"Hunter’s cities are all one city. Each house opens its door on to a street that is all streets. Cobbles reveal themselves from a given perspective to be bitumen or limestone flagging, and all roads are runways, canals or rivers, so that one might go from London to Boston to Amsterdam as easily as from number nine to number twelve. Growing bolder, one might leave the immediate white European neighbourhood and pass on to Cairo or Kirghizia, to Santiago de las Vegas or Addis Ababa. The journey of a thousand miles does not begin with a single step; it is one step. Humanity exists in a unitary urban sprawl whose laws may vary and whose travel infrastructure may take more or less time in conventional space to connect any given part with any other, but in these fictions there is no such difficulty and the conceptual truth becomes the practical. The reader and therefore also de facto the protagonists move from one room to the next without passing through the intervening space, because there is none. Life is a series of cinematic elisions, and we do not wait in waiting rooms or get bored, we simply "cut to." Place and time in the world—as in the act of consuming the text—are notional and a matter of opinion. Like Wilhelm Reich, the prisoner walks through walls. In Quaerendo, the modern reader, contemporaneously convicted as a killer by Mr. Murder, voluntarily incarcerates herself with the narrator in a prison constructed by the Mad Cartographer in the distant future, awaiting the judgement which was rendered hundreds of years before by the Five Cardinals as part of their plot against the Roman Empire. Perhaps every day is 14 June 1986, the date upon which the world came closest to total nuclear war. Perhaps the bombs fell and the release of energy has utterly extinguished temporality and we exist in a permanent exception to the rules of physics we painstakingly assemble.