Chapter 3 of Camera Obscura, written by Matt Boothman after Samantha Leigh
Day 64
Everyone be on the lookout for invitations to something called The Gathering that meets in St Enid’s village hall on Thursdays. It sounds too good to be true and it is. My PI said a hot tip had come in about this event, that something about the demos it attracts would make it a goldmine of willing and suitable participants. I don’t know if this tipster is a troll with an agenda or the whole event is some kind of protest against the university, but willing and suitable the attendees most certainly were not. Sometimes you can’t win even by following all the protocols. I got to the hall well before the start time to set up, but they were all even earlier, and definitely wanted me to know I was interrupting. Politely asked if I could speak with the organiser but The whole Gathering just stared at me in silence. Kept staring while I set up my table as quietly as I could manage. I did some admin on the field laptop to signal that they could ignore me for the moment, but whatever The Gathering is when it’s not being observed, that evening the only thing on the agenda was synchronised staring at the interloper. At a certain point all I could do was give the interested-party spiel to the whole room, just in case that’s what they were waiting for. Strained my voice because none of them would come any closer.
The thing that made it feel more like malice than misunderstanding was, they did take all the study literature I’d printed. When I eventually gave up and started packing, I turned my back for a moment to deal with the laptop bag, and when I turned back every single person there had a sheaf of my leaflets crumpled in one hand. Not one of them’s scanned the QR code or emailed the lab. I think someone wanted to make the lab feel uncomfortable and burn through our resources. Don’t let them catch any more of us out.
Is anyone here an IT wizard? I need urgent help to re-bind the Curzon Lab filer-dæmon. Please. I will buy you so many croissants.
It’s locked me out of some valuable participant observation data, hence the urgency. Apologies in advance for letting it get to this point. I was the allegorical boiling frog.
Some history, in case it helps troubleshoot:
I think this started with me rolling back the server. Which I understand I shouldn’t have been doing, not being an IT wizard (unlike the person I really hope is reading this)! But Finance finally broke my poor PI. They’ve been chasing him for this one £7.49 receipt since before I even started at the lab. It’s something related to a previous study that got shut down. That’s all my PI’s been able to work out, just based on the date Finance keep howling in the halls.
All the research assistants who were around then have graduated or moved universities, and all files related to that study were wiped in accordance with the IRB’s data retention policy. The PI’s said so to Finance a hundred times but they’re relentless once they scent irregularity. So he decided it was going to be my job as a presumably IT-savvy young person to find them something to chew on other than his hide.
So I found out the server model and the software version it’s running and searched for options, and found this how-to online, which walked me through commanding the server’s filer-dæmon to restore the filesystem to an earlier state. Which it’s not meant to be able to do as standard, so you have to unbind it first. That must be against I don’t know how many university data policies, but between Finance and my PI I didn’t have much choice, and the how-to reassured me it would all be reversible, so I went ahead.
And good news first: I did at least find the receipt Finance wanted, so it does seem like the version of the filesystem the dæmon restored was genuine, or genuine enough to appease Finance.
But either some element of corruption crept in, or the filer-dæmon was messing with me right from that first moment, because tracking that receipt down was a real ordeal. I’d filter by date, and get a promising hit or two, but then follow the filepaths and end up with something completely different, but always with a folder named something promising like or “FAO finance” or “cost tracking” or “DO NOT DELETE” that sent me off down another branch of the filesystem. I lost a day just double-clicking, feeling like any moment I’d get a pop-up telling me I’d been eaten by a Grue. I nearly gave up looking when I started finding obviously non-lab related stuff the team back then had squirrelled away, maybe 50 folders deep. If the stuff they were trying to hide was easier to hunt down than actual study expenses, I thought maybe it was hopeless.
But I stayed on task. If you’ve ever accidentally pulled an all-nighter by repeatedly telling yourself you’ll just do one more run at a game, you know the mindset I ended up in. I had to start bookmarking folders and telling myself I’d investigate them later so as not to detour down any rabbit holes. (This was just a lie I was telling myself, so nobody go snitching on me to the IRB, please.) And it paid off: I did get what I was looking for in the end.
So then I followed the rest of the how-to and (so I thought) undid the server rollback and re-bound the filer-dæmon. But over the past month I’ve been seeing hints that the operation might not have completed properly:
Sometimes when I create a new folder, it appears already stacked full of subfolders and sub-subfolders.
Important files keep switching to hidden without me touching the setting.
Things I delete don’t always stay deleted.
The system arbitrarily rejects filenames that follow the convention I’ve established, while accepting filenames containing esoteric, usually illegal characters.
As a result, the current filesystem, which I organised in my first week at the lab, is in the process of morphing into something closer to the jumble I saw in the restored impression from six months back.
What’s made this an urgent priority is that I’ve lost access to a recording of a unique subject the PI really needs to have analysed before the next departmental budget review (the one in TWO DAYS).
I’m almost certain the filer-dæmon is responsible because whenever I try to access the footage, it’s replaced with one of the folders I bookmarked “to investigate later” on my deep dive through the restored filesystem impression. The following folders have appeared in place of the footage often enough to constitute a pattern:
my_tardigrade_poetry
◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️ (my current roommate’s name, redacted for her privacy)
1000-eyed_abyss_transcript_RECOVERED
IRBz{NUTS
¥_U_®_✪
Hopefully that’s enough detail for someone who actually knows what they’re doing to diagnose and fix this issue. Please email me if you can help, or if you need more details.
EDITED TO ADD: issue resolved, thank you so much to the anonymous angel who resolved this whole debacle remotely, no less! You saved my study and by extension my job (at least until the next budget review). You have so many croissants coming your way if I ever find out who you are.
Because some of you asked in the comments: the subject in the footage, the one we needed to convince the budget committee our study was worth keeping open, was $GJALLARAC. If you’ve got the right level access you’ll be able to see what made that footage our trump card.
I was actually in two minds about letting $GJALLARAC enroll. CL-HDZ-26 is technically on the books as a human subject study. But (equally technically) the departmental guidance doesn’t define “human”. If the university will insist on letting decades-old assumptions remain enshrined as procedure, its researchers should at least be allowed to benefit from them sometimes. And sometimes a study needs a superstar subject – not in a scientific sense, of course, just to keep it trundling through the necessary institutional hoops – and if we’re very lucky, sometimes that subject is technically human in the department’s eyes, but to all other eyes, presents as a pangolin in a top hat who can recite from memory the seven secret names of the gatekeeper.
Camera Obscura is an actual play of Outliers, a single-player journalling game by Samantha Leigh, based on The Wretched by Chris Bissette, and published by the Far Horizons Co-Op.
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