Rook-7 (Robot)

LOG ENTRY — Rook-7 Location: Threshold Station, Survey Office Context: Boundary-drift file, sources review, seventh day on station

Sources for the 40-second discrepancy, as held by the station:

1. Survey office incident reports. Three, filed over eleven years, each recording the discrepancy as an event with a date. Two administrative responses, recording that there is nothing to record.

2. Chronometer maintenance log. Recalibrations of the right-hand instrument, Dock Seven, at irregular intervals; each returns the instrument to station time; each is followed within forty-eight hours by a further entry. The log records the corrections and not the readings they corrected.

3. New. General operations watch log, Dock Seven, on loan through the supervising Principal, at my request. Forty-seven consecutive watches. Each time line carries two readings, left-hand instrument first, marked station time from the forty-first watch onward and unmarked before it; right-hand after. Discrepancy at each watch change, in seconds: 40, 40, 41, 40, 39, 40, 40 … (full series transcribed to the file). This is the only continuous record of both instruments on the station. The survey's own logging began on our first day. This series begins forty watches before it.

Observations:

• The series is not flat. Over forty-seven watches the discrepancy ranges 38 to 42 seconds, with a period I cannot establish from so short a run and will not guess at. Cross-reference: dock panel 7-C resonance; Section G reports. Consistent with oscillation. Not yet evidence of it.

• Keeper: Shepherd, T., Cadet, general operations. Not on the survey roster; no standing to be tasked by it. The Principal's note on the loan says the practice was the cadet's from her first watch and was regularised, not instituted, on the forty-first. Noted. No action. Nothing in the record improves by its keeper learning that it is read.

• The station's filed position is that the discrepancy is non-reportable. The station has nonetheless been recording it, twice a night, in a book kept for the state of a pressure seal, by the most junior Ranger on the deck. I do not know whether anyone above the Principal is aware of this. I have not asked, for the reason given above.

Conclusion: the boundary-drift file now has a baseline. It was not made by the survey.

END LOG ENTRY