The name for what Hugo, Vesper, Clara, and "a handful of others" are: a small, finite set of designed beings — "machines running some manner of self, be it mechanical, organic, or quantum" — built by "something long-gone and forgotten."
A node's fixed, unchangeable specialty — what it can and can't do. Hugo can't generate oxygen ("I'm not attuned to make one"); Vesper, not Hugo, can read organic neurons.
A bonded pair of nodes who work as partners. Hugo and Vesper are a dyad — and, he insists, explicitly not a romance.
The medium through which a dyad communicates: instant, wordless exchanges across any distance.
The basic particle a node is made of. Hugo is a swarm of cognitive motes; he can split his mind across them and even thread a "contingent of motes" through another body to keep it alive.
The on-page word for a single member of the Array. The Threnic greet Hugo and Vesper as "Nodes Tria and Dio."
Casual word for a node's ability to translocate instantly between places — even between planets — after some preparation. Vesper pops; Hugo can't.
Someone from a world not yet part of the galactic community. Hugo calls Eira's cheap suit "a cheap option for isolate tourists."
The crystalline shard-species native to Threnos — ancient, but stalled forever in the Emergence stage. They swim beneath the planet's glass surface and rise to mimic a visitor's shape and sing.
Hugo's word for mortals. He uses it, but never defines it on the page.
A self-driving vehicle on Coda that seems to sail over the ground and can be summoned remotely.
A node's spacefaring ship. Hugo's car-like "roadster" is really a cruiser; he pairs it with star bridges to get around, since — unlike Vesper — he can't pop. His own is currently stranded on Caligo.
Tiny medical machines that work inside the bloodstream, handling things like alien toxins.
Eira's "exoskeleton": a horde of tiny armor-bots that form a matte-black suit, with a visor that expands into a CO₂-recycling helmet and the ability to speak the local language for her.
Interplanetary travel infrastructure you "book passage through" — and, by Vesper's account, slow going ("Those take ages!"). Hugo relies on cruisers and star bridges; Vesper just pops.
A dangerous stage in a civilization's growth, as Hugo describes it: "strong enough to engineer their own extinction and still stupid enough to try." Only about half of civilizations survive it.
Coda's all-seeing data and surveillance network. Step into a city and it logs your every move; it is also described as a digital existence one can upload into, leaving the body behind.
An early stage on Hugo's scale of a civilization's development, below Consolidation. A species can stall in it indefinitely — the Threnic are ancient yet never left Emergence.
An in-world unit of time, shorter than a turn. The Sonorium runs "several marks — sometimes even a full turn."
The local language of Coda. Eira's lessons "aren't going well"; her suit speaks it for her.
The galactic political body a world is inducted into. Hugo quietly files for Caligo's "unwitting" induction.
A Threnic funeral rite that "call[s] the fallen back to the planet," staged at crystal-spire temples tuned like tuning forks to guide spirits home. It's said to have inspired the galaxy's habit of "containing the dead" — which Hugo despises as delusion.
An in-world unit of time, of unspecified length. "It's been nearly a turn"; Hugo spent "three turns" beside the revolutionary.