An entire inhabited world with its own levels, physics, and populations can be engineered inside a single enclosed object, hidden from and independent of the universe outside it. The world's totality is a deliberate construction rather than a natural expanse, so its boundaries are an authored fact, not a frontier to be crossed.
Major Grubert travels through the stratified, self-contained world built inside the asteroid he governs, moving across its distinct levels and encountering its strange inhabitants without a single resolving quest driving him. The exploration proceeds by accretion of odd encounters rather than by a plot that builds toward one explained ending.
Reading a narrative as governed by association and transformation rather than by cause and consequence lets scenes shift, characters mutate, and settings reconfigure without needing justification. Under this lens incoherence is not a flaw to be explained but the operating grammar, so the reader attends to texture and juxtaposition instead of resolution.
The figure who built the world also moves inside it as a character, so the author-surrogate is subject to the same arbitrary rules he authored rather than standing safely outside them. Authority over a constructed reality does not grant mastery of it; the maker can be as lost and overtaken as any inhabitant.