Incident records

Fifty-two years of write-ups, transcribed in the order the boxes came out of the store. Every file closes with one of two sentences, and the interesting ones are only interesting because the dull ones are commoner.

TS/CAS/151Survey abandoned · 1 min read
At the Occupier's Request
The shortest file in the archive. Four log entries, a baseline, and a note added twelve years later that the Survey chose not to pursue.
TS/CAS/096Cause not established · 5 min read
Unresolvable at Hallow Gate
A brightly lit stairwell the array could not resolve. We added three hundred watts of light. The figure went down by two points.
TS/CAS/112Cause not established · 4 min read
The Floor at Brelling
The Survey's calibration reference has read 1.83 degrees at every visit since 1974. Eleven instruments, four generations of hardware, every season. That is the problem.
TS/CAS/134Cause not established · 5 min read
Eleven Seconds
A sixty-second recording containing seventy-one seconds of a clock. The intervals are all one second. The calibration tone in the same file is exactly one kilohertz.
TS/CAS/088Cause not established · 4 min read
A Field at Ninefold
A rectangle of elevated dispersion in an open field, with edges sharp to thirty centimetres. Twenty-three years later it was the same size, and 1.9 metres further north.
TS/CAS/063Cause established · 4 min read
Forty-Two Marks
A group submitted three hours of recordings with forty-two marked regions. We identified forty-one of them. The forty-second is nine tenths of a second long.
TS/CAS/047Cause established · 5 min read
The Extractor at Kelder Street
A presence at the foot of the bed, nausea in the hall, and a dread the occupier could not talk himself out of. The cause was a fan, and knowing that did not help him.
TS/CAS/019Cause not established · 4 min read
Cross-Bearings at Ardleigh House
Eleven rooms, three floors, and every bearing pointing at the same linen cupboard — which measured lower than anywhere else in the building.

TS/CAS/00Standing

How to read a case file

A Survey report has a shape and it does not vary: site, date, conditions, instruments carried, baseline, log, and a closing line that is either cause established or cause not established. There is no section for what the operator felt, and operators have been asked more than once to stop putting it in the margins.

They keep putting it in the margins. The archive is transcribed as written, so the margins are transcribed too.

The format is the reason these are worth reading. A ghost story tells you how to feel on the way in. A report gives you a floor reading, a timestamp, an equipment list, and a sentence at the end admitting that nobody worked it out — and leaves you to do the rest of it yourself, at your own speed, probably later than you would like.

These are fiction. The Thinplace Survey is invented and so is every file in this archive. The instruments in them are real and are explained in full, the physics is real, and the field notes are meant to be useful. The incidents are stories.

Fiction

Incident records

At the Occupier's Request

Unresolvable at Hallow Gate

The Floor at Brelling

Eleven Seconds

A Field at Ninefold

Forty-Two Marks

The Extractor at Kelder Street

Cross-Bearings at Ardleigh House