p.268 - Polymath scientist Dr Daniel Barker, ejected from NASA under dubious circumstances,
is called out of retirement to assemble a crack team of specialists
(mathematician, cryptographer, cartographer, psychoanalyst, environmental
chemist) after an apparently commonplace homicide investigation opens
up wider and deeper complicities—firstly with the financial meshwork that,
beneath the everyday surface of capitalism, grotesquely binds together coltan
mines, art auctions, pork futures, and arms deals; and subsequently with the
history of modernity and its petroleum-lubricated time-travelling relationship
to the physical history of the planet, the sun, and the universe beyond. These
genre devices give the work a performative relation to the complex concept of
‘plot’—as a narrative thread and as a tract of space separated for a specific
work, but which retains unknown complicities with its original matrix.

The investigators’ forensic analyses take them back and forth across the
surface of the earth, to interrogate protagonists and suspects not limited to
human beings but also including built structures and synthetic objects which
must be coaxed into ‘speaking’.