Agnosis – Ch. 3

<– Chapter 2 / Chapter 4 –>

Amara stood in the corner, windows on either side, and peered out into the night as the rain began to tick against the glass, forty-two stories above the rumpled and crumbling cityscape of Sonali Real. Dorian busied himself in the kitchen, heaping curried chicken and snow peas onto plates and trying to track down where his clean silverware might be. When he found everything he needed, he carried the food and bottles of beer around the island bar that separated the two rooms and set everything on the black lacquered coffee table in front of the sofa.

“You were right about the view,” she said over her shoulder. “It’s fantastic.”

“It’s a little deceiving,” Dorian said. “The glass is focus-oriented line of sight telescopic with a range periphery good to about forty kilometers. The surface microsensors read and correlate your focal and optical depth profile, then adjust the image according to complex pattern analysis algorithms. They’re pretty good, but it can get clunky at times, especially with non-standard optical nodes. You’ll see what I mean if you try to shift from near to distant objects too quickly.”

“I was just enjoying the view.”

For just a moment there, he’d almost slipped out of his secret identity and exposed himself as Super Dork.

“Oh, right. They’re good for that, too.”

The distant mountains to the west were black, more dense shadows than distinct formations, but following the line of the nearer foothills south and east, one could see the jubilant, vibrant, shimmering lights of New Sonali Southrange in the distance. Traffic flowed smoothly on the I-9 circle, though from this distance, it appeared to crawl along in a steady, everlasting stream like a foraging party of luminous insects. The twin beacons flashing atop the Mauripon Towers swung back and forth like erratic antennae tasting the leading edge of the approaching storm. In the center of all the light and energy and primetime hyperactivity, sat the massive concrete carcass of the assembler station and zap depot. The Queen. The source of being for ten million immediate settlers and the unnumbered thousands beyond scattered throughout the towns and villages which pockmarked the mountains between the Sonali plain and Tarn Ferry on the lee side of the continental backbone.

It was twenty-five kilometers through the air to Southrange, and a much longer and more ambitious journey otherwise. One of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time, Dorian had often thought. Zap, nano-assembler stations, the end of want. They had all been heady promises once. Except there were some new and funky physics involved, things no one was certain they properly understood. Potent stuff, quantum data encoding. Ankara happened just about the time Sonali lined up in the queue, and though the land immediately surrounding Ankara had been reclaimed in only a decade or so by specially engineered nanozymes, the town fathers of Sonali didn’t feel like they had the twenty-eight million lives to spare that Earth did, so they’d put a safe buffer between themselves and the assembler station. Twenty-five kilometers and a low bank of foothills, in fact. The radius of a serious blast and subsequent nano-contamination zone.

These had been the unintended consequences: New Sonali Southrange flourished, feeding off the free flow of new and modern goods, while Old Sonali, Sonali Real, wasted away like an infirm and slightly mad grandparent, home to a staggered manufacturing base, government offices and other shameful family secrets.

Dorian edged up beyond Amara’s shoulder and shared the view for a few moments. “Can you see your building from here?”

She turned her attention from the glittering lights of Southrange, and traced her finger over the wreckage of malformed darkness and indistinct abutments that formed their own city. After a moment, she tapped the glass just above the Landgrant Office downtown. The spotlights on the dome and the rain obscured much of the details surrounding it, and there were too few streetlamps for finding better landmarks.

“Over there,” she said. “But you can’t see it. It’s just a three story walk-up on Braston. Nothing like this. It must cost you a fortune.”

“It’s not as bad as you might think,” he said. He didn’t know why it should make him feel awkward. She must spend a likewise fortune on mod salons and firmware upgrades, but somehow his apartment felt like the more conspicuous consumption, looking down on such an expansive panorama of social decline. “The building went up in the wake of the prosperity that followed the zap. The developers guessed there would be a housing boom as the new economy worked itself out. Right idea; wrong location. The Hab Co-op bought it outright about five years ago. The Archive pulled some strings and got me in as part of my recruitment package.”

It was a decent enough space. The windows were what had sold him on the place, a way to look out on the world he called home. He’d added the carpets, rehung most of the walls, paid top dollar for handmade furniture and his assorted entertainment gadgets. The spiral-grained Famen cabinets in the kitchen were his own work, as were the bureaus and tables he kept stashed in the bedroom and den where no one would see his long and torturous progression from novice woodworker to master craftsman.

“You shouldn’t call it a coffin.” Amara broke away from him and paced about the living room, studying his prints and pictures and other accreted junks. “It’s lovely, John.”

“My sister did most of the decorating.” He didn’t have a sister, of course.

“It’s very comfortable here.” She settled onto the couch gently, cautiously, as though afraid that her tough scales might damage the soft leather cushions. “But I think I expected that, somehow.”

Dorian sat beside her. He popped the caps on two of the beer bottles and handed one to Amara. “I’m really very crusty. This is just my narcissistic and self-coddling side drawn out to its logical conclusion.”

Amara gazed up at him with her wide and alien eyes. “You’re oddly complicated for a luddite.”

“Hey, thanks. I think.” He took his plate and began to eat. “Do you want to watch the newswire? I’ve got a projection unit wired into the Strand.” Unaccountably, he felt himself flushing. “Microprism nano-pixels. Um, embedded in the wall tiles.”

She laughed. “And in other ways, you are so typically male.”

“Should I apologize for that?”

“It’s nothing you could help anyway. But I don’t really want to watch the newswire. There’s never anything on it but bad news and celebrity sightings.” She took her plate into her lap and nestled into the sofa. “You could put on some music. I wouldn’t mind that. I’m enjoying the rustic experience. It’s almost like camping out.”

Dorian did a quick, five second scour of the Strand, found something that looked interesting enough and piped the streamjack through his quadro system. The sound was warm, acoustic, slightly Meni-Taurian in flavor. Not his style, but it wasn’t completely hideous.

“The Mongrel Tongue,” Amara said, nodding. “I love this one.”

“Beck, yes?”

“The very same. Thank you.”

They sat quietly for several minutes, eating, listening. Dorian caught himself tapping his foot in rhythm to the melody and made himself stop. If Amara noticed, she had the good breeding not to point it out to him. When they were finished with dinner, he collected the plates and utensils and carried them into the sink. He returned with more beer.

Amara took a fresh bottle from him and shifted to the corner of the couch with her knees drawn up to her chest. Outside, the wind whistled sharply and the rain began to fall in earnest.

“Can I ask you a personal question, John?”

“As long as I don’t have to give a personal answer. I keep a list of pre-scripted public answers printed up on index cards in the other room, though. You’re welcome to those.” She wasn’t smiling. He took a hit from his beer. “Okay, go ahead.”

“What is it with you and geek? You’re so, I don’t know, contemptuous of it sometimes. I notice it at work, of course, but even here at home, with your resonant sound system, your microprism nano-pixels, all of this space you don’t need. You could geek a far superior sense experience at a fraction of the cost if you’d just leave your Strand session up, but you haven’t done that, and I don’t think that you ever would. You wouldn’t substitute a render for this, no matter how much money it saved you. You’ve embraced the reality. Don’t get me wrong, it is a splendid reality, John. I just can’t help but ask myself why. Why would anyone surround themselves with so much unnecessary tangible experience? It’s like you’ve intentionally chosen to cut yourself off from the rest of humanity. You live in this bubble of mediated experience that no one else has access to.”

“You call this mediated experience? I don’t know how to break it to you, baby doll, but this is the way humans have been hacking civilization out of the jungle of interpersonal relationships for a few thousand years now. A dry cave, a cheery fire and scintillating conversation was all our ancestors hoped for.”

“Once upon a time, sure. But the Strand has changed that. Zap and uploading, too. We don’t have to settle for the reality we’ve been handed, we can make whatever reality we choose—make it, and then share that vision with those around us. We’ve broken down the barricades that separate people from one another and begun to unlock our true creative potential.” She hesitated, as though worried she might have offended him. “Except for a few diehards like you, I mean, people who don’t want to live inside the circle of communal experience.”

Dorian shrugged. “I’ve got eyes that see and ears that hear. Why confuse that clarity with the echoes and interpretations of a billion other people’s ‘visions’ and overlapping sense experiences? I’m confident in my own ability to draw conclusions and make decisions. And I certainly don’t crave the constant external validation that you Strand-o-philes seem to.”

“Oh, no, John Dorian. I’m not letting you off that easy. You can’t dismiss the mass cultural migration to phenomenalist interaction as the aberration here. It’s what the human experience—the real experience—has become. You can’t argue with the culture.”

“And you’re advising me to hurry up and drink the Kool-Aid, is that it?”

“Not at all. I just wonder what you’re so afraid of.”

“Bzzt. I’m going to have to dismiss that argument as a non sequitur conclusion derived from a sub-cultural bias. Besides that, who says I’m afraid of anything? I’m not the one sticking my head in the digital sand because the world around me is a big piece of crap. I’m the one out there walking the streets morning and night, talking with real people and facing real personal hazards. In my unmodified native form, no less. I’m out there every day engaging the reality everyone else is ducking, thank you very much.”

Amara arched a suspicious eyebrow. “O weary reality surfer, answer me this question then: what are your neighbors’ names?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

“You’ve lived in this apartment for five years and you don’t know the names of your neighbors, do you?”

He grunted in annoyance. “So that just makes me a bad neighbor. What’s your point?”

“My point is that you’ve largely rejected the interactive and socially immersive experience of the Strand, but you haven’t replaced it with anything. You’re just as disdainful of face-to-face human contact as you are peer-to-peer.”

“Hello, I’m a programming dork, Amara. We’re not exactly known for our social acumen.”

“Don’t hide behind clichés.”

“I’m not hiding. I just happen to like the quiet life. I like the way I live. It makes me happy.”

She frowned at his intransigence. “That’s not an answer, and you know it.”

“What does it matter? Am I hurting someone not staying plugged into the Strand all day, every day?” It really wasn’t the question she was asking, and he knew it. But he didn’t expect her to understand him, either. Sitting here in the soft white lights of his coffin, thrice-resurrected from backup, integrally augmented, so experimental with her physical mod that she probably didn’t even know what she looked like anymore, she was asking what was wrong with him. Where did one even begin to look for common ground?

At last, he said, “I like thinking my own thoughts and reaching my own conclusions.”

“And you think that the Strand interferes with that?”

“When we confuse the tool with the work, yes it does. Look, I love the Strand. I love the access to information, the ready interface with like minds floating out there on the aether, the ability to expand my horizons and learn about what it’s like to live a life in a place I would never otherwise be able to experience. Everything anyone could ever want is out there. But that’s the problem with it, too. Absolutely everything is out there. It’s a constant cacophony. Everyone’s thoughts, everyone’s opinions, everyone’s public face. These insanely pedantic demagogueries that’re all process and no outcome–it’s paralyzing.”

“Paralyzing how?”

“Volume for one. Complexity.”

“I don’t follow.” She grimaced. “I’m sorry if I’m prying. I’m just trying to understand. Your life fascinates me.”

He wasn’t sure how to take that exactly. Was she saying he’d stepped so far outside the circle that he now qualified as a sociological oddity?

Dorian sighed, but he couldn’t refuse to answer her, despite the lateness of the hour. He had invited her up, after all, and the host had certain responsibilities to his guests. He had, in other words, adopted this stray cat completely of his own volition.

“You want to know my biggest objection to the Strand and the whole social milieu that comes with it? Here it is: On the Strand, it’s all been done before. Whatever it is that I want to do, want to be, want to discover–somebody has already been there, learned it, uploaded their conclusions on the matter. That’s where the paralysis comes from, and it infects all of us. We’ve stopped thinking about things, caring about things, or God forbid, actually taking some form of action when we see things that strike us as wrong. It’s so much easier to just tune your sessions to filter out the things you don’t like. And why should we think about troubling issues? There’s no reason to unless you’ve got some startling new insight to offer, which you don’t since fourteen billion other people have already mulled it over before you, most of them with Doctor in front of their names and an academic alphabet soup behind it. They’re certainly not going to take your input seriously. The only people who will, in fact, are the nutcases and trailer trash harpies and jerk-off home study philosophers who hold forth on the boondock bulletin boards.”

“Don’t you think you’re being awfully cynical?” Amara asked. “The Strand has allowed people to come into contact with information and experiences they never would have been able to access before. It’s liberated us from the narrow perspectives of our own native culture pockets.”

“Sure, we have all sorts of facts at our disposal, but do we ever come to actually know anything new from them? Do most of us ever try to do anything constructive with the knowledge we’ve gleaned, or are we content to just sit back and experience a vicarious triDvid render of what someone else already did with it? All the knowledge in the universe is worthless if we’re not stepping outside our custom made bubbles of filtered reality and doing something constructive with it. Which, once again, we wouldn’t ever do, because whatever constructive thing you may want to do could be or has already been much more ably be done by someone more qualified. The Strand has made us richer in data, but poorer in spirit. That’s all I’m saying.

“Take something simple like, oh, for example that encephalitis epidemic in Eudora that’s been in the news lately. A billion people out there are calling on the regional health organizations to do something, to zap them a scheme for some standard anti-virals. Another billion people argue that if they can’t pay, then they’ve got no right to the treatment, human compassion be damned. They point out, quite correctly, that the new manufacturing economy is based almost solely on licensing royalties derived from proprietary schemes. If somebody decides that we should just skip the royalties on some schemes for the public good, what does that mean for people and the congloms whose function in our society and our economy is to destruct objects into digitized schemes? I’ll tell you what happens: they take it hard where it counts, in their bank books and they start exploring other career options. They have no motivation to work for free, after all. And for every one of them who can’t turn a profit, fewer schemes get made. When you start looking at it that way, you start to say to yourself that everybody has got to make a living after all, so maybe it’s actually in the public interest to just let those miners die. They suffer, sure, and it’s tragic and all that, but the rest of us have to forge ahead. Things continue to be destructed, more goods become available at cheaper prices, and the zap economy continues to flourish, which ultimately raises the standard of living for everyone.

“So where do we draw the line? All medicine is free? There goes the vested interests of pharmacological R&D’s, not to mention their revenue streams, which eventually has real consequences on our ability to fight future diseases. And if we’re going to give free meds, shouldn’t we include food, too? That’s maybe even more important than medical schemes to a lot of struggling colonies. I mean, isn’t access to food a fundamental human right? Surely we can all agree on that. Well, once you start down that humanitarian slippery slope, then we have to talk about construction materials for basic housing. Or how about clothing? Each one of those is another argument. Each one is potentially an industry out of work. It’s easy to think altruistic thoughts when those thoughts don’t cost you anything.

“Fine, then. Let’s imagine that as a human community we actually manage to generate the political will to take the situation these miners are in seriously. Somebody digs through all the arguments, catalogues all of these positions that have been put forward by people who don’t have any stake in the lives of these miners and somehow manages to come up with a consensus opinion We collectively decide that Something Has Got to Be Done. Then you’ve got a whole new bunch of worms to try to cram back into can. What exactly are you going to do? How are you going to do it? What are the potential ramifications of this precedent setting involvement? That’s where the real fight starts, because then the ‘experts’ weigh in with historical precedents. How fixing the AIDS crisis led to overpopulation and ecological collapse in sub-Saharan Africa in the twenty-first century. How the Black Death stunted the technological development of Western Europe by a hundred years. How the Garow Root Famine directly contributed to the democratization of New Canton and the downfall of the Shen-Tse regime. And every time you think you’ve accounted for all of those historical events with some important similarity to this one, another one pops up, because everything is out there on the Strand, just waiting to become a factoid in someone’s political argument.

“And in the meantime, those miners on Eudora die because we were too busy wringing our hands and trying to make a decision about what to do that wouldn’t hurt anybody’s vested interest in the process, when the bottom line is that somebody just needed to go ahead and do something about it and worry about picking up the pieces later.

“Humanity is only capable of assimilating so much information. After that, it’s just noise. Just useless bickering that keeps anything meaningful from actually happening. To be completely honest, I have enough doubts about what’s right and what’s wrong without being constantly bombarded by other people intent on arguing all sides of every possible issue. I can’t stand the lurking fear that just around this corner, or inside this room or at some other particular ip, I’m going to find the one perfect argument or coherent explication of the entire mass of human history that’s going to demonstrate to me how I’ve been going about it all wrong my entire life. At some point you have to just make decisions and stick with them. That’s what being human is. Coming to terms with our own fundamental doubt.”

“But what’s the alternative?” Amara asked, clearly unimpressed with his existential dilemmas. “No consensus? Whoever has the power or controls the resources makes decisions for everyone? They decide who to help and who to punish? That’s just what geek prevents. It forges us all into a galactic human community that takes the power away from megacorps and dictators and gives it back to the people. Information makes us free.”

Dorian smiled glibly. “Or do the people who control the power just use the Strand to drown us with music and video and all the other mundane entertainments and distractions so we don’t think about what they’re doing when they’re locked behind the doors of their secure foam?”

“I think you’ve been working at the Archive for too long,” she said, guarded.

“Okay, how about this? They let us have all the information we want because they know we’ll sit around bitching at one another for years while the real wheels of progress grind on around us. They’re governments and megacorps, for God’s sake! They know a thing or two about how bureaucracy works, and there’s nothing worse than a bureaucracy of democratic citizens. Even ancient Greece figured that out.”

“So instead, you’d give us a democracy of rugged individualists, half of which are doing things and the other half trying to undo the harm the first group caused.”

“Right! And eventually they’d get tired of arguing and fighting and wasting their time engaged in localized geek flame-wars–and they’d get their hands on some real weapons and go at it tooth and claw until all the good people ruled the universe and all the bad people were dead and forgotten.” Dorian dug his fingers into his temples and rubbed, rubbed. Happy little circles. “That’s not what I’m saying at all, Amara. I’m not interested in conflict. I’m not interested in consensus. Who cares what anyone else wants to do? I just want to live my own life and be pleased with the results at the end of the day. That’s it. I just want to live in a real world with real people who mind their own business, or at best, don’t ask me to embroil myself in causes that don’t effect me. I mean, didn’t you just ever want to know someone? Not what they say, not their avatar on the Strand with all the trendy consensus opinions they’ve cribbed from someone else’s screed, but the person himself, warts and all. The warts are what make us interesting, not these animated, machinated, falsely-informed, bandwagoneering soundbytes of people that don’t have any more unique personality about them than a chunk of artificial intelligence script. I’m tired of fake people who live on the Strand and show me only the side of themselves they want me to see rather than the real person behind the avatar.”

He stopped himself there, well over the official border into Mad Rant Village, Population 1. Amara still watched him, still listened, absorbing it all. Dorian looked away.

“You sound very bitter,” she said, finally.

“I have a right to be bitter. Buying into the Strand fantasy is what saddled me with a carping ex-wife.” She said nothing, and he sighed, let his shoulders droop in defeat. “That was supposed to be a joke.”

“Was it?”

“I didn’t deliver it as well as the guy on the triDvid.”

“I guess not.” Her straight face crumbled, and Amara giggled at him. “I think I’m beginning to see you more clearly, John. You’re not a cranky old luddite, you’re a idealist. You’re a Warbucks waiting for the opportunity to save an orphanage.”

“Sure. You keep telling yourself that.” He flipped into geek and consulted the system time. “I’m done talking about me for the night, I think. It’s very late. I’m tired, I’m cranky and I’ve had just enough to drink to make it likely that I’ll keep harping on this for hours at an increasingly sharp incoherence curve if I don’t shut up now and go to bed. However, given that it’s still raining and I’m gentleman enough not to put a lady out into the damp and dangerous night, I’m going to get up now and get a pillow and blanket out of the closet. I’ll sleep on the couch. You’re welcome to the bed, but I warn you not to try and move the cat. He bites if you wake him up from a dead sleep.”

 

Dorian woke earlier than he would have expected. His back hurt where the couch braces had dug into his kidneys for much of the night. He was stiff and exhausted and generally miserable. The cat was perched on his chest, glaring at him for reasons only the cat gods could imagine. It was marginally better than waking to the alarm clock, he supposed. Groaning, Dorian rolled himself off the couch.

The cache messenger inside his array buzzed with a status alert. Before falling asleep, Dorian had flipped into his private foam and unspooled one of his generic homegrown mining scripts. Then he had connected to an open source Strand architecture portal he knew in Sandoz and bounced it off on a fact finding mission through the pathless wilderness of public data infosites. His cache was now telling him that the requested query sets had been returned and archived per his request.

Remembering all the things he had promised himself he would accomplish today was the only thing that dragged him off the floor.

He made coffee, hit the pisser, turned on the newswire. The feed was local, a twoD port of a Strand broadcast from Southrange. They rarely covered events in Sonali that didn’t involve a government agency, but Dorian didn’t mind. Most of the news that came out of Sonali was both bad and repetitious. He opened the curtains he’d closed the night before to deaden the monotonous ticking of the rain. The clouds had cleared out in the night, and the dawn was bright and pale. There was mist in the foothills, but the stony peaks were ablaze with light, reflecting the morning sun like gilded daggers. It looked like it was going to be a glorious day. Perfect for hiding out in a claustrophobic basement.

After washing up the evening’s dishes and dumping the beer bottles in the recycler, he seated himself, still in yesterday’s clothes, at the kitchen table, and sipped at coffee that burned his tongue. He thought about taking up cigarettes again. He always thought about cigarettes in the morning. It was one of the grand and time-consuming vices he’d never been exactly certain why he’d given up in the first place.

The newswire’s anchor, some impossibly perky girl named Danifer with digitally brushed curves and spotless skin, went on about an apartment fire on the lower west side, the government’s new crackdown on scheme piracy, soup lines in Colinga that had broken out into riots. There were travel advisories for Kent, Phillips-Overman and Sri Tung where a nasty territorial dispute had finally turned bloody. The increasingly neo-liberal United Terran Confederations had come out with a new list of banned augmentations that had been deemed Dangers to Public Health and Safety. Danifer did not mention that all the mods they had agreed on had been out of fashion for more than two years.

The great thing about living near the ass of the universe was that Sonali and the other independent states of Trithemius Orbis couldn’t be picky about who their citizens were. They needed bright, energetic, risk-embracing folk. The sort of people who were more interested in exploration, adventure and a bit of danger than in maintaining the sort of rigid social order where traditional commerce flourished. Folks like that also tended to be the sort who would be most likely to experiment with physical and mental augmentation–anything, in fact, that appeared to provide a creative or commercial edge on a galactic economy that had a considerable head start on them. The assorted governments of Trithemius Orbis had widely adopted a live and let live stance (only partially out of political necessity) and tended to turn a blind eye to legal definitions foisted off on them by external agencies that impinged on personal freedoms. As a result, T.O. had developed something of a Freaks On Parade reputation. Most of the long-timers liked it that way. In fact, they liked anything that looked like it might spark the stuttering immigration and economic engine upon which they all depended.

Finally, at the half hour: Homestead Mart financial auditors are scrambling this morning to explain a computer system glitch that inexplicably diverted corporate funds to an unknown anonymous account. Financial Security and Enforcement Division Chief Henry Calico explained to nervous shareholders that the transmission error was caught early this morning and corrected by data technicians before there was any disruption in the sector’s trade markets. He went on to stress that Homestead’s own reporting protocols were at fault, stemming from a failed software upgrade last month. Market and Exchange Ministry officials declined to comment and are not expected to launch an independent investigation.

Dorian shook his head, drank his coffee. Thought about kicking the cat.

It was a lousy way to start the day.

“That’s not a happy face,” Amara greeted him cheerily.

She went straight to the cabinets and dug around until she found a coffee cup. She joined him at the table and sat down across from him with her elbows on the edge, cup in her hands, saurian nostrils quivering over the steam and aroma. “Good morning, sunshine.”

“There are doughnuts in the fridge,” he muttered, completely failing in his quest to sound cheery back at her.

“Thanks, but if it doesn’t come from a carafe, it isn’t breakfast.”

A sound philosophy if ever there was one.

“I’m going in early today,” Dorian said. “You’re welcome to crash here if you’re still tired, or I can drive you over to your place if you want to shower or change or whatever it is you do before you go to work.”

She lowered her cup. “You have a car?”

“Sometimes.” He smiled to himself. He had an ancient and only intermittently reliable Roland Trench Jeep, though the furrow blade had been removed before he bought it. He took it up into the mountains sometimes, or along the winding and frequently washed out roads through the foothills on those rare occasions when he needed to go to Southrange. “It gets stolen a couple times a month if I leave it around the Archive, so mostly I just walk.”

“I’ll hook a ride with you, if you don’t mind,” Amara said. “I’ve still got some work ahead to catch up Frau Stein, and I’d just as soon get it done early.”

Dorian pushed away from the table and climbed to his feet. “Then I’ll change into some fresh clothes, feed the cat and we can get out of here.” Assuming that he could find his keys. “There should be an extra toothbrush in the bathroom if you want it.”

While he dressed, Dorian routed the data he had downloaded in the night through his cortical seeder and began the slow process of encoding it into wet synaptic storage.

By the time he reached the Archive, he expected to have learned everything he might have ever wanted to know about the life and times of Michael Raville.

<– Chapter 2 / Chapter 4 –>