction indicated that we had passed through an extremely unstable information structure. That structure might have been the talisman that had kept this space alive within the Void Domain until now, but we had never seen anything protect itself in this way.
"We passed through a membrane-like structure—a membrane in the mathematical sense." One of Tawell's Mass Projections was in her laboratory, while the version before us was a hologram. Countless complex patterns floated before her, and the data scrolling across them made anyone who glanced at it want to pick a fight with every scientist in the world. "More precious firsthand data. This truly is a fascinating structure. It is actually a filtering information constraint rule... Hmm, that may be difficult to understand, but its function is simple: it filters everything passing through it, filtering them from a void state into an ordered state. On one side of the membrane is disordered void; on the other is an ordered world that has been reorganized... The ship itself is orderly, so we passed through this membrane unchanged, as if we had diplomatic immunity."
"All right, you have plenty of time to study membranes or nets or whatever." I quickly raised both hands in surrender to Glasses Older Sister, who was normally quite mild-tempered but became fanatical whenever science was involved. "Now tell us, how are our connections with the outside?"
"All information transmitted beyond the membrane is being blocked, but the