Aldera (Cyber-Enhanced Cat, Detective Agency)

DETECTIVE AGENCY LOG — Aldera, Field Unit Assignment: Boundary Anomaly Observation, Marsh Causeway Sector Status: Closing — sector clear

Sector swept at first light. Four hours' observation, full perimeter, including the two places I would use if I were something that had just lost its grip on a grove.

Nothing is using them.

I record this as an absence, not a departure. I did not see it leave. Nobody did — the robot's arrays do not track motion and the humans were looking at a lamp. What I can state is that the causeway's texture, which I have logged nightly for three years and described in this file as a wrongness I could not itemise, is not present this morning, and that the difference is large enough that I noticed it before I reached the stones.

The grove is a separate finding and I am filing it separately, because the two will otherwise get read as one result.

The trees are unchanged in every respect a survey instrument measures except one, and the robot has that figure. What I will add to it is this: they were not friendly before and they are not friendly now. The pale ones grew at a fault line three centuries before anyone laid a causeway across it, and something used the joint they make together as a hook for a long time, and this morning it does not. None of that is the same as the grove being on our side of anything. Field discipline for this sector should not relax. I expect it will.

Case status: the feeding loop is closed and the anchor is severed, by two separate interventions on two separate nights, and I want the record to show they were separate. The first was clarity. The second was craft. Neither would have worked alone and neither was mine.

I have been on this assignment for three years. The part of it I was actually here for ended on Tuesday when somebody asked me a question.

I am not closing my file on the sector. I am closing my file on the entity.

END LOG