Pip Rippon
Writing your own entry is an odd bit of housekeeping, and I have put it off longer than any of the others in this book, on the reasonable grounds that nobody asked. For the record, then: I'm Pip. PhD student, University of Hallamshire, studied biology at Oxford in the off-world a couple of years back, which is the sort of qualification that turns out to matter less here than knowing which pub not to be seen leaving. Everything in this book, every entry before this one, is the same habit applied outward instead of inward. I could not tell you why turning it on myself feels different. It just does.
I wear a council-issue psycmask with the feeding section unclipped, which is uncomfortable, and I wear it anyway because not wearing one is how you get noticed. The hivemind chatter that comes through it, the ads, the constant low traffic of everyone else's thoughts brushing past mine, is meant to feel like company. It has never once felt like company. It feels like trying to read in a room where somebody won't stop talking, and I have simply gotten better at reading. That, and writing things down, which started as fieldwork and has since become something closer to a compulsion I've stopped examining too closely.
The actual risk in being me, if I'm honest about it, isn't anything I do directly. It's who I'm stood next to. I am, among other things, Van Hallam's occasional friend, confidante, drinking associate, sometime pusher, and biographer, and Van has never once in my hearing lowered his voice at the correct moment. Being seen next to him while he says the wrong thing in the wrong bar is its own kind of exposure, and I have made my peace with that exposure the way you make peace with weather. It arrives regardless of what you think about it.
There is a longer version of why I matter to certain people that I am not going to write down here, except to say that the bitterfinger know my name for reasons that predate most of what's in this book, and that Nibor-Ud (Dani Hinchcliffe) has been directed to start with me rather than end with me, which I choose to read as a kind of compliment, because the alternative reading is worse. I keep researching anyway. I keep writing anyway. I have not yet worked out whether that's courage or just the same compulsion from the second paragraph, dressed up.
Field note: if you are reading this and you are not me, and something in this book has led you to a version of me who is no longer writing it, please assume the entries before this one are more reliable than I was.
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