Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)

a list of “conditions required for Area X to exist” that include

• an isolated place

• an inert but volatile trigger

• a catalyst to pull the trigger

• an element of luck or chance in how the trigger was deployed

• a context we do not understand

• an attitude toward energy that we do not understand

• an approach to language that we do not understand

“We lack the analogies” was itself somehow deficient as a diagnosis, linguists burning up during reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere after encountering Area X. Making you think of all the dead and dying satellites sent hurtling down into the coordinates that comprised Area X, because it was easy, because space debris winking out of existence made a perverse kind of sense, even as turning Area X into a garbage can seemed like the kind of disrespect that might piss off an insecure deity. Except Area X never responded, even to that indignity.

Somehow that created an uncomfortable doubling effect, too, one that she argued about in her own head. Because she did not agree with her own decisions at times—the biologist’s decisions.

something in Control’s affect made her believe he might be working toward that kind of solution. Whereas she was not yet committed to anything other than wanting to know—herself and Area X.

and raging against her own death, she had exulted in the sensation of the sea, welcomed having to fight her way to the surface—bursting through such a joyful hysteria of biomass—as a sort of proof that she was not the biologist, that she was some new thing that could, wanting to survive, cast out her fear of drowning as belonging to another.

Then, examining the sense that her memories were not her own, that they came to her secondhand and that she could not be sure whether this was because of some experiment by the Southern Reach or an effect caused by Area X. Even through the intricacies of her escape on the way to Central, there was a sense of projection, of it happening to someone else, that she was only the interim solution, and perhaps that distance had aided her in avoiding capture, added a layer of absolute calm to her actions.

When it was her turn, she conceded that she now remembered everything up to the point at which she had been scanned or atomized or replicated by the Crawler that lived in the tunnel/tower—the moment of her creation, which might have been the moment of the biologist’s death.

There had already been some misunderstandings about their relationship since reaching the beach—especially about who was in charge—and in the aftermath he’d taken back his name, asked that she call him Control again rather than John, which she respected. Some animals’ shells were vital to their survival. Some animals couldn’t live for long without them.

Once, from this vantage, he’d seen something vast rippling through the water beyond the sandbars, a kind of shadow, the grayness so dark and deep it had formed a thick, smooth shape against the blue. Even with his binoculars he could not tell what creature it was, or what it might become if he stared at it long enough. Didn’t know if eventually it had scattered into a thousand shapes, revealed as a school of fish, or if the color of the water, the sharpness of the light, changed and made it disappear, revealed as an illusion. In that tension between what he could and couldn’t know about even the mundane world, he felt at home in a way he would not have five years ago. He needed no greater mysteries now than those moments when the world seemed as miraculous as in his old sermons. And it was a good story for down at the village bar, the kind of story they expected from the lighthouse keeper, if anyone expected anything from him at all.

The answer doesn’t lie in your backyard because no one is going to come and save you even if you beg them to. Especially if you beg them to. You’re on your own, like you’ve always been on your own. You have to keep going forward, until you can’t go forward anymore