Record set 21Test Tube 21 · The Silence Between1961–1992
Robert W. Termanini, MD

TestTube21

The Silence Between

A historically grounded alternate-history literary thriller, in development.

A country decided its epidemic had one guilty center. This is the record of how that decision was made, who it was made about, and what it cost the people who were never on the map at all.

Join the publication list One message when it has a date. Nothing else.
Scroll
Begin Four ways in

Every room in this archive is open.

Each one holds something you can take apart yourself. Nothing here is a slideshow.

1971 · the afternoon after

Five directions, and nothing about the morning is dramatic.

A trader toward the coast. A woman going to care for a relative. A medical worker returning to another district. A driver carrying produce toward the capital. A man boarding a bus. A form afterward states that nobody moved.

Try it One character, four reproductions

Watch a letter turn into a number.

Nobody decided to do this. Each copy was a little coarser than the one before it. It happens as you scroll. Watch the letter, and read what it has become by the time it reaches the bottom of this section.

The character, written by hand The character, photocopied The character, degraded by copying The character, now read as a zero
01
Notation

WrittenCopiedDegradedMythology
Keep scrolling
The Lantern · from 1974

She can tell you which barstool belonged to whom.

She knew him for eleven years, the way you know someone you have talked to two hundred times without ever visiting his apartment. She can say exactly what he was like and nothing at all about what he did.

Late 1992

The novel ends at the smallest possible scale.

Names, photographs, flowers, handwritten notes. No governments, no laboratories, no maps. Nothing is restored, and one person is still standing in a field that a country decided not to count.

Stay with it

Be told when it is finished.

This novel is in development. Leave an address and you will get one message when it has a publication date, and nothing else, ever.

End of record set 21Form 21–A