What doesn’t is how the slugs fit into this.

It’s a reflection of the delvers who don’t want to remember or to change (which having time would cause). This is why people lose their memory and sense of time in the Nowhere. Because of the large number of delvers in the Nowhere, they are the force that influences it and the people inside it. He decided to copy himself so he wouldn’t be alone, write his emotions out so he wouldn’t feel the pain of loss, and hide in the Nowhere so nothing would change. Said AI lost his human maker right after becoming independent of his programing and didn’t handle it well. Now the confusion…the delvers are copies of a former AI who gained emotions and “humanity” because of its connection with the Nowhere. As the Nowhere allows him to develop his emotions, he describes them to Spin and Chet in order to identify them and those descriptions are pure gold. If there were a present and immediate danger this might be understandable, but without it…Spin has some pretty unlikeable moments. She’s always had some issues with her emotions, but it is still a little shocking that she completely disregards M-Bot’s feelings over being taken apart and focuses solely on mapping the world she lands into. And it does, but Spin is terrible friend to M-Bot. Since M-Bot is the only talking companion who came with Spin, their relationship is one that could progress and be seen throughout the book. Accompanied by only Doomslug and M-Bot, Spin travels into the nowhere in Cytonic and she doesn’t get home until the very end of the book. At this, he is one of the best, but with Cytonic-as with Starsight before it-he takes the protagonist Spin completely out of the world she was in before, disconnecting her from most of the other characters and all of her preexisting human relationships. Brandon Sanderson is a master worldbuilder, creating wonderful new societies, species, and magic systems for each world he makes.

Cytonic brandon sanderson paperback