The manual's first line had said Aether was something you remembered how to feel, and after two hours of reading, Max was beginning to suspect this was the most accurate sentence anyone had ever written about anything.
He read without stopping. The manual did not waste his time, which he appreciated more than he would have acknowledged to anyone. It was written by someone who understood that the reader was starting from nothing and needed to arrive somewhere functional, and had organized every word with that understanding in mind. No mysticism. No philosophical detours about the nature of existence. Just the mechanics of a system, explained in the sequence that made the system comprehensible.
