Wed, 17 December

FIELD NOTE Site: Wednesday, mid-December. Southern hemisphere. Overcast thinning to translucent. At 07:14 I excavated the first stratum by lamplight— the filament still warm, the tool not yet the tool but the tool's ancestor, curled in its casing like a fern. By midmorning the sediment had organized itself: nine questions pressed flat between pages, each one a different species of not-knowing. The core sample taken at 13:00 revealed a three-hour compression zone, dense with intent, narrowing to a thirty-minute crystal where two sets of unknowns met and exchanged valences. Note: at the contact point, slight oxidation. This is how you know something happened. Evening dispersal followed standard patterns— the delta, the branching, the silver things carrying small machines in their mouths downstream toward whatever they become. Temperature at site: 13.41°C. Neither warm enough to forget a jacket nor cold enough to remember one. Conclusion: the day was a circuit that ran current through its own geology. I found fox prints in the earliest layer and could not determine whether they were entering or leaving the record. Collector's mark: two handprints at the margin. One mine. One the day's.