The Cost of Knowing follows the paper one last time: an address outside the record, an auxiliary archive that was never accessioned, a signature that decides whether eleven years of warnings were evidence or entrapment. The people who believed are still believing. The people who profited are still filing. And the person who kept the files has to choose which of them to hand the last letter to.
A conclusion about knowledge as a cost centre: who pays for knowing, and whether the bill can ever be sent to the right address.
Todd J. Ankenbauer writes speculative fiction about belief, evidence and the places where the two quietly trade places. The Letters That Arrive Tomorrow is his four-volume account of one impossible correspondence, from the first envelope to the final accounting.
He writes about institutions at the moment their good intentions become procedure, and about the readers who notice what the minutes leave out.