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A little to the left, Control, and maybe you’ll pick up that flash of light.
“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.
But her suit didn’t fit well, and her fingernails were uneven, her red nail polish eroded, and he felt her distress extended well back beyond the ant.
Sometimes you had to keep things from people just so they wouldn’t do the first thing that came into their heads.
“So long as you don’t tell people you don’t know something, they’ll probably think you know it.”
Same interrogation room. Same worn chairs. Same uncertain light. Same Ghost Bird.
“If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven’t changed instead.”
Then he thought he detected a faint murmur of the tone of the kinds of sloth-like yet finicky lunatics who stuck newspaper articles and Internet printouts to the walls of their mothers’ basements. Creating—glue stick by glue stick and thumbtack by thumbtack—their own single-use universes.
The linguist again, this time with some reluctance: “To be honest, we don’t like to reproduce the words. So it might have been buried in the information, like in a summary in the lighthouse keeper’s file.” Grace had nothing to add, apparently, but Whitby chimed in: “We don’t like to reproduce the words because we still don’t know exactly what triggered the creation of Area X … or why.”
presentation—“if someone or something is trying to jam information inside your head using words you understand but a meaning you don’t, it’s not even that it’s not on a bandwidth you can receive, it’s much worse. Like, if the message were a knife and it created its meaning by cutting into meat and your head is the receiver and the tip of that knife is being shoved into your ear over and over again…”
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.”
In college, what had always stuck with him in Astronomy 101 was that the first astronomers to think of points of light not as part of a celestial tapestry revolving around the earth but as individual stars had had to wrench their imaginations—and thus their analogies and metaphors—out of a grooved track that had been running through everyone’s minds for hundreds and hundreds of years.
The hagiography was clear:
“Are we obsolete? I think not, I think not. But don’t ask the army’s opinion of that. 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.
“Our banal, murderous imagination,” as the biologist had put it in a rare unguarded moment with the director before the twelfth expedition.
“Terroir’s direct translation is ‘a sense of place,’ and what it means is the sum of the effects of a localized environment, inasmuch as they impact the qualities of a particular product. Yes, that can mean wine, but what if you applied these criteria to thinking about Area X?”
Books as a salve to the boredom of TV? No, because the bookmark just began to separate one sea of unread words from another.
The thought had occurred while sorting through the scraps that if you ran an agency devoted to understanding and combating a force that constituted an insurgency, and you believed the border was, in some sense at least, advancing, then you might deviate from official protocols. That if your supervisors and colleagues did not agree with your assessment, you might come up with an alternative plan and begin to enact it on your own. That, wary and careful, you might then and only then reach out to recruit the help of others who did believe you, or at least weren’t hostile, to implement that plan.
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Just how elephantine, how rhinoceroscrutian, had the Voice’s efforts been in following up on Control’s request?
“Just stabilize and do your job. Paralysis is not a cogent option, either. You will get good sleep tonight.”
When the memory became too faint, too abstract, it would transform itself into an old rotator cuff injury, a pain so thin yet so sharp that he could trace the line of it all the way across his shoulder blade and down his back.
“Don’t thank anyone for what you should already have,”
But when you encountered a real ghost—the Thing Entire—it was a shock … it took your breath. Not away. It didn’t take your breath away—your breath wasn’t going anywhere. Your breath was still in you, locked up, not of use to you.
He used guns, but he didn’t like them and didn’t like relying on them. They smelled like their perspective.
A theory was forming in his head, like a musical composition he could hum from vague memories but not quite yet name or play.
Yes, he would take one, had been missing them ever since his weekend binge. The harsh, sharp taste of her unfiltered menthols as he lit up was like a spike through the eyeball to cure a headache.
