the annulation lecture: the erased map — "what used to be Vermont" — "just south of the Concavity, right…"

The fusion lecture doubles as a tour of the reconfigured map: the facility sits "in what used to be Montpelier in what used to be Vermont," the waste routed "to what used to be Loring A.F.B.... near what used to be Presque Isle Maine," "flush up against the Wall and Checkpoint Pongo." The drumbeat "what used to be" is the political content — whole states unmapped, their names surviving only as coordinates for a fusion plant and a checkpoint. The technical geography of the fusion process is inseparable from the erasure of the ceded territory; to explain where the plant is, Pemulis must first name what the map no longer shows. (The fusion physics — the right-triangle cycle, the breeder, the medicine-derived annulation — is annularity's; landed here is the erased political map.)