Sea of Tranquility

This chapter begins with a description of the moon colonies. Colony One was built near where Apollo 11 landed, in the Sea of Tranquility. It was popular due to the flooding and extreme heat on Earth, and Colony Two was built quickly thereafter. The speed of the construction led to the failure of the dome’s lighting, and it was called Night City because there was no artificial sunlight.

Gaspery grew up near Olive’s house, 200 years after she lived there. His mother named him after the character in Olive’s book, which caused him to watch the house attentively. The girl that lived there was named Talia Anderson, and she ended up in Gaspery’s class when he was 12. They went to the Periphery, the edge of the dome, together and looked out at the surface of the moon and Colony One. Talia left later that school year, and Gaspery didn’t see her again for about 20 years.

In their thirties, they see each other at the Grand Luna Hotel in Colony One. Gaspery applied for a job there after his mother died. He describes how he and his sister, Zoey, were at their mother’s hospital bedside throughout her illness and her death. Their mother murmured about the simulation hypothesis, which Zoey described to Gaspery. It is about the possibility that reality is a simulation, and Zoey regrets telling Gaspery that it comes up at the Time Institute.

Talia, who goes by Natalia, interviews Gaspery for the security position. It requires someone attentive, and he is confident in his attentiveness, although he feels like a failure in most other regards. When he recognizes her, he asks if she ever goes back to Night City, and she says no.

Gaspery describes working at the hotel as boring. He passes the time thinking about Night City and the family that moved into Olive’s house after Talia. His apartment is in Colony One, near its Periphery, and he looks out on Colony Two. Six months into working at the hotel, he calls his sister, Zoey, to wish her happy birthday (she turned 37). Zoey asks him to come to the Time Institute where she works.

In her office, she shows him the video of Paul, the composer, including the video by his sister (the one Mirella saw). Zoey identifies how Paul’s music contains a motif from the violin in the video. Then, she shows him the passage in Olive’s novel that contains a similar moment.

The excerpt from Marienbad is about Willis, his husband, and their children at the beginning of a pandemic. They store up food, but still go out to eat. They hear about some cases in Vancouver, but the children still attend school, and their parents still go into work. Willis remembers a different pandemic, Ebola X, which he and his husband lived through in lockdown. In the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal, Willis hears a violinist busking, experiences darkness and then light, and sees a forest. He believes the darkness is death and the forest is an afterlife. After this experience, he pulls his children out of school.

Zoey and Gaspery note how the book and video mirror each other. Gaspery suggests Olive saw the video. Then, Zoey shows him a handwritten letter from Edwin to his brother in 1912. It is included in its entirety and describes his experience in the woods of Caiette—the darkness, the violin, and the feeling of being in a train station. After having this experience, Edwin moved to Victoria and was diagnosed with a migraine.

Gaspery asks why Zoey is concerned about this. She mentions a bug in an operating system called Zephyr where opening a text file triggers the last-played song to start playing again. She compares the overlapping moments as corrupted files. This throws into question the nature of reality, looping back to the simulation hypothesis.   

Gaspery struggles to categorize his life as a simulation. His sensory experiences seem real as he rides home from the Time Institute in a trolley car. He thinks about the rest of his and Zoey’s conversation. She wants to investigate the repeated event—speak with letter-writer (Edwin), videographer (Vincent), and novelist (Olive) in their respective times, as Gaspery did in previous parts of Sea of Tranquility.

Gaspery thinks about how he saw the invention of time travel announced on the news, and now only the government was allowed to use it. Most prisoners with life sentences on the moon “attempted time travel” (130). Zoey mentioned he looked shocked at her suggestion of an investigation. He gets off the trolley and walks slowly, waiting to enjoy the artificial and scheduled rain.

For a few weeks, Gaspery continues to wonder if his world is a simulation and, at work, asks Talia what she thinks of the simulation hypothesis. She thinks the faults that surround them, like a broken light, show that it is not a simulation. Gaspery talks to Zoey about this and generally how the moon colonies are shabby in her apartment. She thinks the newer colonies are more glamorous, but Gaspery thinks about how they could be just a more glamorous simulation.

He asks about the people involved in the incident. Zoey reveals that Edwin passed away in a psychiatric care facility after going to war, and Olive passed away on Earth. Gaspery asks if Zoey will investigate the incident, but she refuses to time travel again. Time travelers “can’t mess with the time line” (136) and go into situations with the knowledge of how everyone they will meet while traveling will die. Gaspery asks to become a time traveler, and Zoey explains it takes a lot of training and capacity for detachment. Gaspery notes there’s no rush, and he’s willing to devote time to training and education. Zoey is still unwilling to recommend him.

After three weeks of Zoey avoiding his calls, Gaspery visits the Time Institute. Ephrem comes out of the building and admits that he works there. When Gaspery asks about Zoey’s simulation hypothesis project, Ephrem ushers him to his office for tea. They talk about Ephrem leaving his arborist job, and Zoey joins them. Ephrem is also interested in Zoey’s anomaly, and Gaspery asks if he can help investigate.

Zoey is still against him working at the Time Institute, but Ephrem wants to recruit him. Ephrem has had a more positive experience working at the Institute than Zoey. He explains that their work is to maintain their timeline, but the interference of the time travelers is often smoothed over easily by events that occur. This causes Ephrem to consider that they may be in a simulation. He agrees to set up an interview for Gaspery and orders champagne.

A week after Ephrem sets up Gaspery’s interview, he goes into Talia’s office before his shift to give his two weeks’ notice. They walk around outside the hotel, by the river. As they talk, she learns that he came to Colony One after a messy divorce. He learns that she grew up in Colony One, and only moved to Night City when she was nine. She knows Gaspery is being recruited by the Time Institute because some people in suits from there came to talk to her about Gaspery’s work at the hotel.

Talia tells Gaspery that her parents worked as time travelers for the Institute. After a failed mission, they were unable to work and had to move to Night City. She explains that the Time Institute is a bureaucracy that only fixes the issues with the timeline that put it in jeopardy. She warns Gaspery against working for the Institute. However, he can’t bring himself to work his shift, calls Ephrem, who says he can start working at the Time Institute in an hour.

Gaspery meets with Ephrem, and the chai reminds him of a memory from their childhood of drinking tea together. Ephrem shares gossip about Zoey falling in love with a time traveler who tried to intentionally mess with the timeline and was not brought back to the present by the Time Institute. Then, Ephrem explains Gaspery’s role in the investigation: interviewing Edwin, Paul, and Olive (seen in previous chapters/parts), as well as the violinist Alan. Then, Gaspery is to turn his findings over to a more experienced investigator. However, he must complete five years of training before starting the interviews.

Gaspery quickly and vaguely summarizes his years of training as immersing himself in different worlds. After five years, he enters the travel chamber. Zoey, all business, injects a tracker into his arm. She tells him that a time traveler who didn’t want to return to the present because she fell in love fed her tracker to a cat, and Zoey gave this cat to Gaspery. He is shocked that his cat is from 1985. Zoey grumpily programs his device and tells him to sit in the machine—a bench molded into the stone of the wall.

Chapter 10 is the transcript of Gaspery interviewing the violinist, Alan. He asserts that he does not need money but plays in the airship terminal for pleasure. Gaspery plays him an audio clip, which Alan identifies as him playing in the terminal. The song is his own composition—a lullaby for his dead wife. Then, Alan asks Gaspery where he’s from. Gaspery says he’s a music historian’s assistant from the University of British Columbia and doesn’t get Alan’s Shakespeare joke.

Gaspery meets with Zoey and Ephrem to discuss his interview with the violinist. Ephrem warns him to not mess up when Zoey notes his slip-up about not knowing Shakespeare because they didn’t cover it in his training. When Ephrem leaves for another meeting, Gaspery describes the violinist’s modified violet eyes.

Then Gaspery asks Zoey about Talia’s parents working for, and being thrown out of, the Time Institute. He learns that Talia repeated some language from a classified manual. Zoey reminds Gaspery that she tried to talk him out of working at the Institute. She admits she was close to a woman who messed up in a moment of weakness—a moment of empathy—while traveling. Zoey hints at how the Institute can frame travelers for crimes, for instance.

Their conversation turns to Gaspery’s upcoming interviews. He is most uncomfortable about his interview with Olive, just days before her death. Zoey warns him to not interfere, but he considers what would happen if he breaks protocol.