Fifteen stories, each set in a different specialized world — monastic librarianship, drone warfare, computational neuroscience, 1960s jazz, Roman hydraulics, dressage, bridge engineering — all circling one question: what do we leave inside the things we create?
The characters are specialists who think in the language of their domains because it's the only vocabulary they have for what they're feeling. A cardiologist processes love through arrhythmia. A software engineer processes grief through legacy systems. A military analyst trains a targeting AI and watches it execute instincts he didn't know he'd transmitted. A medieval librarian encodes worth into a ledger that outlasts him by seven centuries. A neuroscientist studying time perception in dying patients follows her research backward to Thermopylae.
The stories talk to each other. Characters and concepts recur across pieces separated by millennia, building the feel of a novel told in fragments — not a shared universe, but a shared consciousness. Underneath the domain variety runs a tighter set of concerns: the subjective experience of duration, what survives transmission across a gap, the difference between measuring something and understanding it, and what you do with the interval you have.
Noise Floor is a debut collection by Camilo Gomez
Fifteen stories, each set in a different specialized world — monastic librarianship, drone warfare, computational neuroscience, 1960s jazz, Roman hydraulics, dressage, bridge engineering — all circling one question: what do we leave inside the things we create?
The characters are specialists who think in the language of their domains because it's the only vocabulary they have for what they're feeling. A cardiologist processes love through arrhythmia. A software engineer processes grief through legacy systems. A military analyst trains a targeting AI and watches it execute instincts he didn't know he'd transmitted. A medieval librarian encodes worth into a ledger that outlasts him by seven centuries. A neuroscientist studying time perception in dying patients follows her research backward to Thermopylae.
The stories talk to each other. Characters and concepts recur across pieces separated by millennia, building the feel of a novel told in fragments — not a shared universe, but a shared consciousness. Underneath the domain variety runs a tighter set of concerns: the subjective experience of duration, what survives transmission across a gap, the difference between measuring something and understanding it, and what you do with the interval you have.
Noise Floor is a debut collection by Camilo Gomez
On Acceptance as Overclocking
III.
The first thing you must understand is that Leonidas did not want to die.
I say this because the popular account has calcified into something useless. Three hundred men marching cheerfully into oblivion, death as aesthetic choice. That narrative misses everything interesting about what actually happened at the Hot Gates, which is that Leonidas and his men experienced those final fifty-two hours as weeks — perhaps as long as a month — of subjective time between the moment they understood with certainty that they would not survive and the moment the last of them fell.
I know this because I have spent eleven years studying what I initially called stress-dependent temporal dilation, and what my research subjects, terminal patients at the Elliston Institute for Palliative Neuroscience, simply call the Slowing.
I.
My name is Nathan Carey. I am a chronobiologist, which is to say I study the mechanisms by which organisms measure time. Circadian rhythms. Ultradian oscillations. The suprachiasmatic nucleus, that tiny cluster of twenty thousand neurons in the hypothalamus that serves as the body’s master clock. For most of my career, I was interested in the machinery.
The shift began in 2019, with a patient named Gerald Byrne.
Gerald was seventy-one, retired from the Connecticut Department of Transportation, and had been diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme — the kind of brain tumor where the median survival is fifteen months and the five-year survival rate rounds to zero. When I met him, he had nine weeks left, give or take, and he knew it. He was not in denial. He was not bargaining. He had arrived at something I can only describe as a settled clarity about his situation, and it was this clarity that interested Dr. Pereira, the palliative care physician who first referred him to our lab.
I assumed confabulation, medication effects, the understandable distortions of a brain being colonized by malignant cells. I agreed to see him as a courtesy.
Gerald Byrne sat across from me in a plastic chair in my office at the Institute, hands folded on a cane he did not yet need, and described his experience with the precision of an engineer reporting a fault in infrastructure.
“It’s not that time seems slow,” he said. “I’ve had slow time. Waiting rooms. Staff meetings. This is different. I am fitting more experience into each hour. Each moment has room in it. I am thinking more thoughts, noticing more things, remembering more of what I notice. I clocked it last Wednesday. I sat in my living room and watched the light change on the wall, and I had what felt like an entire afternoon’s worth of thought and observation, and when I looked at the clock, eleven minutes had passed.”
I asked whether this might be an attentional effect — the well-known tendency to remember vivid experiences as longer than they were.
He shook his head. “I’m a careful man, Dr. Carey. I spent forty years measuring things. I understand the difference between remembering something as long and experiencing it as long. This is the second one.”
So I measured him.
V.
The fMRI data cost me my first postdoc.
Kenji Tagawa was a brilliant imaging specialist who had come to chronobiology from physics. He had a physicist’s conviction that interesting phenomena demand clean explanations. When I showed him Gerald’s temporal bisection data, his first instinct was artifact. His second was pathology — the tumor altering clock-speed neurons directly. We imaged Gerald’s brain during temporal tasks, and what Kenji found made him uneasy in a way I had never seen from him before.
The suprachiasmatic nucleus was not responsible. The dilation signature appeared in the insular cortex — specifically the anterior insula, which integrates interoceptive signals to construct what Craig and others have called the “sentient self.” This is the structure that assembles heartbeats, breaths, and gut feelings into the felt experience of being a conscious entity moving through time. In Gerald, it was operating at an elevated rate. Not erratically. Not pathologically. As if someone had adjusted the sampling frequency upward. More snapshots per second, each one detailed, each one filed.
“It looks like his brain is overclocking,” Kenji said, staring at the activation maps. He said it like a confession.
The insular cortex was communicating, at an accelerated rate, with the basal ganglia, the supplementary motor area, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This last connection bothered Kenji. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is involved in self-referential processing and, critically, in the appraisal of one’s own mortality.
Gerald’s brain had registered, at some deep computational level, that its time was finite and precisely bounded. And it had responded by increasing the temporal density of conscious experience.
A feedback loop appears to exist between the neural circuits that model one’s own death and the circuits that generate the subjective experience of duration. When the former achieve a state I have come to call terminal certainty — not fear, not despair, but settled, clear-eyed knowledge that death is assured and proximate — the latter adjust their sampling rate upward.
The phenomenon has a distant cousin in Csikszentmihalyi’s flow state, where deep absorption distorts the sense of time, but flow achieves this by turning down the brain’s time-monitoring. Terminal certainty turns up the time-generating.
Kenji pushed back hard. He spent three weeks building an alternative model — elegant, purely mechanical — that predicted dilation should correlate with tumor volume. We tested it across our first four patients. It did not. The dilation tracked certainty. Only certainty.
“Then you’re saying consciousness has a throttle,” Kenji said the day we reviewed the results. “And acceptance is the hand on it.” He did not say it with wonder. He said it with the specific discomfort of a man who has spent his career believing that physics describes everything real and is now confronted with a measurement that physics cannot account for.
He left the lab two months later. He said the work was “too soft.” But on his last day, standing in the doorway with his box of belongings, he said something I have not been able to set aside: “If you’re right, Nathan, then I have no idea how long my mother was alive. I was at her bedside for three days and I have no idea what she experienced. And I can’t go back and measure.”
II.
Gerald’s internal clock was running faster than baseline by a factor of approximately 2.3. For every objective hour, he experienced something closer to two hours and eighteen minutes of subjective time. His nine remaining weeks of clock time contained, by this measure, roughly twenty weeks of experienced life.
I recalibrated the equipment. I ran the test again. The results held.
The dilation did not correlate with his tumor’s progression. It did not correlate with his medication, his sleep quality, his pain levels, or his cognitive function on standard neuropsychological batteries. It correlated, precisely and exclusively, with a single variable.
Certainty.
Gerald, being Gerald, wanted a theory. He came to our third session with a yellow legal pad covered in the neat block lettering of a man who had spent four decades annotating blueprints.
“You know about Janet,” he said. It was not a question. Pierre Janet, the French psychologist who in 1877 proposed that the subjective length of a period of time is proportional to the total time you have lived. A year at age nine is one-nineth of everything. A year at age sixty is a rounding error. This is why childhood summers feel like geological epochs and retirement years vanish like coins into a slot.
“What nobody talks about,” Gerald said, tapping the legal pad, “is what happens when you flip the denominator. I’m not measuring against time lived. I’m measuring against time left.” He turned the pad toward me. He had drawn a simple graph: a curve that began flat and then rose sharply, almost vertically, as remaining time approached zero. “Each week I have left is a larger fraction of what remains. Last month, a week was one-ninth of my future. Next week, it’ll be a quarter. The ratio isn’t linear. It’s hyperbolic.”
He looked at me the way he must have looked at bridge inspectors who were slow to grasp a load-bearing calculation.
“Your brain isn’t speeding up because it’s panicking, Dr. Carey. It’s speeding up because each unit of remaining time is worth more. Supply and demand. The scarcest resource gets the most processing.” He folded the legal pad closed. “I’d check whether your dilation factors track the curve.”
I checked. They tracked the curve.
IV.
I found the pattern in nine more patients over the next three years. Not all terminal patients — only those who met specific psychological criteria. The dilation required acceptance. It required the kind of knowledge that sits in the body like a stone in water: settled, undeniable, and, crucially, unresisted.
Patients who were fighting their diagnosis did not dilate. Patients in denial did not dilate. The phenomenon was narrowly specific: you had to know, clearly and without evasion, that you were going to die, and approximately when, and you had to have stopped struggling against that knowledge.
The dilation factor varied. Gerald’s 2.3x was on the low end. My most extreme case, a forty-four-year-old cellist named Rachel Chen with pancreatic cancer, sustained a dilation factor of 3.8 for the final eleven days of her life. By her internal clock, she experienced approximately forty-two days in those eleven. She spent them at the small desk in her hospital room, manuscript paper spread across the adjustable tray table, her handwriting growing larger and less controlled as the days passed but the notation remaining precise. She was transposing what she heard in her head faster than her body could keep up. She told me she could hear the entire quartet simultaneously — all four voices at once — and the difficulty was not composition but transcription: slowing the music in her head down enough for her hand to capture it. She completed a string quartet in four movements — Allegro vivace, Allegro, Andante, Largo — that she had been working on for two years.
I asked her, near the end, what it was like.
She thought for a long time. “You know when you’re driving on a highway and you pass a field, and there’s one tree at the edge of it, and you think, I would have liked to look at that tree? It’s like someone stopped the car.”
It was after Rachel’s death that I began reading about Thermopylae.
VIII.
In August of 480 BCE, a Greek force of seven thousand held the coastal pass of Thermopylae against a Persian army that outnumbered them by orders of magnitude. For two days, the narrow terrain held. On the evening of the second day, a local shepherd revealed a mountain path that would allow the Persians to encircle the Greek position. Leonidas dismissed the bulk of the army and remained with his rear guard to cover the retreat.
This is the moment.
Not the battle. The moment of knowing. Leonidas understood with absolute clarity: the path was compromised, retreat was no longer an option for the rear guard, and he and his men would die at the Hot Gates. Not probably. Not possibly. They would die, and they knew it, and they stayed.
Every historical account agrees on one thing: the final stand lasted far longer than it should have. The ancient sources express this as valor, as divine favor, as the sheer physical superiority of Spartan warriors. But when I read Herodotus’s account with a chronobiologist’s eyes, something else emerged. The time references are inconsistent. Actions that should have taken minutes are described with the density of hours. The final morning in particular — from dawn to the fall of the last Greek — is narrated with a granularity of detail difficult to reconcile with the likely clock-time duration of the engagement.
I am not making a historical argument. I am making a neurological one.
Three hundred men who knew, with absolute certainty, that they were going to die. Who had stopped struggling against that knowledge and chosen to act within it. Men in a state of terminal certainty as pure and undeniable as any I have measured in my lab.
If the dilation factors I have observed in my patients are indicative of a general human capacity — if the mechanism is not pathological but adaptive, a feature of the neural architecture we all carry — then the subjective experience of the last stand at Thermopylae was not three days.
But the Slowing was not the only temporal mechanism at work in the pass.
There is a well-documented phenomenon called tachypsychia, from the Greek for “fast mind,” in which acute threat dilates time over intervals of seconds. Soldiers describe bullets drifting like insects. Police officers report watching shell casings tumble end over end in midair, each rotation distinct. The mechanism is adrenal: a neurochemical surge that stamps every incoming frame with emergency priority. The result is a burst of temporal dilation — intense but narrow. Tachypsychia tunnels attention onto the threat. The peripheral world goes dark. It lasts seconds, occasionally minutes, and it leaves the subject shaking and depleted.
The Slowing is none of these things. It is calm, sustained, and wide. It does not narrow attention; it opens it. Rachel Chen heard all four voices of her quartet at once. Gerald Byrne watched light move on a wall and found the experience capacious. Where tachypsychia is a spotlight thrown on a single danger, the Slowing is a window flung open on everything.
What happened at Thermopylae was both at once.
The rear guard stood in a state of terminal certainty — the deep, settled dilation that runs for days and broadens the aperture of consciousness. And within that dilated field, each moment of close combat triggered tachypsychia, the acute adrenal spike that stretches individual seconds into long, vivid, narrowly focused intervals. One mechanism nested inside the other. A slow wave carrying fast waves on its surface.
Using conservative parameters for the sustained dilation — a mean factor of 3.1 — and layering acute tachypsychic spikes during combat engagement, my upper-bound estimate is a compound factor between 8 and 12 for the most psychologically prepared among them. At that range, Leonidas’s final fifty-two hours contained between seventeen and twenty-six days of subjective experience. And at the extreme peaks — the moments of closest combat, the seconds when a spear tip filled the visual field — the local dilation may have spiked far higher. Weeks. Perhaps, for some of them, more than a month.
A Spartan month, filled with the density of combat and brotherhood and the sharp geometry of the pass, the salt smell of the Malian Gulf, the specific weight of a bronze shield.
VI.
I presented these findings at the International Society for the Study of Time in Kyoto, in the spring of 2024. The reception was divided along predictable lines. The neuroimaging people found the clinical data compelling. The historians found my Thermopylae extrapolation romantic. The philosophers found the whole thing terrifying.
One philosopher in particular — Marcus Feld from the University of Vienna — asked the question I had been circling for two years without managing to land on it.
“Dr. Carey,” he said, standing in the back row. “If your findings hold, then you have a profound problem with the concept of lifespan. A person who lives to eighty in a state of temporal default and a person who lives to forty-four but dilates by a factor of four in their final year — who lived longer?”
The room was quiet.
“Because if experienced time is what matters,” Feld continued, “then you have just demonstrated that a death sentence, fully accepted, is, in some measurable sense, an extension of life.”
I did not have an answer for him. I still don’t.
VII.
I want to return to Gerald Byrne, because Gerald said something in our last session that I have thought about nearly every day since.
He had four days left. The tumor was compressing his motor cortex, and his left hand had begun to tremor, and he was losing words — not thoughts, he was careful to specify, but the labels for thoughts, which he found frustrating but not frightening.
“I’ve been doing math,” he said. He often said this; it was a kind of joke between us. “Nine weeks of clock time. At 2.3, that’s roughly twenty weeks of experienced time. Twenty weeks I wasn’t supposed to have.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“But here’s the thing.” He leaned forward, and his eyes were clear in a way I associated with his dilated state — a quality of attention that was almost architectural, as if he were constructing the moment deliberately. “The twenty weeks aren’t bonus time. They don’t feel extra. They feel like mine. They feel like the time I was always going to have. It’s the clock that’s wrong, not me.”
“The question you’re going to have to answer,” Gerald said, “is whether a life is a number of years or a quantity of experience. Because those turn out to be different things, and nobody told me.”
He died on a Thursday. According to the clock, he had been alive for seventy-one years and four months. According to my measurements, he had experienced approximately seventy-one years and seven months. Nearly three extra months of consciousness, lived inside the same interval of physics.
I do not know what to do with this.
IX.
Here is what I have not told you.
Six months ago, I was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS. Motor neuron disease. It began with a coffee cup. I was standing at the counter in my kitchen on a Sunday morning, and the cup left my hand. Not dropped, exactly, but released, as if my fingers had simply stopped receiving the instruction to hold. The cup shattered, and I stood there looking at the pieces with the peculiar calm of a man who has spent his career studying the body’s clocks and has just heard one of them skip.
My neurologist, who is a precise and compassionate man, told me that the median survival from symptom onset is two to five years, with significant variance.
When he said it, I looked at the clock on the wall behind his left shoulder. I did this without deciding to. The second hand was at the four, and it stayed at the four. It hung there, pinned, for what I would later estimate was three full seconds of subjective time before it resumed its sweep.
Chronostasis. I have given lectures on chronostasis. When the eye makes a rapid movement — a saccade — the brain suppresses the blur of transit and backfills the gap by stretching the first stable image it receives. You glance at a clock and the second hand appears to freeze because your brain has pasted that first post-saccade frame backward over the missing interval. It is a parlor trick of visual processing. I have explained it to undergraduates with a slide deck and a laser pointer. I have called it, in print, “among the most minor and best-understood temporal illusions.”
But sitting in that office with the word amyotrophic still in the air, I watched the second hand stick and I understood something I had not understood in twenty years of studying time: that the parlor trick and the Slowing are not different phenomena at different scales. They are the same hand on the same throttle. One is a reflex. The other is a sustained act. My brain, in the moment of hearing its own death sentence, had reached for the only tool it had — the same crude mechanism that backfills a saccade — and tried to hold the world still.
It couldn’t, of course. Not yet. I was nowhere near certainty. I was in the antechamber of terror, and the second hand resumed, and the clock went on measuring what clocks measure, which is not the thing that matters.
For the first four months, I did not dilate. I know this because I tested myself weekly, compulsively, using the same protocols I use on my patients. My bisection points were normal. My interval production was normal. My anterior insula was behaving exactly as it should for a man of forty-six in a state of considerable distress.
I was not in terminal certainty. I was in terror, which is a different country entirely.
The shift happened six weeks ago. I will not describe the psychological process that carried me from terror to knowledge, because it was private and irregular and involved, among other things, watching a colony of ants dismantle a dead beetle on my kitchen floor. They worked with such precise economy, each one carrying exactly what it could carry, no wasted motion, no awareness that any motion could ever be the last. An ant does not know it is going to die. It cannot achieve terminal certainty, cannot dilate, cannot experience more than what the clock gives it. And yet it wastes nothing.
I watched them for forty minutes — which, at the dilation factor I did not yet know I had, was something closer to an hour and forty-eight minutes of interior time. Long enough for a beginning, a middle, and an end. Long enough to understand that the economy I was watching was not the same as mine, that their efficiency came from having no self to interrupt the work, while mine, if it came, would have to come from the opposite: from a self so thoroughly informed of its own ending that it stopped flinching and simply attended.
What I will say is that I woke up the next morning and the resistance was gone. Not the sadness. Not the love for my life and the people in it. But the struggle against the factual content of my situation had dissolved, the way ice dissolves in water — leaving the water slightly changed but clear.
I tested myself that afternoon.
My dilation factor was 2.7.
X.
I am writing this from my office at the Elliston Institute, in the last week of October. Outside, the sugar maples are the color of the inside of a flame. I notice this, and I notice that I notice it, and then I return to work because noticing is not the point. The point is what you do with the time the noticing lives inside of.
I have two years, perhaps three. The clock will measure them as such. But at a dilation factor of 2.7, those years contain something closer to five or eight years of experienced time, and I intend to use every one of them.
I am the first researcher to study the Slowing from inside it.
This fact reorganized my priorities within days of the shift. I had spent eleven years measuring the phenomenon in other people, constructing instruments sensitive enough to detect it, arguing for its reality in front of skeptical colleagues who looked at my data the way one looks at writing in the margin of a page — something too peripheral to be the main text, too small to take seriously, surviving only because no one had thought it important enough to disprove. The Slowing has persisted in the literature the way certain manuscripts persist in libraries: not by being championed, but by being beneath the notice of anyone with the authority to discard it. And now I am the instrument.
I can feel the dilation in real time, can observe my own cognition from within the expanded interval, can note the precise quality of attention that the Slowing produces — its width, its calm, its refusal to narrow — in a way that no external measure can capture. Gerald could describe it. Rachel could compose inside it. I can quantify it from both sides of the skull simultaneously, and the window in which my hands will still be steady enough to do this work is finite and closing.
I am writing three papers at once. The first presents the full dataset: thirteen patients, four years of longitudinal imaging, the dilation curves that Gerald predicted on his yellow legal pad. The second proposes the mechanism — the feedback loop between mortal self-modeling and temporal generation, the anterior insula as throttle. The third is a single-subject case study, N=1, the subject and the author the same person, which will either be the most important or the most embarrassing paper I have ever written.
The ants are still in my kitchen. A new colony, or the same one — I cannot tell. I have been watching them for weeks now, not with the diffuse wonder of a man contemplating mortality, but with the focused attention of a chronobiologist who has realized that they are a perfect control group. They cannot dilate. They have no self-model, no capacity for terminal certainty, no throttle to open. Their time is purely mechanical, purely clock-given. I have been filming them, measuring the tempo of their work against my own shifted sense of duration, using them as a metronome against which to calibrate my interior clock. On Tuesday I watched a single ant navigate a crack in the grout for what my dilated mind experienced as nearly four minutes. The camera showed forty-seven seconds. The ant, of course, experienced forty-seven seconds. I experienced something else entirely. The difference is the phenomenon, and the ant, unknowing, held the baseline.
Rachel finished her quartet. I understood this, when she was alive, as a beautiful anecdote. I understand it now as a research protocol. She used the Slowing to work. She did not sit in the expanded time and marvel at it. She put it to use. The dilation gave her imagination more hours, and she filled those hours with notation, and the quartet exists because she treated the Slowing not as a grace but as a resource.
I am trying to do the same.
My data — recorded, calibrated, replicable — tells me the dilation is not a trick of perception. It is a real and measurable expansion of conscious experience, written into the neural architecture of a species that has always known it would die and has, perhaps, always had this quiet mechanism for making its peace with that knowledge. If I can get the papers finished, if I can formalize what Gerald intuited and Rachel demonstrated and I am now living, then the next researcher who sits across from a patient in a plastic chair will have a framework. They will know what to measure. They will know what the measurement means.
If experienced time is real time — if the hours you actually live through matter as much as the hours the clock records — then we have no idea how long anyone has actually lived. Every life we have ever measured has been measured from the outside, in clock time, which is to say we have been measuring the container and not the contents.
Leonidas, in the last light at Thermopylae, among the men he had trained and eaten with and known the way brothers know each other, which is to say in a way that makes no promises about duration — Leonidas may have had weeks in that final afternoon. These men had trained for this since childhood. Not for courage, which is cheap, but for precision under duress: the mechanical art of killing without waste. The Slowing handed them what no amount of training alone could — time inside the moment to use everything they knew. The pass became a laboratory. Every Persian advance was a problem set, and they had hours to work each one. This is why the ancient sources cannot account for how long they lasted. The Persians ground forward in Largo. Leonidas and his guard met them in Allegro vivace.
I think about Gerald, who said the clock was wrong.
I think about Rachel, who finished her quartet.
I think about the ants on my kitchen floor, holding the baseline for an experiment they will never know they are part of, working with such precise economy, as if they understood exactly how much time they had.
My hand is beginning to tremor, very slightly, on the left side. I can feel the pen slowing down. I can feel everything else speeding up.
Camillo Gomez’s anthology Noise Floor explores human curiosity, learning, innovation, progress, and knowledge in all of its many forms.
Sometimes the results are for the betterment of the individual and society and sometimes the stories end on a sour, pessimistic, or bittersweet note. But the situations often involve a protagonist discovering a problem, a discrepancy in the usual flow, or just a simple idle question of what if something happens, why it happens, and how it could be changed. In a way the stories are the scientific method told in narrative form.
Full disclosure: Gomez's introduction reveals that the book was partially inspired by and with conversational assistance from an AI program. Yes, there are some serious real concerns about AI’s involvement in the arts. It's a controversial issue and it is disconcerting towards human writers, artists, musicians, and other creators over where it will lead.
These are not unreasonable concerns and I myself share them, especially the fear that one day I may not be able to tell the difference between a human and an AI author. I also share them even though I confess that I have used AI when it comes to writing unpublished fanfiction back stories and additional scenarios.
However, I will say that in this particular situation with this particular anthology and this particular theme, it kind of works. This is an anthology about innovation, invention, scientific curiosity, and fears and anxieties about technology and progress. It makes sense to use it to comment on, criticize, and at times satirize the tools that simultaneously move us forward but also hold us back.
The best stories are:
“Thermopylae Time”
Nathan Carey, a dying chronobiologist, is interested in how time moves differently for those who are at the point of death.
It's an interesting theory and Nathan asks some provocative questions. How can someone with a brain tumor feel like they have had an entire afternoon of thought and observations in only eleven minutes? Does time work differently when faced with one's own mortality? Is it different if the death is sudden (like in an accident or in wartime) or long-term (like after an illness)?
Nathan searches through case studies, historical accounts, and his own memory and observations to come up with his conclusions. The experiences themselves are very revealing.
A composer uses this expanded time to complete her magnum opus. King Leonidas foresaw his own death with his 300 man Spartan Army but still managed to put up a resolute force against Xerxes’ Persian Army.
Despite or because of their physical decline, they transcended their thoughts, emotions, and mindsets into the work that outlived them. Nathan is faced with that situation as well.
What will outlive him? What will his final moments be like? What will his legacy be? How will he face that uncertain time when he thinks in days,the clock on the wall shows only minutes, and his body stops for good? These are questions that haunt him as he reaches the end.
“Noise Floor”
The Narrator studies the behavior, thoughts, and emotions of a test subject to determine and evaluate his progress and potential life trajectory.
This story is dense in scientific terminology and analysis. It can be discombobulating for many readers, especially those who don't have a scientific background. However, what makes this narration work is that it is intentionally technical and mechanical.
The subheads such as “Threat Assessment,” “Approach Vector Selection” give the appearance that we are reading a peer reviewed article from an academic scientific journal. It gives the impression that the Narrator is clinical and almost robotic in studying their subject.
Also we don't learn either the Narrator or the Subject’s names (or even whether the Narrator is human or AI). This shows the detachment between researcher and subject. During most of the studies, the Subject could be a cell of clustered bacteria for all that their observer cares about.
However, there are times when emotions and human frailty are called into question. The subject acts in unpredictable ways. The researcher notices miscalculations in their analysis. They even start to express concern, confusion, and anxiety over his welfare. It seems that the one thing that the researcher could not account for was the human factor.
“In This One”
Erik, an actuary, discusses numbers and mathematical equations with his curious daughter, Sophie. She reminds him of his late mother, a math teacher.
This short story demonstrates that sometimes a child's best teacher can be found within their own family. Sophie asks her father plenty of questions about the thickness of pennies, breaths in a year, steps to the moon, or seconds she has been alive. Erik activates her curiosity by encouraging her to figure these problems out for herself.
Numbers become a shared language between the three generations. In his job, Erik has to itemize how much time one has left. A number which is a literal prediction of life and death is later reinterpreted as a game and communication source between father and daughter.
The presence of numbers also becomes a calming source in Erik’s life. After Sophie was born and had trouble breathing, Erik counted the seconds between the beeps on the heart monitor and her breathing.
This moment let him hold onto something tangible and connected him to Sophie in infancy.
The numerical connection between Erik, Sophie, and Erik’s mother is manifested through imprinting and pattern recognition.
Erik’s mother used her educational experience and mathematical studies to instill that numerical learning style in her son. He used his interest in quantifying risk and social situations into life assessments so Sophie could create an interest in problem solving and using math in everyday applications.
These three generations show how that passage of knowledge can change from academic book learning, to theoretical concepts, to practical applications, to everyday use.
“Proof of Work”
The Narrator tries to weigh their life in numbers while trying to find a way out of their pressing financial situation.
Like Erik and Sophie, The Narrator is obsessed with numbers. But where numbers were previously seen as a means of connection, shared language, and an important legacy passed from parent to child, in this story they have darker connotations of reduced status and systemic dehumanization.
The Narrator often thinks in terms of half-lives. The American Dream has a half-life which has met the sixty-hour mark. The dollar has a half-life as money is deposited, transferred, saved, and spent. The Narrator’s meds are half-used as they take them to cope with pain and anxiety.
The constant references to halves contain a feeling of ambivalence. There isn’t enough to feel completely negative about, but there isn’t enough to be hopeful about either.
The halves minimize the Narrator into someone who can’t aspire for more because he is always waiting for the bottom to drop out. One can’t plan for the future if they can’t see or imagine anything differently.
The Narrator also uses the word “nonce,” often. A nonce is a number used once, has no value, and no identity. The Narrator sees the nonce everywhere but particularly in terms of money and finance. It’s highly significant that this story keeps going back to money and the impact that Bitcoins have on the financial sector.
Finance is one of the factors that determine status: how hard a person works, how they present themselves, how they face cost of living pressures, and how they can plan and determine their future.
In the Narrator’s life, finance is another number that challenges their sense of self and dehumanizes not only them but all of society. They are simply reduced to a number, a nonce.
“All The Time There Was”
Curtis, a musician, and his former band mates are cursed after they play a strange musical composition.
This story recognizes the mathematical process that can be found in music by creating patterns, establishing a tonal rhythm, measuring a beat, and keeping time. In fact Curtis’ contribution as a bassist is to “keep good time and not get in the way.” He knows that even though he isn’t as flashy or innovative as a performer, he is an important member for being the steady rhythm for the others to stand out.
The conflict begins when Eric, the bass clarinetist, plays a section that is jagged, angular, out of place, and filled with deep emotion and unpredictability. The other musicians follow suit and play in a different manner than they are used to. The composition puts them into darker head spaces to keep up.
Curtis becomes a more creative player. He is able to hold down a root note that makes him stand out instead of fade into the background. He also experiences slower time feeling 45 minutes to an hour have gone by while the composition lasts only twelve minutes. This is similar to Nathan’s studies in “Thermopylae Time” with some slight differences.
While Nathan looked into the time expansion at the point of death, Curtis looked into it during a time of creation and birth. Instead of an awareness of the mind and body coming to a close, the band is awakened to a deeper energy and awareness.
A change occurs within the musicians in the decades afterwards. It veers the story into horror as each member suffers a traumatic fate. They engaged in musical careers before dying. It doesn’t say whether they were affected by the music though Curtis believes it to be so.
It’s worth noting that while a couple died at young ages, some of them lived to be older and had medical issues beforehand. In some cases correlation may not necessarily equal causation, but there could be something else at play.
Perhaps the price of reaching such creative heights where the music or art envelops you so much is that you will forever live outside of real time. Once you have seen boundless creative energy sources, it is impossible to return to the real world and known society. The band’s souls are captured within that composition.
It also explains why so many musicians and artists lived troubled lives and died young. They access an inner world that cannot exist through natural means. It has to be experienced fully through exploration and inspiration. The natural world seems slow and mundane to a creative brain that can no longer access or process it.
“The Marginalia of Brother Lukas”
In the Middle Ages, Brother Lukas, is ordered to remove some volumes from his collection. He weighs which books can be sacrificed.
This story is the best in the anthology even if it contains the loosest connection to the overall main theme. Unlike the others which put a scientific or mathematical concept at the forefront, this book celebrates the history of the act of passing knowledge itself.
Like other characters in this anthology,
Brother Lukas decides to go through this tough book weeding scientifically and analytically. He researches each volume in terms of frequent use, number of copies, how long monks spent to work on it, and other factors to determine the book’s value and necessity to the collection.
While he loves each volume, he knows that some have to leave the safety and comfort of the library and be cast aside. Each must be evaluated for their contribution to the library as a whole, the monks reading it, and eventually the community in which that information will be shared.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to separate the whole from the individual parts. Like many librarians, Brother Lukas loves his library as a complete collection. He gives it his own personal style and system. He gives the shelves names like Silence, Hunger, Breath, and Contrition offering some hints about the book’s contents and their usage.
He knows which books are favorites among the monks and which have never been opened or read. If someone requires a specific source of information, he knows which shelf that it sits on, what the book’s main topics and subjects are, and what page and line number the information is on.
Brother Lukas treats each volume like a beloved child to be cared for, protected, leant out into the world, and returned safe and sound where it belongs. That’s why this task is so difficult for him. He appreciates the library as a whole and treats breaking it up like breaking up a family. He understands not only the weight of the volume that contains the information but the work that went into creating them.
He also understands the labor that it took to create them. This is back when monks transcribed such works by hand and created beautiful illuminated pages. There were true works of art and some spent years even decades working on them. There also were very few copies so if Brother Lukas selects one to be removed, it doesn’t get rid of just the physical copy of the book but the information that it provides. Whatever those pages tell will be gone forever and never remembered because there wasn’t enough shelf space for them.
While other stories in this anthology touch on the process and results of what can be learned, this story honors the vessels in which that knowledge is contained. It demonstrates how important it is to hold onto it, when to decide to bring that knowledge out into the open, and what can be lost when that knowledge is forever silenced.