The world is a very large place.
You leave the house and you think you're outside, among the openness of the world, the sky that stretches over everything. You're wrong. You're wrapped up in a crease, holding onto your direct surroundings, wrapped up in atmosphere and the gravity of a planetary body wrapped up in the gravity of a star. And so on. You jump from crease to crease, filling out your tight little light-cone. But we wanted to go outside. We wanted to be free. Another step up, and out into the dark.
Immortality, in a way, was the easy part. Break the gas mileage on your light-cone and many things become possible possible. The problem is it takes time to move. The problem is the world is a very, very large place.
A spaceship isn't the best place to live, the tightest little crease floating out in the nothingness. The solution is to stretch that crease in non-spacial directions. A crease full of people can be as big as a planet, for our purposes. A crease full of fantasies is even bigger.
We learned to push our fantasies outward into virtual directions. We learned to share them with each other, to participate in objects of fantasy together, while our bodies went further and further into the dark. We learned to scream them out so loudly that everyone could hear, so everyone could partake. And our fantasies reached out to us.
The Fleet is our own little crease of the universe. Many of us have never known anything else. In our dreaming we have found things far stranger than we will in a million years find on any planet, or so we think. And our Network has more creases than any solar system our physicists have dreamed of. The substrate of our simulations is the soul, and with our computers we found a new outside. Outside space, outside flesh, outside logic. We dream recursively. We dream lovingly.
And we are often alone.