Odile Ferrant (Human, boundary officer, Survey Corps)

The seal was hers to break, and she broke it, and sat down on the floor of the station in front of the third shelf with the handset, because a log two years long is read sitting down.

Nominal is a word with a band inside it. An instrument is told what to report as nominal, and it reports it, and the band is set by whoever installed the instrument for whoever they thought would read it. This one had been installed for a planetary survey that was never going to read it, by someone who knew that, and the band was wide. Wide enough that a thing could sit inside it for two years and the instrument would say nominal every day with a perfectly clear conscience, because that was the instruction.

Inside the band, since the first year, before the party had ever carried a stone through a crack: an offset. Small. Stable. Not a drift, which wanders; an offset, which sits. The kind of wrongness that survives every attempt to correct it because there is nothing in the instrument to correct. She had sat in front of logs like it before. Everyone on her side of the Corps had. The best-documented one on the books had sat in a station's record for eleven years as a calibration fault, and she had been trained on it, and so had everyone, and here it was again, on a roof, under a seal, with nominal written beside it seven hundred times.

And seven excursions. Short. Sharp. She laid the imager's seven times beside them without needing to be told to, because that was the whole of why she had been sent for, and they matched. Seven of seven.

She knew what page that was. She read it for a living.

She also knew what she was going to write, and that it was not the page's name, not yet and not here, and she sat on the floor with the handset and went through why, because a thing you do by instinct is a thing you cannot defend.

A planetary survey's log was going to be read by planetary surveyors. The people below the margin, who had their own account of whatever this was if they had any account at all, kept that account by speaking it, and would never read this log, or any log. If she wrote the word into the survey's file, this roof would hold the only written account of a thing those people might hold a spoken one of, and nobody would ever lay the two side by side, and the written one would be the one that lasted, and it would be hers, written at the grade her patch allowed her and read by people who did not know what the grade meant.

That was not a reason not to write it. It was a reason to write exactly what she could stand behind, at exactly its grade, in the file where the grade would be read correctly, and not one word past it, anywhere.

She closed the log. It went on logging.