A helpful tip for when dealing with others: When someone starts talking about reconfiguring the world, it's time to run very, very far away. Unless the person to whom you're talking is terraforming the world, in which case...get his or her business card for me.

I've been looking forward to doing this page for a little while; there's so much absurdity and cuteness on it. Although the "Nature Maintenance Droid" in Haas's ideal world came out looking great, I don't feel comfortable taking much credit for it as it's an obvious ripoff of the fabbo mecha designs in Neil G.'s Robot Stories.

Letters, we get letters: Thum Bingming wrote in to ask about the page's title. Well, to be honest it doesn't really mean anything at all; like most of our taglines, I just picked it because I heard it somewhere and it sounded neat. It's the sort of absurd and overbearing assertion you'd expect a mad scientist to make.

Thum also asked about "decoherence," as used in the last chapter. The idea of how a decoherence beam would work is admittedly rather hazy. Essentially, quantum mechanics states that until they are observed, particles exist in all possible states (or at least a wide variety of same) simultaneously. Upon observation, they instantly collapse into a single state, which ends up being what the observer sees. That process is called decoherence. How you could turn that into a gun is obviously one of the Solar Navy's best-kept secrets, but perhaps it arranges for all of the particles in the target to collapse into random states which are not necessarily the best choices for remaining in one piece.