Noise Floor

A neuroscientist studies what happens to time inside the minds of the dying, and finds himself tracing three hundred Spartans holding a coastal pass twenty-five centuries ago.

A military analyst trains an AI to hunt, then watches the system execute movements he didn't know he'd taught it.

An actuary calculates how many seconds he has left with his daughter, and finds his dead mother still has one more lesson to teach.

A man dying of a brain tumor discovers that acceptance doesn't shrink time. It expands it.

In fifteen stories spanning two millennia, Noise Floor asks a single question from every possible angle: What do we leave inside the things we create?

Named for the threshold below which a signal vanishes into static, this debut collection maps the invisible transfer of attention. The way a researcher's way of looking shapes a machine. The way a parent's patience shapes a child. The way a soldier's instinct survives him in the system he trained. Gomez writes with the precision of a clinician and the patience of someone who has sat very still in a room where something important was happening. His stories are quiet, exact, and quietly devastating.

Noise Floor is a book about time, how it bends under certainty, how it pools in dying bodies, how it stretches in the pass at Thermopylae. But above all it is a book about transmission: the terrifying, hopeful fact that nothing we create is ever entirely ours alone.

"The ghost is always in the weights."