Series
The Uncarved Block Trilogy
by Beckett Cole · 3 of 3 books
Books in this series
Book 1
The Uncarved Block
Literary Sci-Fi / Speculative Fiction
A burned-out data analyst has been practicing an obscure breathing technique from a fragmentary Chinese text for fourteen months. One Tuesday evening, doing dishes in his apartment, something in his mind that had been running his entire life quietly stops. Eli Marsh has not gained a superpower. He has lost a filter. The constructed nature of everything — social performance, institutional authority, the agreed-upon fictions that make civilization function — is now transparent to him. What he sees is not beautiful and not terrible. It is simply what was always there, once you stop not-seeing it. He is not the first person this has happened to. An inter-agency working group called the Coherence Group has been monitoring for exactly this event for fifty years. They have contained every previous case. They are very good at it. Now they are coming for Eli. And Eli has already told his sister.
Book 2
The Coherence War
Literary Sci-Fi / Speculative Fiction
## Chapter 1: Lagos The spreadsheet had forty-seven rows. One for each day she had not skipped, which was most days, and a blank row for each day she had, which was eleven. The columns were: date, time started, duration in minutes, breath count where she had managed to keep count, a notes field she had titled OBSERVATIONS in all caps and then filled with entries like *nothing* and *back hurt* and *generator came on at minute 4* and one entry from three weeks ago that read *something different about the quality of attention at minute 11, unclear, could not reproduce the next day*. She highlighted that row in yellow. It remained the only yellow row. Sera closed the laptop and set it on the desk, which was a plywood board on concrete blocks her cousin Emeka had carried up the stairs in exchange for two weeks of debugging his inventory app. The app was for a phone accessories business he ran from a table in front of Computer Village. The app did not need to exist — Emeka's inventory was small enough to track on paper — but Emeka wanted an app, and Sera owed him for the desk, and the code was simple enough that she wrote it in an afternoon and then spent three more afternoons explaining to Emeka why the app could not also process payments, track his customers' birthdays, and display a map of nearby buyers. Emeka's idea of software was that it should do everything. Sera's idea of software was that it should do one thing and not break. The flat had two rooms. The main room held the desk, the mat on the floor, a plastic chair she had taken from her mother's church when the church upgraded to wooden ones, and a…
Book 3
The Ten Thousand Things
Literary Sci-Fi / Speculative Fiction
## Chapter 1: Reykjavik The plane came in low over water that was the color of wet slate, and the woman in 14C had been holding a paper cup of cold coffee for forty minutes without drinking it. Her thumb moved on the rim in a slow circle. She did not know she was doing it. I watched the circle for a while and then I watched the water and then the landing gear dropped and the cabin filled with the sound of a plane rearranging itself — hydraulics, the grind of metal repositioning — and we landed. Keflavík airport was small and bright and smelled of cleaning solution and geothermal heating — a faint sulfur note underneath everything, like the building's plumbing remembered what it was connected to. I walked through the corridor with my bag over one shoulder. The bag was a gray duffel I had bought in Arlington three years ago when I left the facility with two boxes of clothes and a check for back pay that the restructuring committee had calculated using a formula nobody in the room was fully confident about. The duffel had outlasted everything else from that period. It had a broken zipper on the side pocket that I had never fixed because the pocket still held things if you did not overfill it. I did not overfill it. Customs was two booths. The officer was a woman in her thirties with short dark hair and a mole below her left ear. She had stamped nine hundred passports today and would stamp nine hundred more and her face knew it. She looked at my passport. She looked at me. The passport photo was four years old and showed a version of my face that was thinner and held differently — not the…