Slick had once stimmed a Net/Knowledge sequence about what shape the universe was; Slick figured the universe was everything there was, so how could it have a shape? If it had a shape, then there was something around it for it to have a shape in, wasn't there? And if that something was something, then wasn't that part of the universe too? This was exactly the kind of thing you didn't want to get into with Gentry, because Gentry could tie your head in knots. But Slick didn't think cyberspace was anything like the universe anyway; it was just a way of representing data. The Fission Authority had always looked like a big red Aztec pyramid, but it didn't have to; if the FA wanted it to, they could have it look like anything. Big companies had copyrights on how their stuff looked. So how could you figure the whole matrix had a particular shape? And why should it mean anything if it did?