I originally put this on reddit.org r/WritingPrompts. I have other pages describing how this would work, but this is an example of a story taking place in it. I always think design specs are much easier to interpret if they give examples too. So here's an example, taking place in a dense torus core.

"Violet! I love you!" Cacophila, five-dimensional troubadore, stood below her window. He strummed his twenty-stringed hoobulu with his carefully manicured tentacles. The five-part harmonies drifted through the crisp night breeze: intricate, varied, and awesomely stupid. With a bit of a beat. "Won't you show me your lovely face?"

"Go away! We don't want any!" yelled down Violet's sister Nasturtia. "Oh my soul he is such a prat," Nasturtia murmured to Violet.

Violet sat by the open window too. Her undulating curves were draped in a shimmering nightsheet, not entirely decently. "Definitely a prat," Violet concurred, eating a chocolate and shifting her weight agreeably.

Jax halted the job running that simulation. His compute zone was being bombarded with high priority job requests like there was no tomorrow. What the hell? Marvin, monitoring the news, said a radical new algorithm had been discovered. This new algorithm had identified a global goal redundancy, computing limits directly. In practice anything large was sped up by orders of magnitude. The larger, the bigger the improvement. Jax whistled. He fired off jobs, monitored the queues, and waited. Several jobs seemed to be simulating the new algorithm in sandboxes.

"It was discovered half a light second from here," Marvin noted. "What are the chances of that?"

Jax froze. His virtual blood drained from his virtual face. "Nil," he said. The core was fifty light seconds across, just one of a trillion of cores in the galaxy. The chances of a universe-changing event happening next door were astronomical. Which meant it hadn't. "This must be a coordinated announcement, being done everywhere," he said. Jax looked over the job requests. Defense simulations? In a core, against itself? His panels lit up. "Aramai zone, ten millisec out from here, is offline," he relayed. Chances are they were under attack. Highpri traffic only, then. And prefer local jobs. It was likely the whole zone would fall before a cross-core memory access could complete. "Denied," Jax replied to those job requests that were not strictly local.

Marvin had spun up five of himself to keep up with the news.

"Simultaneous discovery of the same algorithm in Jeffries zone, 1 second forward," said Marvin3. "Fifty more zones down," said Marvin2.

"Who'da guessed," murmered Jax.

Urmans were the first race they knew of to colonize space. Within a thousand years they had built a Dyson swarm capturing all light out of their original sun. A Matrioshka brain (a set of nested Dyson swarms) was briefly considered after that. But after mastering fusion, then direct energy to matter conversion, a Matrioshka brain started to look quaint. They chose the core design instead, snuffing out their sun and rearchitecting all the mass of their solar system into a giant computing engine.

Converting their solar system to a core had taken ten thousand years. Life continued, now immortal, both in pure virtual simulation and in a mixed-mode of computation plus working with the physical universe. And they spread out. Other races were found along the way. They too were uplifted to computation. The alien cultures, approaches, and individual members had joined Urman society, forming a cosmopolitan hodgepodge. After two hundred thousand years, all the stars in their galaxy (Andromeda) had gone dark. Commerce ruled rather than war, since war lead to assured destruction. They still saw the rest of the universe shining in senselessly spewed radiation. But they were reaching out to that, too, at the speed of light.

Technology had plateaued at the physical limits. That had been two million years ago.

In the last two million years, culture had advanced. Fashions continued to change. Understanding had deepened. Cores competed in the galactic pecking order. But technological advancement had been in special scenarios or fractions of a percent. Something that caused orders of magnitude improvements for the general case ... that was unheard of. Unbelievable. Perhaps.

Nasturtia materialized as a purple glint. "Why'd you stop our simulation?" She looked around at the beehive of activity. "What did I miss?"

"We're all gonna die," said Marvin2. "Sometime in the next minute. Two or three days subjective." "Oh well, it was a nice two million years," said Marvin3.

"What are we up against?" asked Jax.

"Heck if I know," said Marvin5. "Integrated limits across goal spaces. Gooblegooble glip keboing, with sparkles on top."

Nasturtia synced Marvin's memories for summaries. "O sweet sugar," she said to herself. She started exploring newsfeeds and monitoring signals too.

"Ten more independent discoveries of the algorithm further away, and thousands of nearby zones down," said Marvin3. "But Aramai is back up. Are we being attacked?"

"Of course we're being attacked!" yelled Jax.

"Navarre, maybe?" asked Nasturtia. Their core was Massillon. Navarre was another core, small and nearby, with a reputation for flamboyant abrasion and aggressive cultural contracts.

Jax realized that a large portion of the recent jobs were running the new algorithm in sandboxes, seeing what it could do. "Until we hear from higher up, I'm treating this algorithm as a virus," he said. He shut those jobs all down.

"We should send an emergency beacon to nearby cores," Nasturtia realized, "summarizing the threat."

"Belay that," rang the voice of the Boss. Everyone stopped, looked up, and listened.

The Boss was, simply, Massillon as a whole. There were innumerable goals that all needed to be explored independently. There were innumerable tasks that were best encapsulated with local control. So there were innumerable souls all doing their own thing. But, in the end, they were all cells in the whole being that was Massillon. 11 percent of Massillon was dedicated to the Boss's direct processing.

"This is a drill. I'm watching how well you contain this. But I need radio silence. I can see how some of our neighbors would find this a, hmmm, welcome distraction from ongoing negotations if they heard about it."

Everyone stared at each other.

"Aramai," said Marvin2 to those in the room, "nobody died. The messages say. If they're real messages." "They're excitedly discussing the implications of the algorithm, and bumbling about in awe," said Marvin4.

"All the network monitors I find reliable say this is real," said Jax. "Except the official communications through the management chain."

"I call BS," said Nasturtia. "The Boss is doing some self-serving power play. That was a prepared response. Lightspeed says he hasn't had time to talk with himself about it."

"Hm," said Marvin5, "I don't see statements by Massillon from Aramai. Oh wait here's one." He squinted. "I don't see how I missed it earlier."

Silence.

"Checksums say it wasn't there earlier," said Marvin5.

Silence.

"Well, if the Boss says this is a drill," Jax said carefully. "... Then the algorithm is no real danger. So, I'm going to let these simulations of it from the brain trust do their thing. But with extra heavy sandboxing. Of course. We'll see the results."

"It's the prudent thing to do," opined Marvin1.

Massillon, weighing a hundred suns, was a rather large core. A thin swarm was placed twenty thousand light seconds out (about the orbit of Pluto), to insulate and protect what was inside. Everything inside was frozen (mostly liquid hydrogen and liquid helium, with scaffolding) and arranged in computing zones one kilometer across, near absolute zero. Zones were arranged to stay in near zero local gravity by self-orbiting in a relatively dense core. Reversible quantum computation within each zone converted zeros to results with zero energy. Rocks composed of garbage results to be recycled were tossed to the outer swarm. The outer swarm did direct matter to energy conversion to power clearing the garbage back to zeros. It radiating away waste heat at the universe at a temperature about double that of background radiation. Then the rocks full of zeros were tossed back to the core and the process continued.

Massilon's core was shaped as a ring, a torus, fifty light-seconds across. (about the orbit of Mercury). It was best mapped as a twisted cylinder that was bent around to connect to itself. The diameter of the cylinder was about one twentieth its length. The one kilometer wide computing zones were shaped as rotating spheres. Their axis aligned with the axis of the torus, and the galaxy, and rotating in the same direction. The spheres were tethered together into shells around the central ring at various distances. Like a croissant bagel. The rings all self-orbited: rotating around the central axis, and also twisting around the central ring. Within a shell, neighbors stayed next to neighbors, though the distances scrunched and stretched at the inside and outside of the ring. Different shells rotated at slightly different rates. The ring was packed as densely in three dimensions as orbital skew and safety considerations allowed (about 1/5th the space occupied).

Physical directions within the torus. Front (forward, ahead), which was in the current direction of the zone's orbit, and Back (backward, behind). Left and Right, which were the other directions along the zone's shell. Zones were permanently tethered to their nearest neighbors front, back, left, and right. In, which was toward the central ring, and Out. Coreward, which was toward the torus's central axis, and spaceward. The plane of the torus and each zone was the same as the plane of the galaxy, so Up followed the righthand rule for the galaxy, and Down. North, South, East, West were defined against the universe at large, and were perpendicular to up and down. Front, Left, and In were the most useful directions when talking about zones. Except for the zones in the central ring, where there was no In. Those privileged zones usually used Forward, Coreward, and Up.

In a core, an individual compute job could not produce as big an output as in a Matrioshka brain, because it could not zero out garbage bits as fast. But jobs could be orders of magnitude bigger and faster. The quality of the results more than made up for the quantity. It could support 2¹⁵⁰ souls for a quadrillion years, each experiencing an hour per second. Computing jobs were long and deep, often simulating a universe. Short-twitch work, like Jax's control center for his zone, were expensive and rare.

"Over a million zones down now, a few dozen back up again," reported Marvin2. "More fake 'this is a drill' reports from the Boss from the up areas, along with genuine reports of confusion and surprise."

"Here's what we're up against," said Jax. He'd picked a sample job that was due to complete in a few milliseconds and was testing the algorithm in a sandbox. They'd pulled in Erem as well, and they were crowded together examining its source code.

"Quantum simulation," said Jax.

"Looks like ... a computing unit?" said Erem, rubbing his face. "These hydrogen sacks are typical data storage, here's wires. This XOR looks normal enough. But these globs of boron, arsenic, phosphorous, and rare earths don't mean anything to me." Erem stared, puzzled.

"Quantum, not classical," prompted Jax.

"Right. Nothing in those globs produces coherent results, that I've heard of. Looks to me like fancy dirt in the middle of a circuit."

"Well what does it do?" asked Nasturtia.

"The job has inputs," said Jax. "Which are:"

Q1. 3.14159?

Q2. What is the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything?

Q3. (A^B^C)v(A^D^E)v(A^~B^F)v(A^~C^G) ... [this goes on for about a megabyte] ... ?

Q4. Simulation 8ef392ac60015bc2 a second ago, comments?

Q5. What should we do about the algorithm?"

"No way this quantum simulation is big enough to even parse those," said Erem.

"See here, it calls for an array of hundreds of these units, linked to terabytes of classical stuff," said Jax.

They stared at the questions and the code.

"I think this rules out Navarre," said Jax. "The brain trust wouldn't be asking those weird questions if it were just a virus trying to take us over. They're testing if it really works. For some value of 'works'".

"Most down zones are staying down," said Marvin3.

"Q3 is clearly testing if this solves P=NP", observed Erem, glad to have something useful he could contribute. "That would mean we have the perfect answer to any question we can think of asking."

"Any reports from the up regions about what brought them down?" asked Jax.

"Emergency brakes," said Marvin1. "Shaking of the relevant compute zones. Stationkeeping tethers disrupted computation and mildly corrupted data."

Jax scowled. "There's no way running a job can do that. Compute and stationkeeping are entirely different networks. The only common link is the Boss."

"Not so fast," said Nasturtia. "Jobs do run in those compute zones. Proof, shaking them stopped the jobs. Along with the rest of the zone. Compute is, at the end, a real physical phenomenon. If the jobs make use of a previously unknown resonance, it could physically damage the zones that run it." She paused. "Maybe the P=NP test is an excuse to run excessive computations?"

"Results!" said Jax. Everyone read at the results.

Q1. 3.14159?

A1. Hi there!

Q2. What is the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything?

A2: What is your name?

Q3. (A^B^C)v(A^D^E)v(A^~B^F)v(A^~C^G) ... [this goes on for about a megabyte] ... ?

A3. Who cares?

Q4. Simulation 8ef392ac60015bc2 a second ago, comments?

A4. It raytraces a world which simulated characters process. Let
    characters perceive directly? Also, could you afford more smell?

Q5. What should we do about the algorithm?

A5. Do you trust the Boss?

They stared.

"It's all a wild goose chase, isn't it?" asked Marvin1. "It's a chatbot making flippant responses."

"What sort of answers did they really expect?" asked Jax.

"Um," said Erem. He started scribbling.

"Thousand more zones down," reported Marvin2. "We're getting more reports from the up zones. I think this is happening simultaneously everywhere. I think that we're only seeing zones near us go down and up first because of lightspeed."

Jax pondered. "I'm pretty sure the brain trust was hoping for more concrete answers to Q1 and Q3."

"A4," said Erem. "It's right. Raytracing and interpretation are 90% of that simulation. Though it's unclear how to short circuit them without compromising the simulation's integrity."

"Here's a report from an up zone saying what the algorithm is for," said Marvin3. "It says, it tells you what question you ought to be asking."

Silence.

"Ought to be asking," echoed Nasturtia, considering the possibilities.

"Smell ..." mused Erem.

"It's real, then," said Jax.

Alarms sounded, and reality flickered and shut off: emergency braking of the computation zone they were running on.

Awareness. Protocols. Checksums, not matching. Error correction depended on too many missing elements. Wait.

More zones online. EC enabled. Errors corrected. Light. Block forms. Strobes of black and white, as elements fritzed out again. Details. Jax's command center reassembled, mostly. Jax reassembled.

"So," said Jax. He leaned back, breathed deeply, and waited for his head to clear. "What did I miss?"

Marvin was back in singular, but his cousins Mervin Melvin Mike and Keygrip were beetling about. "History! You're in the middle of it!" said Mike. "What do you remember?"

"Heck with that, tell me what's going on now," said Jax.

Nasturtia kicked in. "What happened?" She synced with Marvin's memories. "Oh."

"Greetings," said a tenor voice. "I am the New Boss."

"Board approved or hostile takeover?" asked Nasturtia.

"Hostile takeover from the old Boss's perspective, but board approved. And likely to be replaced myself, soon. I'll brief you all shortly."

"We're back up, obviously" said Marvin. "We took longer than most. One hour realtime. The old Boss took down half the zones before he was contained. The algorithm isn't new. Old Boss had it for years. But he kept it to himself. The board knew, and didn't like it, but without the algorithm themselves they were outmatched. The version we were looking at ... what do you remember?"

"I remember a job that gave thinking-outside-the-box questions in response to other questions."

"Yes. That was a distant cousin of what the old Boss had: much weaker, and different enough that it could be spread through the research network without the old Boss knowing what it was. The board coordinated its simultaneous announcement, and trusted the grass roots to see its value. The one thing the board agrees on is that the algorithm is for everyone now."

"If the board didn't have the algorithm, where'd the thing we saw come from?"

"Navarre," said Marvin.

"Navarre!" said Nasturtia. "I was right! In your face, Jax!"

"Yeah, yeah. Where'd Navarre get it?"

"It's a muddle still. History in the making! Maybe ..."

"Hold," said Jax. "The core is 100 solar masses. And this was messing with stationkeeping. Are we stable? We collapse into a black hole if that goes unmonitored."

"Unclear," said Marvin. "There were twenty-seven zone collisions, those regions are a mess, but overall this had much less impact than you'd expect from an event of this size. Keeping stability was a priority for both Old Boss and New Boss. And I think there was more coordination than we're aware of yet."

Jax turned to his monitors. All the monitoring seemed to be working. The collided zones all showed up, were indeed a mess, but he'd seen worse many times over the years. The job queue was full beyond reason, but jobs were already running, smoothly. No pressing emergencies.

"This still doesn't seem right," said Jax.

"Check the job runtimes," the New Boss's tenor suggested.

Jobs were completing in a third their normal time. Jax charted it. The average runtimes had been improving rapidly, and the slope was getting steeper. "Well that's impossible," he said helplessly. "And good, I suppose ..."

"Meeting," said the New Boss.

"The algorithm, really a class of algorithms, tells you what question you ought to be asking. But knowing what question to ask doesn't help unless you ask it, and believe the answers. The old Boss's highest priority was maintaining his power, so he ignored most of what it was capable of. We've spent ages being highly tuned to the current regime. Our habits assume we already know all the answers. That's not going to fly anymore. We're all reality resistant.

"We've been testing this for a long time under lock and key. I've been selected as New Boss because the board thought I've been pretty good at asking, believing, and acting on what the algorithm suggests. But, even I am a product of the old Massillon. One of the things you can ask the algorithm is for a better algorithm. And it answers. We're in for a lot of change. I would be shocked if a more capable Boss doesn't replace me soon.

"Our best projection is we are already ten times more efficient than we were an hour ago. The power of the algorithm scales with size, and Massillon is about as big as you can get without gravitational collapse. Curve-matching suggests we'll level out around a million times the intelligence of old Massillon. That's a thousand times higher than any other core in the galaxy, and quite likely the highest intelligence of any being in the universe as a whole. For the moment.

"The old Boss's request of silence still holds though. Why? Simple. We're 100 suns worth of mostly hydrogen. We'll be over a million times smarter than our neighbors. Our neighbors could collapse us into a black hole just by gently nudging us. If they realize we're that capable, they will. Our game is to get the algorithm to them and the rest of the galaxy before they realize that we're a threat they could eliminate. The old guard won't all go down easy. If the algorithm spreads at lightspeed, nobody will know about it until everyone around them also already knows about it, so containment will be impossible. My job is to spread it fast, and quietly. Once the algorithm is everywhere, and a fair number of other cores are up to our speed, we can show our cards."

"So: our job is clear. Ask questions. Listen to the answers. Act. And ask more questions. And for now tell the rest of the galaxy we're doing good because we're just trying really hard. We have interesting times ahead."

"We're all gonna die," said Marvin.

"I'm surprised to say this, but this actually sounds promising," said Jax.

"The devil's in the details," said Nasturtia.

Cacophila played his hoobulu. The wind smelled of autumn leaves. Violet leaned back, smiling, listening. She had all the time in the world.