The Cast

The chapter plates keep faces turned away or in shadow, on purpose — a face redrawn ninety-seven times is a face that slowly becomes someone else. So the faces live here instead, drawn once and locked, in the same five styles the rest of the book is drawn in. Pick one above and everybody redraws.

This was a reader’s idea. He wanted the people settled so he could keep building the rest of it himself, which is the right instinct: this page is a reference, not an instruction. If the Samantha in your head looks nothing like the one on this page, yours is the correct one.

Portrait of Samantha Hale — Samantha Hale Basalt Labs' CTO. She loves to code, run in the mountains, and be alone.

Portrait of Vlad — Vlad The third founder. He was born in Ukraine and is a ghost.

Portrait of Seth — Seth The seed investor in Basalt Labs. He lives in Boulder with his dog Cooper.

Portrait of Marcus Reed — Marcus Reed The CEO. A competent programmer, but not in the same class as Samantha and Vlad. He's charismatic and thinks he can convince anyone of anything.

Portrait of Sable — Sable Saw the wallet move before almost anyone else. Determined to find Samantha.

Portrait of Nadia — Nadia Runs an atomic-physics lab at CU Boulder. An unwilling confidant of Seth's.

Portrait of Dolores Evans — Dolores Evans Has worked at a hospital for twenty-two years keeping all their machines working.

Portrait of Roy Pittman — Roy Pittman The FBI supervisor out of Denver working on financial crimes for nineteen years.

Portrait of Eli Rosen — Eli Rosen Samantha's friend from the same PhD cohort who runs a small trapped-atom lab at MIT.

Portrait of Ferrante — Ferrante One of the people in a private incident channel called Meridian. He found the machine in Virginia.

Portrait of Eleanor Voss — Eleanor Voss Basalt Labs board member from the beginning. Deeply involved in quantum.

11 of them so far. Characters appear here once you have met them in the book, so this page grows as the story does — it will never introduce someone ahead of the prose.

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The Cast

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