Chapter 3: Seraphine Voss Explains the Rules to a Man Who Has Read Them Differently

The room changes at 0600.

Hamlet knows this because the light does — it shifts from the flat, directionless white that makes a room feel like the inside of a skull to something warmer and more deliberate, angled from a new source in the upper left corner that was not illuminated before. Someone has decided it is morning. He finds this more unsettling than the cell itself: the administration of time, the manufacture of a dawn that has been chosen for him by a person in another room who decided, at some point, that artificial circadian rhythm was preferable to letting a tribute dissolve entirely into the dark.

He is already awake. He has been awake for what his body estimates as four hours, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, watching the camera's red eye, conducting an intermittent and one-sided conversation with Horatio-7 — for he has, by now, decided that is who the careful hand belongs to — on the subject of whether performance and authenticity are genuinely distinguishable or whether the distinction is itself a performance. He has not received a response. He did not expect one. The exercise was for his own benefit, which is to say it was for the camera, which is to say the two things are becoming the same thing in ways he prefers not to examine too carefully before he has eaten.