Sea of Tranquility: A novel

What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.”

Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step.

“You’ve traveled through time,” I said, and my awe at my sister was boundless in that moment. “Where did you go?” “I can’t talk about it.” Her expression was grim. “Can you at least tell me why you don’t want to do it anymore? I’d think it’d be…” “You’d think it’d be interesting,” she said. “It is. At first it’s fascinating. It’s a portal to a diff

Do you know what we do here?” “Not really,” I said. “We safeguard the integrity of our time line,” he said. “We investigate anomalies.” “Have there been others?” “Usually it turns out to be nothing,” Ephrem said. “My first case at the Institute involved a doppelgänger. According to our best facial-recognition software, the same woman appeared in ph

“So we don’t own the building,” the director said, “but we hold a ten-thousand-year lease on the space.” “You’re right. That’s magnificent.” “Nineteenth-century hubris. Imagine thinking civilization would still exist in ten thousand years. But there’s more.” She leaned forward, paused for effect. “The lease is renewable.”

“There are several things we’re looking for.” He was quiet for a moment. “The aspect of our work that relates to the anomaly,” he said, “is a continuing investigation into whether we’re living in a simulation.” “Do you think we are?” “There’s a faction,” he said carefully, “myself among them, that believes time travel works better than it should.”

He just desires no further movement, for the time being. If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness.

“Which operating system do you use on your device?” “Zephyr,” I said. “Same. You remember that weird Zephyr bug a couple years ago, this only lasted a day or two, but sometimes you’d open a text file on your device and you’d hear whatever music you’d been listening to last?” “Sure. That was annoying.” I only vaguely remembered it. “It was file corr

We were married within a year, Talia and I, and when Clara and Mariam died, they left the farm to us. This, I found myself thinking in the years that followed, on nights when my wife and I played the violin together, when we cooked together, when we walked in our fields watching the movements of the farm robots, when we sat on the porch watching th