There were practical reckonings. Funding, ethics boards, the standardized anxieties of institutional life. The review committee said the device must be classified and quarantined, that its unpredictability posed risks of false memory and psychological harm. They argued for tests: blind studies, controlled stimuli, peer review. Mara listened and found herself impatient with protocols that seemed to cleave the world into test tubes when the camera’s language was of lived consequence. But the committee’s caution was not without merit; someone could be undone by what the camera offered, tangled in an image that the mind then deified.