A debut short story collection

What do we leave inside the things we create?

Fifteen stories. Two millennia. One question asked from every possible angle.
Coming March 30th.

Preorder Now Explore the Stories
Noise Floor by Camilo Gómez — book cover

About the Book

Named for the threshold below which a signal vanishes into static

A neuroscientist studies what happens to time inside the minds of the dying, and finds himself tracing three hundred Spartans holding a coastal pass twenty-five centuries ago.

A military analyst trains an AI to hunt, then watches the system execute movements he didn't know he'd taught it.

An actuary calculates how many seconds he has left with his daughter, and finds his dead mother still has one more lesson to teach.

A man dying of a brain tumor discovers that acceptance doesn't shrink time. It expands it.

Noise Floor is a debut collection that maps the invisible transfer of attention — the way a researcher's way of looking shapes a machine, a parent's patience shapes a child, a soldier's instinct survives him inside the system he trained. These stories span medieval monasteries and neural networks, dressage arenas and linguistics laboratories, cryptocurrency philosophy and forensic video analysis. They are quiet, exact, and quietly devastating.

For readers of Ted Chiang, Jorge Luis Borges, and Olga Tokarczuk — stories where ideas have the weight of feeling and the personal is inseparable from the systemic.

The Collection

Fifteen Stories

Each one a different angle on the same question.

Thermopylae Time

A neuroscientist measures the time inside the dying — and finds Leonidas had weeks in his last afternoon.

All the Time There Was

A bass player with a failing hand learns how much living fits inside the time that's left.

The Fiscal Year

Time measured in budgets, quarters, and the things that refuse to fit inside them.

Noise Floor

A military analyst discovers that the best work of the AI she trained came from data she almost erased.

SYNC

An analyst realizes that to work closely with a system is to leave something in it you cannot retrieve.

Strange Loop

A programmer debugging a recursive failure discovers the system has been modeling her decisions — not the other way around.

Proof of Work

One sleepless October, a cryptographer finds the nonce — and buries a headline in a block that will outlast every bank it names.

Canter

A rider and a horse share a language built entirely from weight and waiting.

In This One

An actuary calculates how many seconds he has left with his daughter — and finds his mother's template still running in his hands.

Libramentum

A Roman engineer balances an aqueduct on a mountainside — and his apprentice on the edge of readiness.

Senior

A woman discovers she's been measuring her own expertise against the wrong thing.

Shelf Life

What a building remembers after the people who used it are gone.

The Marginalia of Brother Lukas

A medieval librarian builds a system to decide which books to keep — and learns that the system cannot hold what matters most.

The Gap

A computational linguist finds a discontinuity in the deep structure of human language — and what looks back from inside it.

The Same Room

Two people in the same room who do not live in the same room.

Camilo Gómez

About the Author

Camilo Gómez

Camilo Gómez builds systems for a living and has spent twenty-five years watching what they remember and what they erase. He has lived on four continents, played bass, led teams, and buried people.

Eventually the noise settled.
Something remained.

Noise Floor is his first book. He lives in Colombia with his wife and daughter.

"The ghost is always in the weights."

Read Before You Buy

Start with "Thermopylae Time"

A neuroscientist studying the dying discovers that the brain, once it accepts death, begins to stretch time itself — and realizes the three hundred Spartans at the Hot Gates may have lived weeks inside their final afternoon.

The opening story of the collection. Yours to keep.

↓ Download Sample Chapter PDF
Noise Floor — book cover

Preorder

Available March 30th

Preorder now — paperback and ebook wherever books are sold.

Preorder on Kindle Independent Bookstores — Coming Soon

Get in Touch

For press, events, review copies, and collaboration

— or just to say the book meant something.

Camilo is available for podcast appearances, panels, and conversations on literary fiction, AI and creative collaboration, and the craft of short stories. Press kits and author interviews available on request.

Message sent.

Thank you — we'll be in touch.