A microchip engineer explains something both familiar and unknown, but what exactly? His voice is soothing and distant in equal measure. As we go deeper inside a factory, the object is revealed: a smart contact lens. Though only a prototype for now, this lens corrects vision, displays a screen, and analyzes tears. Are we in Belgium, where the narrator is? Or Taiwan, where the factory is. In this fusion of prototype and place, what does it mean to create knowledge from tears? Or is knowledge ‘in tears’; grieving as it reproduces itself in a factory where the labor is half-automated and the end-user asleep.