Not sure where this is going yet, but I like it. Has hints of Jeff Vandermeer's "Station 11", probably because of the weird semi-future bonobo reservation.
It seems to reference a lot about how knowing everything will lead to understand everything. But one of the main characters was also frozen by that realisation in her youth.
Currently three story lines; about the Nest that tracks patterns, about scientists invited to understand the weird death of two bonobos (without the fourth expedition member, the doctor though) and a nameless thid-person guy who had an accident and who is visited by a doctor while struggling to get his memories back.
They put it in 3D printers, pacemakers and reflective lenses in glasses. They used tantalum to build platforms for virtual experiences where primary purpose was distraction from, among other things, the conditions needed to create the devices and the social, ecological and climatic consequences of the mines. The increasingly disembodied nature of programs run on this hardware - VR holograms, whispered notifications of blood-pressure targets, automatic food replacements arriving silently at the door - was deliberate and ingenious, implying the technology was literally baseless, unlimited and independent, divorced from anachronistic categories such as fuel, labour, emissions, natural resources. It was as if product design exploited latent religiosity, a nostalgia for the belief that people too existed free from bodies.
... but our own composition affected sound too, the amount of moisture currently present in our bodies, influenced by our diet and our sleep, and then by our anxiety, our restlessness, the nature of the dreams we had been having, then the heaviness of our footfalls, the angle and height we raised ourselves to, the position we turned our heads towards, our optimism, the degree to which the entire history of our lives had led us to be confident that good things would happen - this defined, presently, the position of our bodies and this too conducted and issued sound. In order to learn anything about where we were and what was around us we had to think like this, in an increasingly fine-grained manner. Every single thing, regardless of size, was significant. Everything mattered and in those first several days, tracking and, the more I learned, coming incrementally closer to my sub-group, I felt a sense of urgency, purpose and vitality such as I had never previously experienced anywhere.
[Jane] wasn't just transcribing the bonobos' calling, she was attempting to pull out the peripheral and secondary sound – bird call, the insects, the moving trees – the counterpoint, she called it, which could be instructive itself. The more she listened and brought out different aspects of the recording, the clearer picture she got. She kept describing what was happening – both what was in the sound and the way that she approached it – in visual rather than aural terms. She nodded, said something about relative constancy, stability, variation and differential pattern. I was staring at these sheets, pages and pages scored minutely, aggressively, and I must have been exhausted because I felt I saw something moving in the pages, an object, underneath the graphs and illustrations, an identity, a face, I thought, behind the scrawls and sounds.
