The Survey issues its junior officers a three-column log: observation, method, note. The note column is one line on the printed form.
Obs. First berth. Ship is smaller than expected. Method. Looked at her. Note. I said “she’s beautiful” out loud to a docking clerk who has certainly heard it before and did not have the decency to look bored, which I have decided to take as encouragement. Everything smells of new polymer and somebody’s coffee. I have a bunk, a locker, and a board with my own name over it. I am going to be unbearable about this for at least a week.
Obs. Aft-quarter receiver carrying a persistent thermal residual, four-year baseline. Method. Pulled the raw feed rather than the summary. Note. The chief engineer sent me back for the raw feed twice before I stopped bringing him summaries. He did not explain why, the first time. The second time he said: show me where the lies live. I understand this to mean that a summary is a decision somebody else already made, and that if I want to be any good I have to make it myself. I have written it on the inside of my locker door, which is embarrassing, and I am leaving it there.
Obs. Reach entry. First authenticated marks. Method. Standard node-seeding sequence; three observers. Note. Nobody has ever put a mark here. That sentence has been true of somewhere for the whole of human history and it has almost never been true of anywhere a person was standing at the time. I am not going to pretend I was calm about it. Dr Vale said “that’s the job” in the voice she uses when she is pleased and would rather not be caught at it, and Dawes said nothing at all and then bought me a coffee out of his own allocation, which from him is a parade.
Obs. Photometric residual, Ostry primary. Will not close against the model. Method. Re-ran against two mundane explanations. Both fail. Note. Dr Vale has stopped calling it an anomaly and started calling it a number. I do not know yet whether that is better or worse.
Obs. Contact. The settlement’s own records, five generations, continuous. Method. Observed; permission sought and given; copies taken under observation. Note.
(The rest of this entry runs to four hundred words and is entirely in the note column. It has not been reviewed and the officer did not submit it. It was retained at her request.)