It fails all at once, and everything built on it comes down together, and the people standing in the upper rooms are always the most surprised.

I have wondered, sometimes, whether any of them saw it coming even in the last instant — whether, when the doctor said the word investigators and the flowers slipped from Fiona’s hands, some part of them finally understood the scale of their miscalculation, or whether they went down still not comprehending what had actually happened to them.

I think it was the latter.

I think that to the very end they believed they had made a tactical error — that they had pushed a little too hard, been a little too rough, gotten unlucky with a recording — rather than that they had committed a category mistake about the nature of reality itself.

Because you cannot see your error clearly if it is made of the same material as your whole worldview.

Their worldview held that people like me exist to hold people like them up, invisibly, gratefully, without limit; that our labor is a natural resource, like water or air, that flows to them by right and does not need to be thanked or paid or even acknowledged.