The dimensional medium above floor 200 was different from anything below it.
He felt the change the moment floor 200's transit corridor opened. The native-level space at this depth had an additional quality — the fable density that the Tower's founding intelligence had been accumulating in the medium since the system was built, centuries of convergent-being cultivation running through the dimensional architecture and leaving traces the way deep water left traces in the rock it moved through. Dense, specific, old in a way that was not the pre-Tower presence's kind of old. Old in the way of something that had been growing for a deliberate period toward a deliberate end.
He stopped in the transit corridor and pressed his palm to the dimensional medium directly.
