Two factions develop as the bubble expands: the Preservationists, who wish to stop the expansion and preserve the Milky Way at any cost; and the Yielders, who consider the novo-vacuum to be too important a discovery to destroy without understanding.

Six hundred years after the initial experiment, a vessel called the Rindler matches velocities with an ever-expanding novo-vacuum region at the border, powered by multispectral light emitted as the ordinary vacuum collapses into its lower energy-state.

The novo-vacuum turns out to be more complicated than anyone had suspected, with a whole ordered universe existing within the zone of apparent chaos as direct elaborations of the quantum graph's lattice structure, of which elementary particles, fundamental interactions, and regular spacetime itself are only special cases.

The novo-vacuum's exotic geometry is ultimately revealed to contain living organisms and even civilizations, with an ecosystem based on "vendeks", microbe-like complexes of quantum graph structures only 10−33 meters across.

In 2000, Egan published the essay "Only Connect" describing how the Javanese mathematician Kusnanto Sarumpaet had shown it to unify General relativity and the Standard Model in six papers from 2035 to 2038 and how computer simulations in 2043 and the Orbital Accelerator Facility in 2049 had experimentally verified his work.