Naomi Hale — Science Log

ISV ENDURANCE · MERIDIAN-CLASS · SCIENCE DIVISION

CHIEF SCIENCE OFFICER'S LOG · DEAD-RECKONING VOYAGE · FAR POCKET

DAY 011 · BASELINE

Took the first clean set of free-energy readings since the fold that brought us here. The local floor — the entropy baseline against which every instrument is calibrated — sits above specification. Not by much. Enough that I checked the sensor train three times and ran the cold standard against it twice. The standard is fine. The floor is high. I am noting it as a regional property and recording the value. There is nothing in the literature to read this against, because nothing in the literature has been here. I file it as anomaly and move on.

DAY 026 · THE FLOOR IS NOT STATIC

Three folds and a long transmission burst since the baseline set, and the floor has moved. Up. I want to call it drift in the sensor train, and I cannot, because the cold standard has not moved with it. The measurement is good. The region is warming at its own baseline — running down — and the readings climb after each fold and after each transmission, not before. I have stopped pretending I do not see the pattern. I have not written down what the pattern means, because I do not know, and because the honest answer frightens me in a way I am not prepared to put in a filed record. The table below is what I have. I am keeping it.

NOTE — The trend is monotonic and tracks our own activity. The region was already running down when we arrived. We are not the cause. We are a contribution. I will not write the next sentence.

DAY 073 · THE GREEN WORLD

Made orbit over a temperate world that has no business existing out here: liquid water, breathable air, surface life, a sky the colour of a sky. I led the survey down myself. I catalogued, in order: oak. Herring gull. A dog — a living dog, that came to the lander and sat. Crab in the tidal shallows. Earthworm in the soil cores. These are Earth-derived species. They are eight folds and a region's width from any place they could have come from, and they are here, breeding true. I have a catalogue and I have no mechanism. I am a scientist; I record what is in front of me. It is oak. I note it and I move on, because the alternative is to stop working, and I cannot afford to stop working.

DAY 101 · THE COST IS NOT ABSTRACT

Sustained traffic this stretch — folds and transmissions both — to hold contact and to move. The floor crossed 1.12 today. I keep returning to the shape of it: the more we do to survive here, the faster here runs down. Every fold buys distance and spends something that does not come back. Every hail we send to be heard costs the same way. I have run the contribution analysis four times. The ship is not large against a region. But the slope is real and it points one way. I have begun keeping this log separately from the filed record. Not to conceal. To keep my hands steady on the part of it that is only numbers.

DAY 118 · FINDING

CLOSING NOTE

I am a precise person and I have spent this voyage being asked to hold precise numbers that point at things no one can yet name. The floor climbs. Earth's life grows on a world it never reached. The enemy shares our manufacture and our blood. I do not have the framework that makes these one thing. I do not believe there isn't one. Until there is, I keep recording — cleanly, in order, with my hands steady — because the record is the only honest thing I can give the people who come after me to the place where the lights are going out.