Gleisner: A conscious, flesher-shaped robot. Strictly speaking, gleisners and polis citizens are both conscious software (and gleisners will move their software to near bodies, if necessary, without considering themselves to have changed their identity). However, unlike polis citizens, gleisners attach great importance to being run on hardware which forces them to interact constantly with the physical world.
Home born: Those citizens of a polis created by psychogenesis within that polis.
Icon: A characteristic image, possibly accompanied by gestalt tags, identifying some piece of software, such as a citizen.
Indeterminate field: In a mind seed, a field where only one instruction code has been tested, and the effects of any variation are unknown.
Infotrope: A structure within Konishi citizens responsible for detecting complex, imperfectly understood patterns and coordinating attempts to make sense of the infrastructure field. In a mind seed, a field where one particular instruction code is known to be essential for successful psychogenesis.
Input channel: A structure within Konishi citizens which receives data from other software.
Input navigator: A structure within Konishi citizens which issues requests to the polis operating system for data to be provided to the citizen's input channels from a particular address.
Intrinsic curvature: In a Riemannian space, a measure of the extent to which tangents to a curve at two nearby points are not parallel to each other. If the Riemannian space is a surface embedded in Euclidean space, intrinsic curvature measures the amount of curvature which is "within" the surface, as opposed to being perpendicular to it.
Introdus: The mass influx of fleshers into the polises in the late twenty-first century.
Invariant: An invariant of a mathematical structure is some characteristic which remains unchanged when the structure is transformed in certain ways. For example, the Euler number of a surface with no boundary (such as a sphere or a torus) is calculated by dividing the whole surface into (possibly curved) polygons, then adding up the number of polygons, minus the number of lines used to form them, plus the number of points where the lines meet. This is a "topological invariant" of the surface, because it remains the same however much the surface is bent or stretched.
Inviolability: The protection of a citizen against alteration by any other software without explicit consent.
Kozuch Theory: A provisional unified theory of physics developed in the mid-twenty-first century. Kozuch Theory describes the universe as a ten-dimensional fiber bundle; its size in six dimensions is sub-microscopic, so only the familiar four dimensions of space-time are immediately apparent. Particles such as electrons are actually the mouths of very narrow wormholes, an idea first suggested by the twentieth-century physicist John Wheeler. Renata Kozuch developed a model in which the properties of different particles are due to the different ways wormhole mouths can he connected in the six extra dimensions.
Linear: (1) A data format derived from digitized sound. (2) A particular language which employs linear data, widely used in the Coalition of Polises.
Manifold: A topological space with a definite dimension, but no geometrical properties. A 2-dimensional manifold is somewhat like a perfectly flexible sheet of rubber with zero thickness, and a 3-dimensional manifold is like a slab of the same material—with the possibility that parts of the border of this idealized "sheet" or "slab: have been joined to each other, perhaps in ways which would he physically impossible in three dimensions. Supplementing a manifold with concepts of distance and parallelism turn it into a Riemannian or semi-Riemannian space.
Mind seed: A program to construct a polis citizen, written in the Shaper language. At the binary level, a mind seed is a string of approximately six billion bits.
N-sphere: An N-dimensional space without boundaries which can be embedded in (N+1)-dimensional Euclidean space as the surface (or hypersurface) equidistant from some point. For example, the surface of the Earth is a 2-sphere, and the hypersurface of a four-dimensional star or planet would be a 3-sphere, but the solid planets themselves in either dimension are not N-spheres in this sense.
Outlook: A non-sentient program which runs inside the exoself, monitoring a citizen's mind and adjusting it as necessary to maintain some chosen package of aesthetics, values, etc.
Output channel: A structure within Konishi citizens which provides data to other software.
Output navigator: A structure within Konishi citizens which issues requests to the polis operating system to transfer data from the citizen's output channels to a particular address.
Penteract: A five-dimensional version of a cube. A three-dimensional cube has six square faces, twelve edges, and eight vertices. A five-dimensional penteract has ten tesseractic super-faces, forty cubic hyperfaces, eighty square faces, eighty edges, and thirty-two vertices.
Planck-Wheeler length: The length at which quantum uncertainty in the structure of space-time causes classical General Relativity to cease to apply, equal to about 10-35 meters, which is twenty orders of magnitude smaller than the size of atomic nuclei.
Polis: (1) A computer or network of computers which functions as the infrastructure for a community of conscious software. (2) The community itself.
Psychoblast: An embryonic software mind, prior to the granting of citizenship.
Psychogenesis: The creation of a new citizen by running a mind seed, or by other methods such as the assembly and customization of pre-existing components.
Riemannian space: A Riemannian space is a manifold, with two added geometrical concepts: a metric, which is a means of computing the distance between two close points, and a connection, a means of deciding whether two directions at two close points are "parallel." In the case of a surface embedded in Euclidean space, the distance between two close points in the manifold can be defined as the distance between them in the external space, and directions at two close points can he defined as "parallel" if any difference between them in the external space is perpendicular to the surface. For example, a horizontal compass needle pointing north at the equator is "parallel" in the Riemannian sense with one pointing north at a slightly higher latitude-because although they're not pointing in exactly the same direction in 3-dimensional space, the difference in direction is perpendicular to the surface of the Earth.
Rush: For a polis citizen, to rush is to experience the passage of time between external events more rapidly, by running vis own mind more slowly.
Scanning: The process of comprehensively analyzing a particular living organism and creating a software simulation of all or part of it.
Scape: A simulation of some physical or mathematical space, not necessarily 3-dimensional.