Release Announcement
The Oxygen Wound, 11 September: one premise, followed honestly
The Oxygen Wound is out on 11 September. It is my first book. Here is the premise, in full, because I do not withhold premises. A drilling team puts a clean borehole two thousand one hundred and thirty-four metres through the West Antarctic ice sheet into a lake that has been sealed since the Miocene. At 03:52 on the first night, four minutes after the drill technician shuts down a pump to change a filter cartridge, an oxygen electrode three centimetres inside the sediment steps, and holds. The floor of the lake is one continuous, electrically conductive organism, and it has begun keeping time with their machinery. It answers on a cycle of eleven days. It counts. And every answer costs it something, because the only thing anyone can send down a borehole is oxygen, and oxygen is the one thing that floor has never had. The narrator is Yeva Sarkissian, who runs the drill. Not the scientist who owns the theory. The technician who owns the machine and has to make it work. The season ends on the eighth of February. The hole is ordered sealed, correctly. Nine of them stay. Real drills, real chemistry, real law. No villain. Nobody is rescued. If a number is on the page, it was checked.