Pantheon, part 1: rooms with two uses

The first thing I settled about Pantheon was not the plot. It was where two people are allowed to hand each other information.

The answer I wrote down is that it happens in rooms with two uses. A lift lobby shared by a private bank and the trading company renting the far suite. A restaurant floor with a members’ room over it. Somewhere legitimate daily life and illicit trade run past the same people on the same afternoon, in ordinary light, with the lunch service on.

What the rule refuses is the warehouse at night.

A warehouse at midnight has one use, and the room announces it. Everybody standing there is standing there for the same reason. There is nothing for a reader to interpret, and nothing for a character to say if someone walks in, because being seen finishes them. So the writer has to arrange for the world not to look. I have read a lot of thrillers where the surveillance state is terrifying on page 40 and conveniently asleep on page 200, and it is nearly always this: a scene set in a room that cannot survive a witness.

Give a room two uses and everyone in it has an answer ready. The financier is at that table because she eats there on Tuesdays. The man across from her is in the building because his firm has three floors of it. Both of those are true. One of them is also cover. Nobody has to sneak, so everybody can be observed, and the work I want the reader doing is working out which of the room’s two uses this particular conversation belongs to.

That is load-bearing rather than atmospheric. It sets the kind of danger the book runs on. Nobody in Pantheon is untraceable. They are all accounted for, all the time, by calendars and receipts and the people who saw them come in. The threat is not being followed. It is being explainable, and only just.

What the book is

Pantheon is a novel written under the Lacunae name. A conspiracy thriller with a romance at the centre of it, set in contemporary Hong Kong.

Vivienne Ho is a socialite and a financier, principal of a firm that buys businesses other people would strip and keeps them alive instead. She has spent five years building that life so completely it became real to her. Damien Tang wants to marry her, and his family does what a family like that does and runs due diligence on the woman he has chosen. In the same season, an old institution reopens a file on her.

Two sets of people go looking, for reasons that have nothing to do with each other, and neither set tells her they have started.

The premise has the same shape as the rooms. A life with two uses that both check out.

Close third person, past tense, rotating point of view, so you spend the book inside different heads and get let in a different amount by each of them. You end up knowing more than anyone in the room and less than all of them put together. It is an adult book. 63 chapters planned, 57 drafted, about 150,400 words. There is nothing to click and nothing to choose. My last project was interactive fiction and people reasonably assume this one is too. This one is a book.

Why I think about books this way

I have spent over a decade doing level design on AAA games, routing players through heists, open-world regions and extraction maps.

Level design is mostly the placement of information. Where a player learns a thing, in what order, from what vantage, and what they can do with it once they hold it. A heist level is a document about who knows what and when. Move one piece of knowledge two rooms earlier and the whole plan changes character.

Single-purpose spaces are the ones players solve in about four seconds. You clock the one thing the room is for, you do it, you leave. The spaces worth building have two legitimate activities in them, because those are the ones players read wrong, and reading them wrong is the game.

A conspiracy thriller is that same problem made of sentences. Somebody knows something. Somebody else is about to. The distance between those two facts is where the book lives.

The rule earns its keep by what it forbids. It tells me where a conversation can happen, and more usefully where one cannot, which is the constraint that has done the most work on this draft. Every time a scene felt convenient, it turned out I had let somebody hand over information somewhere nobody had a reason to be.

Where to read it

Chapters 1 to 7 are free in a web reader at pantheon.lacunaedesigns.com. Seven is where a sequence ends rather than where I got tired. The complete book follows as an ebook.

There is also a companion archive on the site: people, connections, places, evidence, gated to how far you have read. The gate is absence rather than a lock. A record you have not reached is simply not there, and the page does not tell you how many of those there are. Games taught me that a greyed-out slot is a promise, and that a reader who can count the slots has been handed the shape of the book for free. So there are no slots.

The book stands on its own. The site is enrichment and never required reading, so if you would rather read the seven chapters and never open the archive, you lose nothing.

Whether it is for you

This is a slower book than a chase. Very little of it is people running. Most of it is people sitting across from each other in rooms where they are both allowed to be, saying accurate things, while someone compiles.

If you want the pleasure of a scene where two characters cannot acknowledge what they are actually discussing and the waiter keeps coming back, that is the register. The romance is what the conspiracy can cost her. That is why it sits at the centre rather than beside it.

Part 2 is about building the city the book stands in. Part 3 is about the cast, and how you keep a dozen people from sounding like one person in different outfits.

If you read the first seven and catch yourself wondering who else was on that floor that afternoon, the rule is doing its job.