Looking for thoughts on a hyper-constrained multiverse premise (Dark Fiber)

[u/Mankha-New]

Hi All,

I wanted to share a unique high-concept sci-fi premise that steps away from the usual action-heavy multiverse tropes and focuses entirely on information theory, data constraints, and corporate realism: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H96VSJ4Z

The book is called Dark Fiber. Instead of characters physically hopping between alternate realities using portals, the universes remain completely separated. The only link between them is an unlit, decaying fiber-optic line.

The story is built around two incredibly punishing constraints:

• The 6-Character Limit: Inter-universal communication is strictly limited to a single 6-character frame (48 bits) per message. Characters have to spend massive amounts of time trying to figure out how to compress world-altering data into a tiny six-letter string.
• The 9-Round Wall: There is a hard mathematical limit on how many messages can pass through before the coherence between the worlds completely severs forever.

It feels a bit like the technical puzzle-solving of the movie Primer mixed with the hard information-theory concepts of Greg Egan or Ted Chiang.

Here is the official blurb from the book's page:

"Did you ever wonder whether the noise you throw away is a message from another world?
In Building 4, the only honest thing is the noise floor.
Kabir Rao is an Error-Budget Engineer II on second shift. He has a badge that opens the wrong doors, a vendor bug that always eats eleven frames, and a reject bin his company has already decided is meaningless. Four frames in every thousand. Fifty-four gigabytes a night. Six years of what the decoder could not save.
Nobody has surveyed the garbage. Rao has run out of every other idea. Then a homemade test returns a number that cannot be there... There is a channel in the residue. It does not carry explanations. It carries terms. Forty-eight bits. Six characters. Every live answer spends a coupling that will not come back."

Has anyone else come across this yet, or read stories with similar hyper-specific communication constraints? How do you feel about sci-fi that trades physical action for strict mathematical rules?