A handful of entries recovered from his personal slate aboard the ISV Endurance. They were never filed, and were never meant to be read. Reproduced here with the family's permission. Where the official logs are clipped and certain, these are neither.
Day 3.
I have been given a chair I did not want, on a ship I cannot pronounce half the systems of, in a part of the dark that no chart contains. Vance is dead. Holt has not opened his eyes. By some clause Geneva wrote to cover an entirely different emergency, the command is mine. I have run rooms. I have run a very great many rooms. A ship, it turns out, is not a room. Nobody applauds when you leave it.
Day 19.
Sloane corrected me on the deck today, in front of the watch, in the flattest voice I have ever been corrected in. She was right. That is the trouble with her — she is always right, and she would rather chew glass than say so to my face. I am beginning to understand that command out here is not knowing the answer. It is being wrong slowly, and out loud, in a way the rest of them can survive, instead of being lost all at once. I am good at being wrong. It may be the only relevant skill I brought.
Day 64.
Ferris killed the gardens to buy us a fold. He did not ask me, which I find I am grateful for — I would have hesitated, and hesitating would have cost more than the lettuces. Still. We ate the last of the green tonight, all of us, standing, because no one wanted to be the one who sat. We are navigating by dead reckoning now. Reckoning. A lovely old word for a guess you have decided to trust.
Day 211.
The two Nhál keep to the aft compartment. Naral and Saen. I sat with them a while — you do not so much talk as occupy the same quiet — and I understood, without a word of it being said, that they have lost more than any of us and carry it without setting it down once. I came back up the corridor lighter and could not have told you why. A Londoner of six-and-forty, learning grief from people who are not people. Vance would have laughed at me. I would have let him.
Year Two, somewhere.
I stepped down. I will write it plainly because there is no one to perform for: I gave the chair to Sloane, because she was the better officer and I was tired in a way sleep does not reach, and I told myself it was the selfless thing. It was also the easy thing. The two are not always different. She took it without comment, which was its own mercy.
Later. I have stopped counting well.
The chair is mine again, and I would give anything for the reason not to be true. I will not write the reason. I find I cannot. I will write only that I sat down in it tonight and the deck was very quiet and I did the job, because the job is what is left, and because somebody has to be wrong slowly so the rest of them are not lost all at once. I never wanted to be the one. I am the one. Goodnight, whoever you are, reading this — I did not expect you, and I am sorry for what you'll find.
— J.M.
The official record gives Undersecretary Mercer four lines and a rank he never trained for. The slate gives the rest of him.