Toma Egede

Toma Egede is the instrument specialist of the surface party that works the upper levels of Fliade. The party is three: Survey Lead Hesper Nakagawa, who reads the ground; Aravena, who carries the relay unit and dictates the log; and Egede, at the far wall with the imager, saying things. Egede always said things, and was usually worth listening to.

Egede's one Codex document is a proposal that was not adopted, with a note Egede asked to have appended after the refusal. The chapters add the rest: the specialist argues for choosing, reaches for an explanation and is relieved when it arrives, and, when the survey lead strikes the explanation out, says nothing for a while and then asks the better question.

Known History

• 2832 UCSD: wrote the prospectus in A Proposal to Collar the Anstolik, Refused at Countersign: twelve Anstolik fitted with a passive detection collar, no cognitive subsystem, released and left alone, to watch the corridors the herds already cross. Egede states the power problem plainly and says the 96.7% figure is bench performance, not a field figure. Nakagawa withheld countersign and filed the prospectus anyway. Egede's appended note accepts it and disputes one word: the herd would not be conscripted; it would be unasked, which is worse.
• 2832 UCSD, the survey's second year, Eleven Minutes: Egede read the eleven-minute thermal profile as the small one, Teddy. When the relay unit was found standing at the line, Egede filed that a dropped thing had been returned, a courtesy; Nakagawa filed that a line had been drawn; both were kept. Egede argued for choosing, did not like the standing order that the log say every shift that nothing happened, and said unasked aloud, the way Egede said a word that was going to end up in a document.
• The same year, Nothing Happened and Something Happened: Egede found on the imager that the adults withdrew from the light's moving shadow and not the light; proposed a gift left at the line and was refused on the surface rule; offered to be the one to go down.
• 2833 UCSD, the third year, Imager Fault: Egede filed seven occurrences of a dark, dense-edged, upright shape at the third passage mouth as imager artefact, cause under investigation, through two recalibrations, a lens change, the test card and the spare imager, and ticked the boundary-side gravimeter nominal on the manifest. After the seventh, Nakagawa struck artefact and fault with Egede present. In Two on the Line Egede, for once, said nothing.
• 2834 UCSD, the fourth year, Sound, Rising: Egede wrote the year's instrument summaries, as every year, and when the unit's class sound, rising came up at a hundred and sixty-four argued that the classifier was working, that the entries were a recording and not a word, that no survey in the Corps strikes a recording, and that the fix was to write whose they were. Asked for the word once used of a herd fitted with a collar it was never asked about, Egede gave it. In Not Given Egede had the objections, in order and sincere: that the unit's answer entries are a rock and not a word, that the party found a people by rereading two years of them, and that a survey which arranges never to have a recording is not a survey; asked the right question about the handheld's frames; and, with no fault left to report, asked instead that the file say every shift where the hole in it was and for how long, which became part of the order. In Heard By Egede stands at the junction beside the unit with no channel open while a sound comes up the crack that is not the rise, reads the one instrument there that still has a channel open, which is the file, and says the order says come back as a reading and not an objection; waits, for once, to ask Aravena what it sounded like; and reads the entry over the survey lead's shoulder and says that's the entry.

Character Notes

Egede writes a proposal the way Egede reads an instrument: the failure modes first, the honest problem not buried, the figure named for exactly what it is a figure of. The seven artefact entries were the same habit at its limit, honest every one, and each a reading entered as a fact. The survey lead's judgement on them is also the record's on Egede: the better reading, let stand because it was better, and still a reading.

The record gives Egede a first name, a rank and a job, and nothing else: no origin, no species stated, no posting before Fliade. The record places Egede on Fliade from 2832 to 2834 UCSD and nowhere else.

See also

• A Proposal to Collar the Anstolik, Refused at Countersign
• Hesper Nakagawa, who withheld the countersign
• Aravena
• Teddy
• Fliade