Eytan Gall
Traps for the living: Of Flash and Fiction volume 2
Synopsis
The systems that keep you alive were never built to be understood.
A global health network that has control over life and death. A discovery in cancer biology that works, and then never stops. A deep-space mission of exploration that becomes something no one saw coming. A research station orbiting a black hole, where the anomalies in the log are starting to look less like malfunctions and more like sentences.
Seven stories of hard science fiction, each touching on the limits of our understanding. The surveillance infrastructure already exists in prototype. The microRNA questions are open problems that people are working on right now. The fuzzball at the centre of the closing novella is a serious proposal in theoretical physics, not a metaphor.
What connects the stories is not a setting but a preoccupation: What happens when a system grows too large, or too fast, or too autonomous for anyone inside it to say what it is actually doing? Not malice, and not malfunction. Just rules we only partly understand, running correctly, indifferent to whether anyone was ready for them.
Author's Note
“Science fiction has always seemed most powerful to me when it does not begin with fantasy, but with proximity. Not with magic disguised as machinery, but with ideas that already exist in some early, unfinished, or unsettling form. The stories in At the Edge of the Beyond were written from that instinct.
Everything in this collection began that way. Surveillance already decides how people live and how they die. Biology already contains mechanisms powerful enough to heal or to ruin, depending on where you point them. Physics still leaves room for possibilities strange enough that serious papers read like metaphors.
What I kept returning to was the threshold: the point where a system becomes too complex for the people inside it to explain what it is doing. That is not a failure of the science. It is what success looks like from the inside.