At some point her spaghetti is done. She puts sauce on it. Serves him some.

"—oh, thank you!"

"You're welcome."

Peter's happy enough to eat in silence and tap away on his phone while trying to not look anything that might not be determined in reality up.

Elspeth is going to see if there exist maps.

There are maps! The world is spherical and has continents and those continents have countries and her country... has states, probably... which have cities...

How much does she want to know about the specifics there?

Let's have a map of the San Myshuno area.

That one's easy! She can have it. It has neighbourhoods and streets and stuff.

If she tries to look for the specific place she thresholded into another place, though, it definitely cuts through the city—according to this map, there should be city blocks and streets and all of that to both sides of the threshold, and there doesn't seem to be anything special about it that she can tell from the map.

"I'm going to figure out a commute with respect to this map," she says, zooming in, "and see if that makes the space between appear for real."

"Like a specific path?"

"Yeah. There's stuff on the map, there's supposed to be a - Maple Street, and so on."

"Oh yeah that one's bizarre. ...I wonder if anyone actually lives there? Maybe if we could visit them that'd do something?"

"I'll put it on the list of things to do with real estate friends."

"I bet I can find someone at the office, too, they ostensibly have hundreds of employees."

"Find someone who lives there?"

"Yeah. I guess it's possible all of them live this side of the threshold but that would be... differently interesting."

"Yeah. If I imagine asking a cab to take me to an address there I think I imagine it getting filled in, but it might be that till we do that there's nobody home."

"What I wonder is, if we do that, does that specific location get filled in only or does it happen to the whole—all of the space between the current threshold and new implied threshold? Bears testing, also."

"Yeah, once we find out where everybody we know lives."

"I feel like I should be registering predictions here about what I'd expect us to find and my brain is providing me with the words 'epistemic honesty' but this is once again something that seems to come from before I existed."

"I don't specifically have the predictions intuition myself but I don't mind it."

"Prediction: we're not going to actually run into anyone who lives in the prohibited zones just by asking people we personally meet, seventy percent. ...hmm but I think within that there's a reasonable chance that we can run into someone who claims they know someone who does live there, say forty percent conditional."

"Hmm. I think maybe if we go near those neighborhoods we can find someone? And it could depend what order we check things in."

"Exploring my entirely unfounded intuitions some more, I think I agree."

"What order would be most informative, I guess - ask a random half our coworkers, then check the place more closely if none live there...?"