Chapter 5 of Camera Obscura, written by Matt Boothman after Samantha Leigh
Day 183
IRB siege of Curzon Labs continues. Still alive. Somehow, study continues. Our lab has been crawling with auditing bodies for a month, but either they haven’t found anything yet, or they’re amassing everything they find for the coup de grâce.
Constant scrutiny makes everything harder, but you find workarounds. If I make all my movements big and demonstrative, the auditing bodies seem content to observe from ceiling corners instead of dribbling down onto me to monitor my actions by contact. I’ve learned a lot of keyboard shortcuts so I can do routine admin even when there’s an auditing body splatted half in, half out of the laptop screen. That still falls down when they gloop down and gum up the keyboard, but it’s something. I’m keeping us functional. Ticking over.
I haven’t been able to go out and table since this started, but a few of our old flyers must still be circulating, because potential participants are still managing to get in touch. Top tip to siege-proof your own studies: don’t limit contact options to phone and email. Auditing bodies love getting into electronics, and it just doesn’t look very professional when your emails reach potential participants stained with rainbow-black snail trails. Finance apparently whined and whined about Curzon Labs’ comms expenditure back at the commissioning stage, but it’s paying off now that interested parties can express their interest into a well or a nightclub toilet and their details appear tattooed on my arms. And bonus, it seems to confuse the auditing bodies when I dance our acknowledgement in a beam of moonlight; after each response, they usually leave me alone long enough to grab a snack.
She had tattooed arms. I didn’t get a good enough look at them to know if my new ones are the same. If I’ve diverged enough from her yet.
She’s taken all the satisfaction out of participant observations. Today I handed a new participant ($PTOLOG, for those keeping score) the consent form to fill in and just sat there waiting for arms to burst from his chest with pens in their hands like they did from hers.
The image of those arms in my mind’s eye eclipsed the empirical reality of what I was seeing before me, so I ended up missing the exact mechanism $PTOLOG used to fill in the form – it might have been direct atomic manipulation, or something more temporally based? I was aware enough to register that they didn’t move or blink while the form accepted their responses, but I was too distracted to catch the nuance.
She’s gone and still she continues to reduce my efficacy as a researcher. It’s irrational.
And I can’t stop thinking about what she said. $PTOLOG missed the age field (I must not have explained clearly enough which fields were mandatory) and I couldn’t get to the actual research portion of the observation until we’d worked out what to put there. Couldn’t.
I’m pretty sure a being old as the spiral in a snail-shell, old as the scent of sweat, old as algebra, is old enough to be treated as an adult for the purposes of the study, but pretty sure was not good enough. I had to pin it down more precisely. Had to bend $PTOLOG’s own conception of their age into the calendar I know the university and our software recognises. Is this what she meant by hard lines and right angles? When she said they were machining my mind?
You can’t have good science without good protocol. But what if all the protocol means you never get to the science?
I missed a chance to understand $PTOLOG because I was thinking about her instead of focusing on protocol. And I missed the chance to observe $PTOLOG for the study because we couldn’t agree on an age for the form. But of course I can’t submit the form without a machine-readable age while we’re beset by auditing bodies!
I’m supposed to be here to do science and there isn’t any getting done.
I’m tired. My arms prick with new tattoos all night and any time I do manage to doze I wake up choking with an auditing body stretched across my face. I want to learn. I want to understand. But I’m tired. I want this to be over.
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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