Chapter 11

# Chapter 11

The transparency lasted nine days before it produced its first anomaly.

They kept logs, as Okafor had ordered. Seven logs, entered daily into the shared system, each one a clinical accounting of subjective experience rendered in the careful language of people who had been trained to distrust subjectivity. Vasquez's entries were the most structured—timestamped observations of her own emotional responses, catalogued with the rigor of a physician who had decided that if she could not prevent the changes, she could at least taxonomize them. Chen's were the most terse: three or four lines, notation fragments, a daily comparison of his symbolic vocabulary against the previous day's baseline. Mehta wrote in paragraphs that read like field notes from a country no one had visited. Asante recorded frequencies.