The Shape of Things
MimeticMetaphoricScientificMetaphysical

Metaphoric Geometry

Current Drift

Jeffrey Benjamin

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Southwest of the Baja peninsula, in the black cold of the Middle America Trench, something is warm that has no business being warm — and the heat isn't rising.

Aboard the CICIMAR research vessel Corriente, a small crew sails west out of La Paz expecting weeks of routine oceanography. What they find instead is a signature that survives every explanation meant to kill it: a rock that shouldn't hold a charge, a storm that spins the wrong way on purpose, a line drawn straight down from the edge of the atmosphere that has no business being straight at this latitude at all.

At the center of it is Heath Trevithick — brilliant, unaccountable, fluent in physics and mythology and the distance between them, a man nobody aboard can quite explain the presence of, including, it seems, the captain who keeps his secret. Around him: a rigorous skeptic who tests everything and finds, for the first time, nothing left to test; an instrumentation specialist who keeps finding real things by what looks like accident and isn't; a radio operator who needs everything confirmed twice, including his own name; a captain who wants everyone home alive and nobody's business but their own; and a ship's cat who is never lost, never chasing anything, and always — infuriatingly, correctly — exactly where the answer turns out to be.

As the anomaly widens from one basalt outcrop to a pattern circling half the globe, the crew has to reckon with a harder question than whether Heath is right: what does it cost to prove something true, and who actually does that work once the seeing is done.

Current Drift is a story about instruments and myths, about the difference between a shape someone sees and a finding that survives being doubted — and about the parts of any mystery, and any person, that never fully resolve.

About this book

Ported to this site on November 8 2026 from the author's revised manuscript of that date. The port did not edit wording.

Copyright (c) 2026 Jeffrey Benjamin. CC-BY-NC.

Contents

  1. Chapter One — Yaz
  2. Chapter Two — Amaleto
  3. Chapter Three — Bram
  4. Chapter Four — William
  5. Chapter Five — Solá
  6. Interlude I
  7. Chapter Six — Yaz
  8. Chapter Seven — William
  9. Chapter Eight — Heath
  10. Chapter Nine — Amaleto
  11. Chapter Ten — Bram

Part III

The Line That's Too Straight to Be Coincidence

  1. Chapter Eleven — William
  2. Chapter Twelve — Solá
  3. Chapter Thirteen — Yaz
  4. Chapter Fourteen — Amaleto
  5. Chapter Fifteen — Heath
  6. Chapter Sixteen — Bram

Part IV

The Capacitor

  1. Chapter Seventeen — Amaleto
  2. Chapter Eighteen — William
  3. Interlude II
  4. Chapter Nineteen — Bram
  5. Chapter Twenty — Yaz