In August 2026 the press announced a new kind of thing in space. The thing had been sitting in a public archive since 2023. What was new was the agreement about what to call it.

In 1970 an astronomer found hundreds of dark lines in a quasar's light and called them a forest. The name holds in one respect and fails in three, and string theory's first real chance in decades of being shown wrong now runs through it.