Fine Structure is a science fiction story which I am in the process of writing. It has been ongoing since 2006.
New readers
Each chapter is hardlinked to all the prerequisite chapters. That is usually only two or three chapters (or none), never the whole story. To understand a chapter, just make sure you've read all the prerequisites first. For instance, Exponents builds on story elements from On Digital Extremities and Power Of Two, so read those and you're good to go.
The story so far (CAUTION, SPOILERS!)
Ching-Yu Kuang, Mike Murphy, Josephine Baird and others have discovered an informational subspace to the regular universe containing the Script, an endlessly echoing binary message trillions of bits long containing blunt and straightforward summaries of the complete laws of physics as they know it, and millions of times more besides. This information is now public, and new technologies based on Script physics have begun to appear.
But these technologies are jinxed. A series of catastrophic teleportation experiments leads to the deaths of nearly everybody involved in the project and it is soon discovered that the laws of physics themselves have changed to make teleportation impossible.
At length, it transpires that Mitch Calrus, one of Josephine Baird's friends who has inexplicable multidimensional powers, is a godlike multidimensional being trapped in our universe. During a battle with an even more godlike being, he found that trapping them both in three dimensions was the only way he could kill his adversary, but he in turn now needs the scientists' help to break out of his own prison and go home.
A first attempt to send Calrus home fails-- Murphy and Baird are rendered brain-dead and the accelerator technology used in the attempt becomes useless, just like teleportation. It is revealed that the "prison cell" is intelligent, watching for technologies which could be used in an escape attempt and stamping them out as soon as they appear.
Meanwhile...
Every solar year a random human on Earth is struck by lightning and gains superpowers - flight, strength, invulnerability. Each is twice as powerful as the last, and each is born insane, killing potentially thousands of people before coming to their senses. Can Ching figure out how to stop the cascade and the rising death toll before the technology to make more supermen goes global?
Physicist Anne Poole is immortal. She cannot be starved, hurt or killed. Nobody knows why, and she cannot explain because she was rendered vegetative as a result of her involvement in the teleportation experiments.
In the distant future, Anne Poole and Mitch Calrus are working together on a colossal, twenty-thousand year supercomputer calculation, periodically resetting the human race back to the Stone Age to prevent them from destroying themselves with nuclear war in the meantime.
And a mysterious Russian named Mikhail Zykov has begun recruiting scientists of his own...