The most philosophically weighted sim in the catalogue — a portal chain that ends not at a battle but at a library with no closing time. Trace it node by node.
◆ Canon · ▣ Narrative sim · §17Novo Alexandria is, unusually, a sim that functions less as an action environment than as an argument. A space object lands on state land in southeast California; from it opens the Wadlow Portal (just over 9 ft each way — named for the tallest recorded human). It hums a slow Morse signal: three textbooks of schematics — a working fusion reactor, a supercollider beyond the Waxahachie design, and "a quantum computer that actually works."
The chain runs California → Azure Janus (a Texas-shaped landmass at one-fifth scale, breathable, no predators — and seven hangars of unexplained refined material) → Rust-Mars (mask, not suit) → Novo Alexandria, a moon-sized computronium station orbiting a stellar black hole, staffed by tens of thousands of academics who simply want to teach.
Late in New Pluto, characters argue the sim's presence in the Day 1 catalogue was deliberate: the ETI advertising what voluntary self-improvement at civilisational scale looks like. As one puts it, Borg was always the wrong analogy — the right one was a library with no closing time. Pairs with the Time Dilation Instrument (Novo Alexandria runs on black-hole time) and the Omega Centauri Society's black-hole tools.