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Where And What Is Transit?

Well, Transit isn't actually anywhere. But it isn't nowhere, either. It's kind of between places.

No one agrees how this happens to be. Some cosmologists think it's a quantum fluctuation, a bubble universe that's popped up inside our own universe and for some reason hasn't burst. Or, equally unlikely, it's an unusually large microverse caught within the dimensional joints between several other full-sized universes, a sort of blister on the brane. No one knows when this uncertainty might be resolved.

As for the religious explanations…let's not go there.

The first people to find Transit found it by mistake. They got lost in the fog and, literally, stumbled inside. For centuries the only way in and out – the only known way – was on foot. As time went by the feet doing the finding included mule train hoofs, camel hoofs and, allegedly, elephants. Once the existence of the place became more widely known, of course – it had been a dark and mysterious secret of the there-be-dragons variety – entrepreneurs drove through a road. Nowadays the main route in and out is by train. You can't fly. No one's sure why not.

Transit, these days, is a city. The city is surrounded by civilized farmland with a dispersed population, complete with towns, industries and tourists. This is the Transit Ambit. Further out from the city, the Ambit grades into wild land, and eventually the wild land…stops. Apart from the road and rail routes in and out, there seems to be no way through the Extremities. But that doesn't mean that things don't get in. They do. Transit is a rather strange place.

Modern Transit has people, bots, those transient things, and its own slightly weird way of life. It also has a university whose main focus of study revolves, one way or another, around Transit itself. But since really understanding the place would probably take the combined brain power of everyone in the university, the best way to get to know Transit is to spend some time there.

The university provides a magnet which can draw you in – if you're young, curious, reasonably clever, moderately ambitious, and in possession of a study place and a ticket on the Transit Impress.

So, let's taste a little Life in Transit…