Authority

The Southern Reach called the last expedition the twelfth, but Control had counted the rings, and it was actually the thirty-eighth iteration, including six “eleventh” expeditions.

He had not expected any of it to be beautiful, but it was beautiful

“A name conveys a whole series of related associations,” Hsyu had said, launching some more primordial section of her PowerPoint, created during a different era and perhaps initially pitched to an audience of the frozen megafauna Control remembered so vividly from the natural history museum. “A set of related ideas, facts, etc. And these associations exist not just in the mind of the one named—form their identity—but also in the minds of the other expedition members and thus accessible to whatever else might access them in Area X. Even if by a process unknown to us and purely speculative in nature. Whereas ‘biologist’—that’s a function, a subset of a full identity.” Not if you did it right, like Ghost Bird, and you were totally and wholly your job to begin with. “If you can be your function, then the theory is that these associations narrow or close down, and that closes down the pathways into personality. Perhaps.”