Vortex

Spin ended with the alien Hypotheticals setting a vast Arch over the Indian Ocean. Those who sailed under it found themselves on Equatoria, another planet entirely.

In Axis, a secretive Equatorian community of Fourths-humans who've had their lives extended by illegal Martian technology-raised a boy, Isaac Dvali, to communicate with the Hypotheticals. They built the same technology into Isaac that had, back on Earth, allowed Jason Lawton to make contact with the Hypotheticals, before it killed him. But Isaac's fate proved stranger. Interstellar clouds of tiny fragmented Hypothetical nanomachines rained down on Equatoria, and some of them began to grow. He and Turk Findley, a tough bush pilot and former drifter, were absorbed-the Fourths' word for it is "remembered"-by a vast concatenation of those growths.

Now Turk Findley has awakened ten thousand years later, to be collected by the people of Vox-an Equatorial' group that's obsessed with the Hypotheticals, and who evidently know the timing whereby the "remembered" will reappear. And they've been waiting for Turk and Isaac a very song time, be cause they think Turk and Isaac can tell them what the Hypotheticals are, what they want, and what they're going to do.

Turk Findley has no idea. Isaac may have an inkling but to the extent that he understands the Hypotheticals a galaxy-spanning network of self-replicating Von Neumann machines that "thinks" very, very slowly because its mental processes are limited by the speed of light over interstellar distances-he's as alien they are. But this is not what the people of Vox, under attack by the other nations of Equatoria, want to hear.

Meanwhile, the story of Turk Findley and Isaac Dvali among the people of Vox is being told in scrawled notebooks by a disturbed man being held in a hospital on Earth in the years immediately following the Spin.