Chapter 5 of Camera Obscura, written by Matt Boothman after Samantha Leigh
Day 1⦓5
Question for the day: What’s the furthest you’ve ever gone to protect the integrity of a study?
Follow-up question: Did it work or did everything end up contaminated anyway?
Context: study participant $IVYREEF paid another visit to Curzon Labs today.
Just like last time, at first I only registered her as a normal, nondescript-looking person. But when I watched her sign the consent form, and 20 watches and that scar on her hand (my hand) shook the memory loose. That and she signed my name on the form (and the ink didn’t even squirm a little bit).
She asked if we could talk. I said fine, but not now. Whatever she wanted to say, it sounded personal. In the lab, with a consent form signed, in the context of a participant observation, I had to treat her like every other participant, right? If I don’t have personal conversations with the other participants, I couldn’t with her, not then, or I wouldn’t be keeping the conditions consistent.
She said okay, then let’s get this over with. She extruded a whole five extra double-jointed miniature arms from her chest just to initial all the consent form pages faster. They all fell off straight after. What a huge energy expenditure for a miniscule efficiency gain. Is there really a timeline where that’s my attitude? Treating the science as the thing to get out the way? At least now I know I’m on a different track, but it’s still depressing to think about.
And then throughout the observation, she still kept taking every little chance to try and start irrelevant conversations. Even derailing the warm-up questions like “How did you hear about the study?” (Her response: the dust of the fallen stranger whispered to her in a dream. She moved her eyebrows and pointed with her chin in a way that made it obvious by “fallen stranger” she meant me. She should know me! She should know she can’t distract me from study protocol just by making me confront my own mortality! This is Curzon Labs, lady! I ticked ‘friend or family’ and moved right along.)
But the cube test was the final straw. Instead of drawing a cube like I instructed (which, if she’d just done that, she could have been out of there and said whatever she wanted to me!), she drew the Æ-dimensional geometry of my own (our own) mental armature. Obviously the resonance feedback loop meant I was stuck then, beholding this image of my mental armature with my mental armature, perfectly meshing and locked into place. A personal violation, an abuse of intimate knowledge and a plain old dirty trick. And while I was there twitching like a malfunctioning clockwork, a captive audience, she started saying all this stuff about how they’re calcifying my mind, they’re snapping it rigid, they’re making of me a thing of hard lines and right angles, they are planing my edges, fitting me to the function they have me suited for. And it was undeniable because that was the shape she’d drawn and that shape, overlaid on my psyche like an acetate transparency over a schematic, matched perfectly.
She turned the paper over and let me go. She was backing up, looking at me with this combination of wariness and pity. All I could think was, she’s in the log, she’s in the system, so I have to submit what she drew. That’s protocol. And it’ll sit there in the data like a landmine. An outlier. Ammunition for the IRB. Evidence of tampering by a research assistant. By me.
Looking at it objectively after the fact, I think I did what I did to try and prove that she and I could not be the same, and therefore that her transgression was not mine.
I vaulted the table and tackled $IVYREEF. She started saying something so I grabbed one of her discarded arms off the floor and fed it to her until she choked.
>STAY AWAY from Curzon Labs
>we are being aggressively audited
>IRB must know about $IVYREEF somehow, maybe even plucked her from the timestream to sabotage the study
>was dialling into video call to discuss today’s events with the PI when screen went concave abyssal and started leaking auditing bodies
>they’re everywhere all over the computers files binders evidence observations
>hiding in server cupboard – convinced filer-dæmon to readdress the space and tag me as irrelevant material
>AVOID CURZON
>FOLLOW PROTOCOL
>SAVE YOURSELVES
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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