A crew of human and humanoid Employees have found a number of strange Objects on a newly discovered planet. In an effort to document the Objects and their effect on the crew, a series of HR interviews are undertaken.
The raw epistolary format of the anonymous transcripts ranges from a few lines to a couple of pages, lacking guiding context or exposition. The resulting cognitive estrangement is intensified by an abstract, spartan prose that offers no concession to visualisation. I began to doubt my ability to figure out what was happening.
Midway, the story emerges from a dissonant fog of interviews suffused with smells, tastes, textures, and dreams. Building through sensory accretion rather than descriptive worldbuilding — as a baby learns its world, with an attendant oral fixation.
Scattered clues cohere into a picture of a minimalist ship: a sealed terrarium of functional spaces as if you’d made a spaceship out of only meeting rooms. Satirising the depersonalised capitalist workplace, the Employees are mere machines in service to mysterious technologies and banal labour.
In counterpoint, the Objects exist as rich sensory interventions in this sterile world, resisting explanation and capitalist utility, arousing emotions in the crew and a deviant desire to interact unproductively without purpose – an allegorical collection of Plumbus-like installations in an otherworldly modern art gallery that compel rubbing and licking.
The narrative blurs ontological boundaries between human and humanoid, dreams and waking, holograms and memories. The humanoids are evolving, erasing the definitional boundary between human and machine, rebelling. Paranoia, deviance, and pathological behaviour abound.
The idea that alien contact will be so dissonant as to resist conceptual framing, creating a sensory challenge over a technological one, is interesting. Ravn cleverly constructs this dialectic through her juxtaposition of the sterile bureaucratic workplace with the phenomenological impact of the Objects — yet the follow-through is lacking, the narrative too thin to adequately interrogate the questions posed.
