-- Why did you preserve Old Earth, Ummon?

[Nostalgia/ 
Sentimentality/
Hope for the future of humankind/
Fear of reprisal]

-- Reprisal from whom? Humans?

[Yes]

-- So the Core can be hurt. Where is it, Ummon? The TechnoCore?

[I have told you already]

-- Tell me again, Ummon.

[We inhabit the 
In-between/
stitching small singularities
like lattice crystals/
to store our memories and
generate the illusions
of ourselves
to ourselves]

-- Singularities! I cry. The In-between! Jesus Christ, Ummon, the
Core lies in the farcaster web!

[Of course\\ Where else]

-- In the farcasters themselves! The worlmhole singularity paths! The
Web is like a giant computer for AIs.

[No]
[The dataspheres are the computer\\
Every time a human
accesses the datasphere
that person's neurons
are ours to use
for our own purposes\\
Two hundred billion brains/
each with its billions
of neurons/
makes for a lot
of computing power]

I try to conceive of this and fail. Farcasters were the Core's greatest gift 
to us... to humankind. Trying to remember a time before farcasting was like 
trying to imagine a world before fire, the wheel, or clothing. But none of 
us... none of humankind... had ever speculated on a world between the 
farcaster portals: that simple step from one world to the next convinced us 
that the arcane Core singularity spheres merely ripped a tear in the fabric 
of space-time.

Now I try to envision it as Ummon describes it -- the Web of farcasters an 
elaborate latticework of singularity-spun environments in which the 
TechnoCore AIs move like wondrous spiders, their own "machines", the billions 
of human minds tapped into their datasphere at any given second.