The Last Objective Fact: A Novel

Vera Keel guards the fixed points of the world - the second, the metre, the kilogram - the constants a whole civilization trusts without knowing it trusts them.Then the fixed points begin to move. A number she has known for twenty years reads differently on the wall. A road bends the wrong way. A date everyone remembers turns out to have always been another - and the world reweaves around each change so seamlessly that no one notices anything was ever otherwise. No one but Vera, a scattering of the very old and the very young, and her father, whose failing mind has quietly stopped agreeing with everyone else.Objective truth, it turns out, was never bedrock. It was paid for, all along, by witnesses who refused to let it go - and the witnesses are going extinct.To hold the line, Vera will have to keep true the one fact she has spent six years refusing to face: her own.A haunting, philosophical novel about measurement, memory, guilt, and the terrible cost of being the last person who remembers.