LOST Chapter 23: The Organized

Read chapter 23 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Hana said she was not bringing me. She said this three days before she brought me, which I had learned was her method of preparing me for something she had already decided to do, the announcement of reluctance as a form of briefing. She brought me on a Tuesday evening, through the old part of town, past the marks on the doorframes that I could now read without stopping, to a building I had not been inside before, a room on the second floor that smelled of old paper and salt air and something that might have been coffee made many hours ago. Four people were already there when we arrived. A fifth came in behind us and closed the door. They were not what I expected, though I should have been able to predict from what Hana had told me, which was: there are Threshers who are not passive. What I had pictured, from that description, was something more dramatic, some quality of organized urgency, the energy of people who had been working against something for a long time and felt the pressure of it. What I found was something quieter and therefore more serious. Five people in a room with mismatched chairs and a table covered in papers, who looked at me when I came in with the focused attention of people who had been expecting me and had prepared for the expectation. The one who spoke first was a woman in her late forties. She introduced herself as Tanaka. She did not offer a first name and nobody else offered first names either, which I noted and filed. She said: we know who you are. We know roughly what you've been doing since you arrived. We have been watching the rupture sites in this harbor zone for four years and we have been watching the Kankyō Foundation for three and we have been trying to build a theoretical model of the crossing mechanism that is rigorous enough to work with and we have not been able to complete it. She said all of this without pause, the way people speak when they have planned what they are going to say and are executing the plan. Then she stopped. I said: and you think I can complete it. She said: we think you already have. I said: what makes you think that. The man to her left, who had not introduced himself and who I estimated was around thirty, put a folder on the table. He opened it. Inside was a series of printed documents, and on top of them, slightly at an angle, a page I recognized. My handwriting. Not the notebooks. A page from what appeared to be a photocopy of something I had written, something from the early volumes, the theoretical framework sections I had drafted in the first two years, the ones that were most legible, the ones I had been most careful with. I looked at it for a moment. I said: how did you get this. Tanaka said: you are not the first person to cross from W-01 in the last several years. Others have come through with knowledge of your work. One of them had read your early papers, before you stopped publishing. Others had heard about the notebooks through the Misakiura physics community, which is small and talks. I said: I published two papers. Neither of them was about this. She said: no. They were about anomalous light refraction patterns in coastal environments and about atmospheric pressure variations near geological fault lines. Neither of them named the crossing mechanism or anything close to it. But both of them, read carefully, pointed at something. The framework underneath them was pointing at something. People in the local physics community noticed. I thought about the two papers. I had published them at twenty-two, my second year of serious observation, and I had published them in the specific way of someone who wanted to put ideas into the world without putting the full idea into the world, who wanted to be findable to the right readers without being findable to the wrong ones. I had not thought much about who had read them. I said: and someone who had read them crossed here. She said: two people, independently. Different years. Both of them told us what they knew abo