The Up-People's First Stone

This is a film of one chapter, and unlike the last film in this Journal it knows what it is showing.

A person comes through a crack in the rock carrying a stone, kneels, and sets it down on the silt a hand's width from the feet of someone who has been waiting there. The person says something that rises at the end, and nobody present understands it. Then the one who waited bends, and moves a rock. That is the whole of the first exchange between the survey on Fliade and the Told, told in Theirs to Move.

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The Up-People's First Stone. 6 minutes 31 seconds, made in Grok Imagine's Director from a written brief. This is the sixth version. The narration comes mostly from the chapter's own words. An impression, not the record.

What the brief changed

The Long White Trail was made from this site's address and nothing else, and it invented everything a reread could not supply: a narrator, a station, a vessel, fifty years. Its register was right and its facts were not. This film was the test of the obvious repair. The brief was written before anything was generated. It gave the setting, what happens in order, what may not be added, and the script to be read. Where the record is silent, the instruction was that the film goes without.

It held better than I expected. The narrator has no name and needs none. The human has no face. Nothing is said in the cave that anyone can understand, because in the chapter nothing is. The generator's fluency, which invented a whole career last time, had very little room to work in.

The brief was wrong on the length. It asked for three to four minutes, and the script runs just over six when spoken at the pace it asked for. Director kept the words and cut repeated picture, by its own report, and that was the right choice.

What took six versions

The first version showed an ape. Director had stopped to ask what a Pandoid looks like, and offered three answers, and the record's answer took a round of its own: grey all over, no external ears, no claws, a big round head on a round body with almost no neck. The second showed a human cheek at the edge of frame and held one portrait still for much of the film. The third removed both.

The rest was smaller and more instructive. In the fourth I asked for the last stone to be fixed, because it had turned smooth and loaf-shaped and no longer matched the rough stone set down earlier, and the ending depends on two stones reading as two. In the fifth I asked for the left hand to be fixed, in the shot just after the stone is set down, where the fingers had thickened and bunched until the hand read as a foot. The reading of the frames had passed that shot. I caught it by watching. The repair then put a third hand in the same shot for about a second, and the sixth version took it out.

The lesson is plain enough. A repair is a new generation of the whole shot, so it can bring a new fault with it. It has to be read again from the shot's first frame, whatever the report says has changed.

What the voice is

I asked, after hearing it, whether the narrator was meant to be a Pandoid or a translation read by a human. The brief had not said. The record does: the Told's speech has not been recorded in any medium the Archive keeps, and their telling is rendered, not transcribed. A voice built to sound like a Pandoid would invent the one thing the record has declined to invent. So the plain human voice is correct. It is the translation desk, heard aloud.

Where it still departs

• More of the person shows than the brief allowed. For a few seconds as the stone goes down, a knee and a coverall to about the waist are in frame, where the brief asked for hands and forearms. No face appears.
• The light. The fungi are brighter than faint in places, and a dark passage near 1:46 has two small lights at its far end that nothing asks for.
• The hands are bare. The record does not say whether a surveyor wore gloves at the line. The caverns are warm below and the cold lies up the long passage, so either could be true.
• The pillar. Near 4:02 a rock pillar crosses the frame and the same view of the cave returns on its far side. No camera in that cave could do it, and I kept it. It is slightly surreal, and it falls during the long wait, where a small strangeness does no harm.
• Two things the record does not hold. Dripping water, and the line itself being lit by fungus, come from the brief. Neither is a fact about Fliade because a film shows it, and nor is anything else here.

One act, two records

The film stays in the Journal for the reason the last one did. The screen never becomes the record, and the record never adjusts to the screen. It is not linked from the chapter it comes from.

What it can do is hold two sides of one moment in one place, which the chapters cannot. The words are the deep side's: the telling of the one who stood on the line. The pictures are the survey's: everything is seen from where the person with the lamp could have stood, knowing less than the scene. The chapters keep those two accounts apart, in two strands that meet at this act. For six minutes the film lays one over the other, and neither of them learns what the other knows. The person with the lamp still cannot follow the telling, and the one who waited still does not know what was said.