<n>Standard disclaimer<fn></n> This story takes place after <cite>Abaddon's Gate</cite>. It tells the story of Paulo Cortázar, who started life as a somewhat gifted, but lazy student. He gets hooked on amphetamines during his latter years at university and manages to get his degree. He has some money set aside, but he also now has a pretty big monkey on his back. He seems to be chronically incapable of landing a job, so he sets up his apartment for a <i>cleansing</i>---he's going to kick the drug habit that he, in a clearer moment, finally realizes has spiraled completely out of control. It takes over a week of suffering alone in his apartment, but he comes out clean. He has even less money now and still doesn't have a job. He has a fraught relationship with his mother that he abuses and uses for his own benefit. He is at least there when she dies. <bq caption="Page 14">In the end, she was on little more than sedatives and antivirulence drugs. I gave them to her because it was what I had to give her. The night she died, I sat at her feet, my head resting on the red wool blanket that covered her wasted lap. Heartbreak and relief were my soul’s twin bodyguards. She moved beyond pain or distress, and I told myself the worst was over.</bq> A mysterious corporation takes an interest in him, liking his seeming lack of scruples. This doesn't bother him at all. He takes the job and begins work at Thoth Station, working for ProtoGen, the Jules-Pierre Mao corporation that unleashed the protomolecule on Eros. That experiment was organized by Cortázar and his team of scientists. The scientists there have had all human empathy worn out of them; they are monsters, seeing only experimental opportunity where most people see fellow human beings. <bq caption="Page 29">The changes that we went through to become what we became didn’t blind us to humanity. Our emotional lives didn’t stop. All of us in research suffered the same loves and hopes and jealousies that administration and maintenance and security did. If someone felt flattered or excluded or tired, we saw it just as anyone else might. The difference, and I think it was the only difference, came from not caring anymore.</bq> They are in love with the potential of the protomolecule and are more than arrogant enough to believe that they will be able to learn how it works and to control it. <bq caption="Page 14">Human studies required human subjects, and ethical guidelines made rigorous studies next to impossible. One didn’t give healthy babies a series of monthly spinal taps just because it would have been a good experimental design. I understood that, but to come to science expecting the great source of intellectual light and step so quickly into darkness was sobering.</bq> We know what happens to Eros---it crashes into Venus and builds the Gate---and we know what happens to Thoth Station---Fred Johnson, James Holden, and Miller breach it, executing their head of operations and arresting the rest of the staff. This is the story of what happens to the staff. They are confined to a space station by the precursor to the Free Navy. They are all kept in a single, large, open room with little cover and little furniture, looked down upon by Belter guards. The do everything in the open and in public. The scientists without empathy---the most intelligent and ruthless ones---thrive the best. They openly scheme and openly copulate. Cortázar has a boyfriend whom he ends up betraying. The renegade Martian contingent headed up by Duarte coerces the Belters into helping them find the most useful prisoner. They play mind games to get them to divulge information about the protomolecule. They slowly feed them information about what's happened with the Ring. One of the prisoners gets a hand terminal with the information, but he doesn't have what it takes to make anything of it. Cortázar steals the terminal from him and makes a discovery. Instead of reporting it directly, he convinces the man from whom he stole the handheld of a completely fantastical and deeply wrong interpretation of the data. When the man reports the "answer" in an attempt to free himself, the Martians see through the vapidity of the solution and execute him. Cortázar springs his trap to prove his worthiness and it works. He has properly divined the purpose of the Ring and the meaning of the data. The Martians take him away to eventually take him to the planet that would become Laconia, where Cortázar would develop protomolecule technologies, breeding "catalysts" and working to grant Duarte immortality. <hr> <ft>Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you.</ft> <h>Citations</h> <bq caption="Page 10">I believe now she used to denigrate herself in front of me in order to hear praise from someone, even if it was only a beloved child. I don’t resent the manipulation. If intellect and focus were indeed the legacies of my invisible father, emotional manipulation was my mother’s true gift, and it was as valuable. As important.</bq> <bq caption="Page 10">I was a street rat living on basic, but the discovery of life was so rich and dramatic and profound that I wasn’t concerned with my status in the larger culture. My social microenvironment seemed to stretch to the horizon, and the conflicts within it—whether Tomás or Carla would be goalie, whether Sabina could tweak off-the-shelf bacterial cultures to produce her own party drugs, whether Didi was homosexual and how to find out without courting humiliation and rejection—were profound dramas that would resonate through the ages.</bq> <bq caption="Page 14">There were explanations, of course, for this dearth of information: Human studies required human subjects, and ethical guidelines made rigorous studies next to impossible. One didn’t give healthy babies a series of monthly spinal taps just because it would have been a good experimental design. I understood that, but to come to science expecting the great source of intellectual light and step so quickly into darkness was sobering. I began to keep a book of ignorance: questions that existing information could not answer and my amateurish, half-educated thoughts about how answers might be found.</bq> <bq caption="Page 14">In the end, she was on little more than sedatives and antivirulence drugs. I gave them to her because it was what I had to give her. The night she died, I sat at her feet, my head resting on the red wool blanket that covered her wasted lap. Heartbreak and relief were my soul’s twin bodyguards. She moved beyond pain or distress, and I told myself the worst was over.</bq> <bq caption="Page 16">Humanity is social, and the self-image of humans is built from the versions of ourselves we see and hear reflected in others; that this is not true of the research group—of Coombs or Brown or Quintana or me—was, after all, precisely the point.</bq> <bq caption="Page 23">A thought experiment from my first course in the program: Take a bar of metal and put a single notch in it. The two lengths thus defined have a relationship that can be expressed as the ratio between them. In theory, therefore, any rational number can be expressed with a single mark on a bar of metal. Using a simple alphabetic code, a mark that calculated to a ratio of .1215225 could be read as 12-15-22-5, or “l-o-v-e.” The complete plays of Shakespeare could be written in a single mark, if it were possible to measure accurately enough.</bq> <bq caption="Page 29">The changes that we went through to become what we became didn’t blind us to humanity. Our emotional lives didn’t stop. All of us in research suffered the same loves and hopes and jealousies that administration and maintenance and security did. If someone felt flattered or excluded or tired, we saw it just as anyone else might. The difference, and I think it was the only difference, came from not caring anymore.</bq> <bq caption="Page 38">“The idea that animal suffering is less important that human suffering is a religious one. It assumes a special creation, and that we—you and I—are different in kind than other animals. We are morally separate from rats or horses or chimps, not based on any particular physical difference between us, but just because we claim that we’re sacred by our nature and have dominion over them. It’s a story we tell that lets us do what we do. Consider the question without that filter, and it looks very different.</bq> <bq caption="Page 39">“We are the animal we’re trying to build a protocol for. It’s where we’d get the best data. And better data means less suffering in the long run. More human suffering, maybe, but less suffering overall. And we wouldn’t have to labor under the hypocrisy of understanding evolution and also pretending there’s some kind of firewall between us and other mammals. That sounds restful, don’t you think?”</bq> <bq caption="Page 41">A burden I hadn’t known I was carrying vanished, and my mind became sharper, able to reach into places that shame or guilt or neurosis would have kept me from before. I didn’t want to be what I had previously been any more than a depressive would long for despair.</bq> <bq caption="Page 58">“One of the features of the illness is that she wasn’t able to be aware of the deficits. It’s part of the diagnosis. Awareness is a function of the brain just like vision or motor control or language. It isn’t exempt from being broken.”</bq>