We Watch From Telescopic Desks Places That Have Not Yet Been Destroyed: A novel
How does our way of thinking of ourselves in the world go from one extreme to the other?
Life a series of isolated incidents. / Everything happens for a reason.
Among all this random information what I do is arbitrary. / In a romantic progression, I have meaning and purpose.
Our story from one state of mind to another:
A Silicon Valley hipster swears he won't die of disease or disaster.
He fills in the garbage gyre in the Pacific Ocean; to make a land called Arden.
Refugees are welcome. They bring data of survival that buffers Arden's smart, programmed environment. The Founder also asks them to share their personal memories, everywhere, an effort to perpetuate culture. They continue lives where they left off in a representational global microcosm.
Ner is the only non-refugee in Arden. He's an overwhelmed young man, constantly exposed to other people's pasts with no proper past of his own. Too aware, he's suffering from debilitating ambivalence.
The Founder has mysteriously disappeared. Ner's recruited to fill in.
He joins the surveyors, who are engrossed watching places outside Arden through telescopic desks. Ner discovers hints about what happened to the Founder. What to do?
A futuristic Hamlet.
From afar, two women conspire with filters. Is this Ner's last hope, or the greatest threat to him and all that the Founder created?
