The One Who Asks
The data leans when he watches it.
Paperback, 6 by 9 inches, 761 pages. Kindle e-book. ISBN 9798160361390.
The book
Twenty-six years ago, Trey Vogler survived the night the Bonfire stack fell at Texas A&M, in a pocket of air beside a friend who did not. A year ago he lost his mind. He came to believe the world was sending him signs, and he stood in the sleet outside the house of the woman he loved, reading her porch light as a message, until she called the police.
Now he is back on the night shift at the superconducting supercollider outside Waxahachie, Texas, the machine that in this world was never cancelled, with three pills a day and one rule from his psychiatrist: No signs. No meaning. Just data.
Then the data leans. A tiny excess in one decay channel appears only when someone is watching the live feed, and most of all when the watcher is Trey.
For a man whose illness was believing the universe was looking at him, it is the worst possible result. Is it a discovery or a relapse? From the inside, they feel exactly the same. To find out, he will need a method that doesn’t trust him: sealed predictions, blind openers, and a second observer willing to look first.
The question draws in a whole cast: the ex who leads data quality and once called the police on him; a young physicist from El Paso with a green notebook; the engineer who runs the data racks and can’t decide whether to call his estranged son; a brilliant theorist who drinks; a federal intelligence officer asking who gets to watch; a Dallas foundation offering money and certainty; and a prophet across the border who is sure he already knows what Trey is for.
The One Who Asks is an epic novel of science and faith, recovery and grief, set in a Texas of seven churches, a collider under the prairie, and a single porch light. It asks what it would mean if something in the universe were listening, and whether a man who once heard answers everywhere can learn to sit in a room with a question and leave it open.
From the prologue
Thursday, November 18, 1999. 2:38 a.m.
Phil does not want to be up here.
He says so for the fourth time since midnight, which is three more times than he said it last night, and Trey Vogler, who has his boots wedged between two logs the width of his thigh and a coil of baling wire over his shoulder, tells him what he told him the other three times. Forty minutes. Then they climb down, they sleep until noon, and they never do this again.
“You said that Tuesday,” Phil says.
“Tuesday I meant it less.”
They are forty feet up, and the cold has gotten into the baling wire, so that every loop Trey pulls tight leaves a line of ache across his palm through the glove. Below them the stack spreads out in the floodlights like something that grew there, six tiers of logs lashed and wired and stacked around a center pole, a few thousand pounds of oak and pine for every one of the people crawling over it. Somebody down on the ground has a boom box going. Somebody else is singing over it, badly, and a girl’s voice tells him to shut up, and he does not. The air smells of cut wood and diesel and the particular cold of a Texas November that has not decided yet whether it is going to be winter.
Also by Troy Taliancich
The Deep End, a novel about a breakup, a building, and a man who cannot tell whether he is being watched or writing a book.
The Sextant Protocol, a trilogy about a device that holds people where they are.
Coming next: The Dog House, the sequel to The Deep End. Join the mailing list.