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None of them knew what had happened to the fourth member of their expedition—the psychologist, who had, in fact, also been the director of the Southern Reach and overridden all objections to lead them, incognito.
“Never do something for just one reason,” his grandpa had told him more than once, and that, at least, Control had taken to heart.
“We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit artists all want causality.”
“Never skip a step. Skip a step, you’ll find five more new ones waiting ahead of you.”
The border extended about seventy miles inland from the lighthouse and approximately forty miles east and forty miles west along the coast. It ended just below the stratosphere and, underground, just above the asthenosphere.
“So long as you don’t tell people you don’t know something, they’ll probably think you know it.”
“If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven’t changed instead.”
He was also, according to his file, “a first-rate scientist partial to beer,” the kind of mind Control had seen before. It needed dulling to slow it down or to distance itself from the possibility of despair. Beer versus scientist represented a kind of schism between the banality of speech versus the originality of thought. An ongoing battle.
Because our minds process information almost solely through analogy and categorization, we are often defeated when presented with something that fits no category and lies outside of the realm of our analogies.”
The Southern Reach called the last expedition the twelfth, but Control had counted the rings, and it was actually the thirty-eighth iteration, including six “eleventh” expeditions. The hagiography was clear: After the true fifth expedition, the Southern Reach had gotten stuck like a jammed CD, with nearly the same repetitions. Expedition 5 became X.5.A, followed by X.5.B and X.5.C, all the way to an X.5.G. Each expedition number thereafter adhered to a particular set of metrics and introduced variables into the equation with each letter. For example, the eleventh expedition series had been
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A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.” “As a physicist, what do you do when you’re faced by something that doesn’t care what you do and isn’t affected by your actions? Then you start thinking about dark energy and you go a little nuts.”
The gist of these comments was that when they looked away from the microscope, the samples changed; and when they stared again, what they looked at had reconstituted itself to appear normal.
“I’m not the biologist,” she said. “I don’t care about my past as the biologist, if that’s what you mean.” “I know,” he said. He’d figured it out on the boat, even if he hadn’t articulated it yet. “I know you’re not. You’re some version, though. You have her memories, to some extent, and somewhere back in Area X, the biologist may still be alive. You’re a replica, but you’re your own person.”
