HOW IT BEGAN (A Reconstruction)
There was a moment — Tomas Bauer would later confirm it, having reviewed the Bureau's portal logs at her request — when her finger hovered over the trackpad.
The notification was on the screen. The message was visible. The first sentence was readable from the preview pane: "I have read your published accounts of the Bureau for Threshold Research's investigations." She had not yet opened it.
Her finger was on the trackpad. The cursor was on the message. She had not yet clicked. She would later note, in her notebook, that she had been holding her breath. She had not noticed she was holding her breath. She noticed it only when she clicked, and the message opened, and her body — without her conscious intervention — released the held breath in a single slow exhalation.
The exhalation was the moment the message became real. Before the exhalation: a notification. After: a message that existed, that had been received, that had entered the record.
She had been doing this work for three years. She had received many messages that had changed the trajectory of the investigation. Each one had marked a transition. Each one had begun with a moment of waiting before the receiving.
She had held her finger over the trackpad for between four and six seconds. In those four to six seconds she had thought: if I open this and it is what I think it is, the work changes. There is no version of this where the work continues as it has been.
She had thought: I am going to open it. She had clicked. She had read. She had begun.
