this paper was quite di#erent, stemming from the axiomatics of categories of tangles (although the authors were aware of possible connections to iteration theories. In fact, similar axiomatics in the symmetric case, motivated by flowcharts and "flownomials" had been developed some years earlier by Stefanescu (Stefanescu 2000).) However, the first author realized, following a stimulating discussion with Gordon Plotkin, that traced monoidal categories provided a common denominator for the axiomatics of both the Girard-style and Abramsky-Jagadeesan-style versions of the Geometry of Interaction, at the basic level of the multiplicatives. This insight was presented in (Abramsky 1996), in which Girard-style GoI was dubbed "particle-style", since it concerns information particles or tokens flowing around a network, while the Abramsky-Jagadeesan style GoI was dubbed "wave-style", since it concerns the evolution of a global information state or "wave". Formally, this distinction is based on whether the tensor product (i.e. the symmetric monoidal structure) in the underlying category is interpreted as a coproduct (particle style) or as a product (wave style). This computational distinction between coproduct and product interpretations of the same underlying network geometry turned out to have been partially anticipated, in a rather di#erent context, in a pioneering paper by E. S. Bainbridge (Bainbridge 1976), as observed by Dusko Pavlovic. These two forms of interpretation, and ways of combining them, have also been studied recently in (Stefanescu 2000). He uses the terminology "additive" for coproduct-based (i.e. our "particle-style") and "multiplicative" for product-based (i.e. our "wave-style"); this is not suitable for our purposes, because of the clash with Linear Logic term...