The Instrument
The facility in the mountain. The signal that should not exist.
Deep in a mountain research facility, a signal arrives that has no source. The second book in The Substrate Series.
For readers of Ted Chiang, Richard Powers, and Andy Weir.
Description
Six months after the events of Wherever It Leads, Elena Vasquez is at the Kamioka facility in Japan — the deepest particle physics laboratory in the world, two kilometres beneath a mountain — when the signal arrives.
It is not a radio signal. It is not electromagnetic. It has no source that any instrument can locate. It arrives in the quantum field data, in the same pattern as the anomaly Elena found in her lab, but stronger now, more structured, more clearly a signal and less clearly a noise.
The Instrument is the second book in The Substrate Series. It is the book in which the hypothesis becomes a discovery, and the discovery becomes a question that cannot be unasked: if the substrate of reality is attending, what is it attending to?
For readers of Ted Chiang, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
For Readers Of
"For readers of Ted Chiang, Richard Powers, and Andy Weir."
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An Extract
The mountain was two kilometres above her and Elena could feel its weight.
Not literally — she knew that. The facility was engineered to hold the mountain at bay, the rock bolted and grouted and held in a permanent negotiation with gravity. She was safe. The instruments were safe. The data was safe.
But she could feel the weight anyway. The specific quality of underground silence that was not silence but the absence of sky.
She had been at Kamioka for three weeks. The signal had arrived on the second day.
She pulled up the data on her workstation and looked at it for what felt like the hundredth time. It was still there. It was always still there. It did not decay, did not drift, did not behave like noise or interference or any of the seventeen alternative explanations she had worked through in the first forty-eight hours.
It behaved like a signal.
It behaved, specifically, like a signal that knew it was being received.
