Blind Lake

She kept an eye on her desktop clock. At 1:30, she made a show of shuffling through papers and digital files as if she had lost something. And therefore would go into Ray’s office to get it. This felt ludicrously unrealistic, like a high school play.

Or a bad movie. And in the movie, Sue thought, this would be the moment somebody walked in on her… probably Shulgin, or even Ray, Ray with a pistol in his hand…

“Sue?”

She bit her tongue, then managed an “Ow!” that might have passed as “Hello?”

It wasn’t Ray. It was only Gretchen Krueger from down in Archives.

“Didn’t expect you’d be in today,” Gretchen said. “I was just on my way to pick up some back-issue JAEs and I saw your door open. Is Ray here too?”

“No. I’m just finishing up some work. Except I keep losing things.” Establishing her alibi yet again.

“When I’m done here, I’m getting together at Sawyer’s with Jamal and Karen. Want to join us? You’d be more than welcome.”

“Thanks, but all I want this afternoon is a shower and a nap.”

“I know the feeling.”

“You have a good time, though, Gretch.”

“I will. Take it easy, Sue. You look tired.”

Gretchen ambled off down the corridor and Sue began to steel herself once more for the assault on Ray’s i

Then into Ray’s sanctuary and out of range of the security cameras.

First she pulled a sheaf of files out of the cabinet against the wall — any files, it didn’t matter, as long as she had something i

The bundle of printouts was in the bottom-left drawer, where he used to keep his DingDongs before the supply ran out. He had probably vacuumed the drawer for crumbs, knowing Ray. Ray must be seriously jonesing, she thought. He must be in acute DingDong withdrawal.

She picked up the first sheet.

EX: Bo Xiang, Crossbank National Laboratory TO: Avery Fishbinder, Blind Lake National Laboratory TEXT: Hi, Ave. As promised, here’s some heads-up on the material we’ll be presenting at this year’s conference. Sorry I can’t be more explicit (I know you don’t want to be blindsided) but we’ve been warned to keep this quiet until it’s all official. The long and short is that we’ve found evidence of a vanished sentient culture on HR8832/B. Screen shots to follow, but there is a region of basaltic uplift in the northern hemisphere, very shallow water and some exposed islands, superficially no different from hundreds of other such swampy regions, but with the remains of obviously very highly engineered structures, including a specific link or at least an architectural reference to the “coral floaters” dotting the equator. Still unsure how to reconcile this with the absence of motile animals: Gossard suggests an ancient mass extinction…

For God’s sake, Sue scolded herself, don’t read it. She cast a furtive glance at the doorway. She was alone, but that could change.

She took her server from her pocket, dialed her home node and activated the scan function. The server was a pencil-style model exactly as wide as a standard sheet of paper. Sue ran the photosensitive side down the document until it blipped a complete transfer. Then the next sheet. Then the next. But there were lots of sheets. She checked her watch. It was almost two o’clock. She might be another twenty minutes here. More.

Calm down, she told herself, and sca

From his aisle seat in the hall, Chris Carmody watched Ray stand up and walk to the podium.

Chris felt it was important to get some measure of this guy. There were a thousand ways he could walk into another confrontation with Ray Scutter. If that happened, he didn’t want to screw it up.

There were a thousand ways to screw it up.

Ray looked pretty slick today. He smiled at the audience and took the podium with an ease Marguerite hadn’t been able to muster. This was the “charm” she had talked about it, and maybe this was what she had seen in him when they first met — a plausible grin and some good-sounding words. Ray began:

“I’m going to depart from my prepared text here — and I know you asked us to keep it short, Ari, and I promise I’ll do my best — to address some of the remarks of the previous speaker.”

Marguerite squirmed visibly in her chair, though she must have expected this.

“As scientists,” Ray said, “one of the things we must keep in mind is that appearances can be deceptive. We’ve been talking about the O/BEC installation as if it were a superior optical telescope. I would remind you that it isn’t. At its most fundamental level, the Eye is a quantum computer functioning as an image generator. We assume the images it generates accurately represent past events on a distant planet. That may be true. It may not. If it is deriving real information, we don’t know how it’s doing so. The images it creates are consonant with our real knowledge of UMa47/E’s size, atmosphere, and distance from its parent star. Beyond that, however, we have no way of confirming what the Eye purports to see. Until we can more efficiently duplicate and understand the effect, our assumption that we’re seeing real events has to be provisional.

“And if we’re tentative about the conclusions we draw, it’s not because we’re timid. It’s because we don’t want to be deceived. For this reason — and many others — I believe our tight focus on the Subject and his culture has been misguided and disastrously premature.

“In contrast to the previous speaker, I would remind the audience that we have been making up stories — pardon me, ‘constructing narratives’ — about extraterrestrial life for much of human history. Whether this constitutes genius or folly is an interesting question. In the name of science, we were once asked by Percival Lowell to believe in a Mars equipped with canals and civilization. That misconception was dispelled by twentieth-century science, only to be replaced by the wishful and ultimately falsified discovery of fossil bacteria in a Martian meteorite. Examined more closely, Mars has proven to be sterile of life. The widely imagined microbes inhabiting Europa’s subsurface ocean of lukewarm sludge have likewise turned out to be illusory. Our imagination outpaces us, it seems. It is intuitive, it leaps ahead, and it sees what it wishes for. A manifesto for imagination is hardly what we need, especially at this point in time.”

He sighed theatrically.

“Having said that — and I think it needed to be said — let me move on to a more pressing issue, one with particular relevance for all of us here at the Lake.

“It goes without saying that the lockdown, what some people have called the quarantine, is an unprecedented event and one we have all struggled to understand. Quarantine, I think, is an apt word. I think it’s become obvious that we have all been confined here, not for our own good, but for the protection of people on the outside.

“And yet it sounds absurd, ridiculous. What is there about us, about Blind Lake, that could possibly be considered threatening?

“Indeed, what? Some have suggested that the very images we’ve been studying might be dangerous, that they might contain a steganographic code or some other hidden message destructive to the human mind. But we have seen little evidence of that… unless you want to cite the previous speaker’s panegyric as an example.” Ray gri