Clancy doesn't have a lot of money, and yet he was able to afford a patch of land on the Ribbon. The land was probably so cheap because it's a few hundred feet from the Wobble, an energy field that kills or mutates anyone who touches it.
The world of The Midnight Gospel features computer simulators that can create millions of sapient beings on simulated planets ... sapient beings who die horrible deaths en masse due to something as simple as operator error.
The simulators can trap those same sapient beings in epiphanic prisons where they die violently, over and over again, until they figure out how to escape through trial and error.
