synchronized, masked, and watching
The Diamond Dogs move together. They speak together, when they speak at all. They wear chrome fox masks and keep their individual identities subsumed into a collective identity that is, they will tell you, the point — the living demonstration that the self can dissolve into something larger without losing anything that matters.
They are the Dreamers of the Night, which is the Dream of the unconscious, of mystery, of secrets and subversion, of the things that move beneath the surface of the world. They are powerful empaths, connected to each other and to a technology called the Common Link that lets them sense the emotional states of everyone around them in extraordinary detail.
They lead Arcadia, the hidden island, which they believe is the last of humanity. They believe in Baseline. They believe in communal good. They believe in Holy Perimeter.
what baseline is
Baseline is a state of calm emotional openness — pleasant, low-activation, a kind of permanent gentle equilibrium that the Diamond Dogs maintain among the Innocent, the people they protect and lead. They consider it the highest ideal, the condition under which people are safest and most free.
Whether this is true is a question the novel takes seriously.
what’s stirring
Within the collective, in the place where individual thoughts should be indistinguishable from the whole, something has begun to differentiate. There are Dogs who are shielding their thoughts. There are Dogs who have begun to believe that Arcadia is not safe, that Baseline is not freedom, that what they have built is more complicated than it appears.
They call themselves the Dogs Without Faces. They are making plans.
The Diamond Dogs sense this disturbance in their collective the way you sense a sound you can’t quite place — certain it exists, uncertain of its source, not yet ready to name what it might mean.
“The mask says: we are this, not that. Within the collective, something has begun to choose differently.”
Read the extended portrait →