In Mapping A Coastline, What Degree Of Accuracy Is Obtained?

In mapping a coastline, what degree of accuracy is obtained? Even in the early days of exploration it had been obvious that the ocean had stored patterns of alien thought; hints of otherness bleeding into the thoughts of the swimmers–but these impressions had always remained indistinct. By accident or subconscious design—it was never entirely clear—the SISS contact craft resembled an infinity symbol: ∞ two lobe-like modules packed with life support equipment, thrusters and additional sensor arrays. Two people could fit into either of the lobes, and in the event of a mid-mission neural fadeout, one or both of the lobes could be ejected. Ramping up the thrust, the contact craft fell towards the Shroud, while the station made a retreat back beyond the safe range, towards the waiting lighthugger. The craft dwindling to ever-smaller size, until only the livid glare of its thrust and the pulsing red and green of its running lights remained, and then grew steadily fainter; the surrounding blackness seeming to occlude it like spreading paint. No one could be certain of what happened thereafter. In the events which followed, most of the information gleaned by Sylveste and Lefere on their approach was lost, including the data transmitted back to the station and the lighthugger. Not only were the timescales uncertain, but even the precise order of events was questionable. All that was known was what Sylveste himself remembered—and as Sylveste by his own admission, underwent periods of altered or diminished consciousness in the vicinity of the Shroud, his memories could not be taken as the literal truth of events. What was known was this. Sylveste and Lefevre approached closer to the Shroud than any human being had ever done, even Lascaille. If what Lascaille had told them was true, then their transforms were fooling the Shroud’s defenses; forcing it to envelop them in a pocket of flattened space-time while the rest of the bound-

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ary seethed with gravitational riptides. No one, even now, pretended to understand how this might be happening: how the Shroud’s buried mechanisms were able to curve space-time through such sharp geometries, when a folding a billion times less severe should have required more energy than was stored in the entire rest-mass of the galaxy. Nor did anyone understand how consciousness could bleed into the space-time around the Shroud, so that the Shroud itself could recognize the sorts of minds which were attempting to gain passage into its heart, and at the same time reshape the thoughts and memories of those same minds. Evidently there was some hidden connection between thought itself and the underlying processes of spacetime; the one influencing the other. This seemed to involve all manner of deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit—operations—in which each figure designates an “event” much more than an essence (the square no longer exists independently of a quadrature, the cube of a cubature, the straight line of a rectification). Sylveste had found references to an antiquated theory, centuries dead, which had proposed a link between the quantum processes of consciousness and the quantum-gravitational mechanism which underpinned spacetime, through the unification of something called the Weyl curvature tensor... but consciousness was no better understood now; the theory was as speculative as it had ever been. Perhaps, though, in the vicinity of the Shroud, any faint linkage between consciousness and spacetime was massively amplified. Sylveste and Lefevre were thinking their way through the storm, their reshaped minds calming the gravitational forces which seethe around them, only meters from the skin of their ship. They were like snake-charmers, moving through a pit of cobras, their music defining a tiny region of safety. Safe, that was, until the music stopped playing—or began to grow discordant—and the snakes began to break out of their hypnotic placidity. It would never be entirely clear how close Sylveste and Lefrvre got to

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the Shroud before the music soured and the cobras of gravity began to stir. Sylveste claimed they were never within the Shroud boundary itself—by his own visual evidence, more than half of the sky remained full of stars. Yet what little data was salvaged from the study ship suggested that the contact module was by then well inside the fractal shoreline surrounding the Shroud— well within the object’s own infitely blurred boundary. She knew when it began to happen. Terrified, but icily calm, she told Sylveste the news. Her Shrouder transform was breaking up, her veil of alien perception beginning to thin, leaving only human thoughts. It was what they had feared all along, but prayed would not happen. Quickly they informed the study station and ran psych tests to verify what she was saying. The truth was appallingly clear. Her transform was collapsing. In a few minutes, her mind would lack the Shrouder component and would be unable to calm the snakes through which they walked. She was forgetting the music. Even though they had prayed this would not happen, they had taken precautions. Lefevre retreated into the opposite half of the module and fired the separation charges, amputating her part of the ship from Slveste’s. By then her transform was almost gone. Via the audio-visual link between the two separated parts of the craft, she informed Sylveste that she could feel gravitational forces building, twisting and pulling at her body in viciously unpredictable ways. Thrusters sought to move her module away from the curdled space around the Shroud, but the object was just too large, and she too small. Within minutes the stresses were tearing at the craft’s thin hull, though Lefevre remained alive, huddled foetally in the last dwindling pocket of quiet space focused on her brain. Sylveste lost contact with her just as the craft burst asunder. Her air was sucked quickly out, but the

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decompression did not happen quickly enough to entirely snatch away her screams. Lefevre was dead. Sylveste knew it. But his transform was still holding the snakes at bay. Bravely, more alone than any human being in history, Sylveste continued his descent into the Shroud boundary. Sometime later Sylveste awoke in the silence of his craft. Disoriented, he tried to contact the study station which was supposedly awaiting his return. But there was no answer. The study station and the lighthugger were lifeless, almost destroyed. Some kind of gravitational spasm had passed him by and peeled them open, eviscerating them just as throughly as Lefevre’s craft had been. The crew and back-up members of his team had been killed instantly. He alone had survived. But for what? To die, only far more slowly? Sylveste steered his module back to what remained of the station and the lighthugger. For a moment his thoughts were empty of the Shrouders, focused only on survival. Working alone, living within the cramped confines of the pod, Sylveste spent weeks learning how to jump-start the lighthugger’s crippled repair systems. The Shroud spasm had vaporised or shredded thousands of tonnes of the lighthugger’s mass, but it only had to carry one man home now. When the recuperative processes were in swing he was able to sleep, finally-not daring to believe that he would actually succeed. And in those dreams, Sylveste gradually became aware of a momentous, paralyzing truth. After Carine Lefevre was killed, and before he regained consciousness, something had happened. Something had reached into his mind and spoken to him. But the message that was imparted to him was so brutally alien that Sylveste could not begin to put it into human terms.

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