Aldera (Cyber-Enhanced Cat, Detective Agency)

DETECTIVE AGENCY LOG — Aldera, Field Unit Assignment: Boundary Anomaly Observation, Marsh Causeway Sector Status: Active — observation continuing

Subject A cut her hand at 09:14 (station time, now available at this outpost; see below) on a flint in the north wall while seating a Survey Corps chronometer. Subject B took the chronometer's case from her wet. A contact mark came up on the back of Subject B's right hand within the minute, along the line of the blood. Subject A's cut was closed before Subject B had finished wiping the case.

Subject B described the mark and gave the clinical file's name for it. He did not go on. Subject A heard him out, read the mark, read her own hand, and asked what the file wanted for a finding. The exchange took four minutes. Nobody raised their voice, because nobody at this outpost does.

For the file: the open question in this log's heading, since this assignment began, has been Subject A's classification. I note that I did not close it, and that I was not asked, and that nothing in three years of my own observation would have closed it: what I had was a person who did not startle, which I filed under temperament, which is the word this agency uses for a thing it has not measured. The chalk closed it. I want that recorded exactly, because precision is the counter, and because I have logged Subject A for three years as unclassified, and the word was always true and never the finding.

Mark on Subject B's hand at dusk: present, fading at the edges, as the file says it should. Chronometer on the north shelf: running, station time, seated flat. The first instrument in this outpost that has ever been told what time it is.

No action. The circle is reset for the night. It will fail correctly.

END LOG