Fourteen people had died in the deluge. One hundred and fifty million tonnes of water, Horace had estimated later, dumped into the centre of the Space in handy screw-top bottles. In the confusion of that day there was little agreement as to exactly what shape they had been stacked in, but there was general agreement that they had been neatly layered row upon row, forming a sort of vertical column. The immense combined weight of the column had crushed and burst the bottles in the lower layers, and the whole formation had collapsed like those old tower blocks that turn into clouds of grey dust at the push of a button. The downward motion of the bottles had driven an immense wave of water outwards, eating up the floor of the Space in an unstoppable rush, inundating all of the floor and crashing massively against the outer walls with horrifying violence. Even without her memories, Marie was quite certain she had never heard any sound as terrible as that.

Today, almost all the Space outside of the Ferrousdyke and the Holmdyke was flooded to a depth of over four metres with a stagnant mass of water. The bottles, it had turned out, were made of some kind of advanced bioplastic, incredibly light but fragile, and rapidly degrading when crushed, dissolving into a kind of muddy-smelling sludge in a couple of hours.

This had given the Space Sea a three-layered structure: a base layer of sludge from all the bottles that were smashed in the deluge, a middle layer of perfectly mineral-balanced but increasingly murky water, and a thick layer of still-sealed bottles floating near the surface, buoyed up by the little pocket of air trapped inside each one.

The sludge layer was thin near the walls of the Space, and thickest near the centre, where the column of bottles had stood, even poking up above the water in one place to form Slime Island. The intact bottle layer was everywhere over a metre thick, which made swimming almost impossible, but it did mean that one could reach in and fish out a refreshing portion of clean drinking water with a handy human-unscrewable lid. Matt had put the screw threads on the wrong way which outraged the muscle memory but at least it was something.

Marie’s pavilion was pitched on a small hill made of artificial soil: sand, clay, and crystalline silt, graded and mixed to exact proportions that were themselves the result of complete guesswork. Plus a binding agent to stop it slipping and flowing like mud – they’d learned that the hard way. Luckily, Matt’s definition of what counted as basic supplies stretched pretty far in the realm of building materials.

Marie’s hill was new. The older constructions could be abandoned now that the Ferrousdyke pretty reliably protected this little hemisphere of dry (well, dry-ish) floor squashed up against the Space’s outer wall around the main Matt interface. In their first desperate rush to save themselves from the water they had summoned enormous mounds of seemingly random materials and equipment, a cluster of islands and breakwaters they could scramble up to escape the crushing white wall bearing down on them. Some of them had turned out to be quite useful, being heaps of necessary resources or enormous stacks of tools and equipment. Others not so much: the mounds made up of perishable foodstuffs had become particularly troublesome. Matt had proved extremely… Marie didn’t think “helpful” was the right word… compliant at conjuring large quantities of things at locations of your choice, but much less so at removing them.

Seven person pods had still been sealed when the deluge happened. They’d managed to pull two of them to safety, and Anna had found a third before it had opened. Marie didn’t want to think about the other four. Matt didn’t seem concerned, but then it didn’t seem concerned about anything.

Over the bottle-laden water from the Ferrousdyke, a terrifyingly unstable bridge covered the short distance to the Holmdyke. The Holmdyke was less well-constructed and had a lot more water inside of it, but the Coven still insisted on living there. And then there was Crisper’s Castle – people did strange things when they got to play god like that. Now that the Council had thoroughly taken control of communications with Matt, that sort of thing should no longer happen. Hopefully. You’d think control of the magic thing-maker machine would be all you needed, but Matt’s demands for offerings had created a strange kind of economy where the more fringe communities could make demands if they were willing to provide…

Marie leant back in her chair and closed her eyes. Dealing with the problems of the Space was exhausting. She decided she did feel old after all.