Martin MacInnes

The possibilities afforded by the use of the performers were impressive. There was nothing, for instance - except money - stopping him from hiring a full cast who could then perform a successful resolution to Carlos’ disappearance. It would be something very special indeed to be privy to the scene where Carlos walked back in. They’d all benefit from it. That kind of positive mental reinforcement was said to be tremendously advantageous.

He barely had time to consider one possibility when another burst in. Imagine a full reconstruction of the evening in question at La Cueva - they could script all of it, based on thorough interrogations of the extended family, the staff, the other diners, leaving only to chance the moment when Carlos left the bathroom. Perhaps the actor, living for that night exactly as Carlos had, would begin automatically reconstructing his actions, intuiting them, that is, without being told. Watching him closely enough, for once - and wishing, too late, that they had done so on the night in question - they would at last find out what had happened.
[...]
He could direct the cast in reverse, beginning from the moment they first realised Carlos hadn’t come back. It would be therapeutic. If done well enough a sufficient number of times it could even establish itself as a viable alternative to history.

Metal washed out in rain and drifted through the trees and wildflowers. He saw copper tints in new giant ferns, each frond exceeding the height of his body.

He entered what had been the café and stepped through the rotten wooden floor as if into a river. The floor was webbed in larva, worms, and purple-black beetles. He dragged his feet forward without raising them and found he dug long, brief lines through the water-wood. The smell was incredible. He would have said he was in the body of something that was changing state. The lifted roofs were vast and uncertain, stretching out to the trees and the canopy.

Sonar readings were always unreliable, but Amy said you could mitigate errors by programming the device according to the characteristics of the water. What lived there, what composed it, what its character was. 1,500 metres per second as a standard measurement of sound velocity wasn't helpful, because speed varies in different conditions, and every part of the ocean is unique. So to get a reliable depth, you need to know the area already. The paradox again. As a general rule, you couldn't learn anything radically new, rate of progress capped from the start by inertia, inability to recognise anything past the limits of present imagination. You could only see, essentially, the world as you already knew it.
"If something unprecedented does exist in the vent," I said to Felix, as we made our way back upstairs, "there's no guarantee we'd acknowledge it. Even it moves right past us."

"It's not a perfect system. In my opinion, it's not even a very good system. Like many of the systems here, it has its roots in the military. Tier software was developed for use on human crowds. One of the more obvious flaws is that it relies too heavily on upward trafficking. Basically, it's guided by what it's already seen. An object acts in an unusual way, it's studied more, further anomalous data comes in, leading to still greater attention; the process feeds back on itself. But as a rule, any object studied in sufficient depth will eventually exhibit anomalous behaviour. Objects will be anomalous largely because they were the ones picked out, when really it could be the reverse. This creates at least two possible categories of error: false attribution, and blindness."

It's the most unbearable time of day. My shirt sticks to my shoulders and I go off for a shower and rare privacy. The ice water unfastens my body in a travelling line, and my thoughts follow it. The power is a form of contact; that's what I said to Uria. We activate it, we build this thing from it, the first step in a sustained encounter. It's volatile because it's sufficiently new to us. It resists containment because it is itself a container. Circles inside circles. A technology that enables other technologies, an unlimited application. A thing that can carry other things, two hands together as a cup, a receptacle for water, a signal of generosity, passing something to another. Protect the precious interior. Language, introspection, technology. Agriculture, medicine, weapons and cities and global heating, spacecraft and the exploration of the outer solar system. But should we do any of this?

The power, as we attempt and fail to observe it, resists us like it is itself alive. Life is not necessarily carried in a body. And what is a body, in the loosest terms, but a set of agreements among matter and energy that endures for a period and exhibits a metabolic response?