Chapter 4 of Camera Obscura, written by Matt Boothman after Samantha Leigh
Day 92
Anyone got a tried and tested script for fobbing off Finance? They’re hounding me (me specifically this time, not the study) for a ‘research purpose’ for some stuff I bought for the PI. He didn’t tell me what it was for and now he’s off on fieldwork, incommunicado. I don’t want to escalate it to the PI if I can help it, not after his last experience with Finance. Is ‘miscellaneous’ a valid research purpose for a dozen porcelain clown dolls as far as Finance are concerned? Or something like ‘contingency’?
tl;dr anyone got an inverse astrolabe I can borrow?
Long version:
I’m beginning to think the IRB’s got it out for Curzon Labs, specifically. Beyond even the rigid pedantic attitude every lab has to deal with.
Someone peer review my thinking here and tell me if I’m just feeling paranoid and persecuted while my PI’s away. (I’ll admit I am feeling the pressure of keeping the ship afloat.)
So I’ve been trying to set up this meeting between us, the Wistful Spires Institute, and this resesarch recruitment company we’re trying out.
And you can already probably guess how that’s going. My PI’s not back til Yyvernoth rises from their great slumber, the recruiters only have a window for a couple of days after the blood moon, and the prof at WSI is only ever free in the hour of doubt. But: I actually did it. I dusted off the ontographic slide rule and that Incan calendar conversion tool someone coded, and I triangulated a date and time everyone could theoretically make.
And then: sabotage.
The Board got hold of the booking (I think they must be automatically copied on room booking requests so they can keep tabs on resource use? I’m kicking myself for booking the telepresence suite, but it was free and I know my PI likes to look fancy on calls with other institutes) and decided this meeting “merits IRB oversight”, and that one of their auditing bodies needs to sit in. And of course none of them are available at the time I found!! They’re only orientated for oversight when highest tide meets lowest ebb, apparently.
This call really needs to happen. The study’s never going to pass peer review without the measures those parties are going to agree. The IRB have to know that. And it really seems like they’ve been scrutinising this study unfairly from the start (go back through my previous posts to see what I mean). I know, I know, personal bias, but there’s something targeted going on here, right? Anyone back me up?
And/or, can anyone loan Curzon Labs an inverse astrolabe? Because I am not letting them get the better of us. If they want to shut us down, they’d better find a legitimate infraction to hold against us. Those are the rules. If we break the rules they put in place to ensure fairness and validity, then the study deserves to get buried. But this sneaky back-channel stuff is how legit and valuable work gets destroyed, and I am not going to let it fly.
Cancel the astrolabe! My scheduling snarl is all straightened out. I stayed the course, got on with the actual work we’re all here to do, the actual research, and lo have I been rewarded!
Only joking, I haven’t started believing in providence. This was a fortunate coincidence. Or evidence that if you’re alert and on the lookout for a solution to your problem, you’re more likely to spot one when it crosses your path.
Also, I’ve now got a new problem, which I presumably wouldn’t if I was being divinely rewarded.
It – the solution and the new problem – came from this new study participant, $IVYREEF. She left a message on the lab answerphone to register interest. Presumably some of our flyers are still circulating. Something about the message she left was a real earworm. The machine sparked me when I played it back, which might have something to do with it – isn’t there some evidence that we remember things better when they’re associated with sensations like pain? Or it was my subconscious telling me to look outside the obvious places for the answer to my problem. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t get the words out of my head until I called her back and lined up a visit.
The visit was sort of unremarkable. I got a static zap when we shook hands, and that’s about when the words from the answerphone finally stopped going round and round my head. I got my samples and my recordings just fine.
But an hour after the visit was over, when I got around to processing the consent form … I realised the date she’d put down actually satisfies all parties for this call, the IRB included. It was such a simple answer, I could confirm it just with the finger-toe count method, hence why I don’t need the inverse astrolabe any more. It’s not even that far in the future.
But that’s the problem part. The date this person put on her consent form is not today’s date. It’s in the future. I have no idea how to account for that in the regulatory binder in a way that isn’t going to ring a million alarms at the IRB.
So, no inverse astrolabe needed, but … any advice for rectifying a record-keeping snafu of epic proportions?
Updating the takeaway from my last post from “be alert for solutions” to some version of “trust in your own ability”, in light of new evidence that $IVYREEF may have been me all along.
Evidence in favour:
The zaps I experienced from her answerphone message and handshake could be explained as antimatter annihilations
The hair and fingernail samples I collected are repelled from me. I’m physically incapable of touching any of them, even with gloves or in the fume cupboard. The hair scattered everywhere when I tried to take it out of storage for analysis. I jumped and broke a flask, which might have been a lizard-brain reaction to the sight of hairs squiggling everywhere like they were alive, or might have been a self-preservation instinct to avoid further antimatter annihilations
The message on the answerphone embedding into my mind could have been an example of homeostatic chrono course-correction, preserving timeline integrity by ensuring a continuity-essential interaction took place
She was wearing about 20 watches all on the same arm: smartwatches nearest the hand, then quartz crystal battery ones, then clockwork, and a beautiful fob watch in a sleeve pocket, and I know I’d want that kind of measurement redundancy too if I was going to risk crossing my own timeline
Otherwise I have very little memory of her appearance, or any memory of even registering anything about her appearance at the time. If pushed I would say she just looked sort of normal. Like a person? Like you expect a person to look. Familiar. Which I think is feasibly how a time-displaced or alternative-reality version of yourself might register
Except I just remembered she had a scar on her hand that is the twin of the cut I got from that flask I broke flinching from her runaway hair! (Oops, seems like I should have got that stitched properly instead of making do with the lab first aid kit)
Instead of a recognised farewell, as she left she said “Enticement slash lure”, which (following some searching of the university handbook) turns out to be a valid research purpose for those dozen clown dolls
I wish I could draw any conclusions about the success or otherwise of the study from $IVYREEF’s visitation, but I don’t remember noticing anything to suggest whether this older version of me was full-time at Curzon Labs, or on another study, or doing something completely different.
But in any case. It wasn’t random coincidence that sorted out my scheduling and Finance issues. It was me. When everything else is falling apart around me, it’s nice to know I can always rely on myself.
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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