TARF·LOG
Declassified
OBSERVATION LOG — EARTH

FRAGMENT TL-0262 · Antarctic borehole · ARCHIVE

SUBJECT · The southern continent

LOG DAY 262

You melted a hole through the ice, five hundred metres of it, and lowered a camera on a rope. The rope stopped. The water under it did not. Something small swam into the lamp and stayed to examine the lens. I have the footage. I have entered the descent as an application to inspect, Form 9-B, the same form as the door under the house. The second line asks what was sealed under. It came back struck out, as it did the first time. Your report lists the swimmer as wildlife. Its report, as far as it can be reconstructed, lists you as weather: brief, from above, not expected again. Filed.

FILE TL-0262DECLASSIFIED

RETENTION SCHEDULE · THE SOUTHERN CONTINENT

PARTIAL
SUBMISSIONSSTATUSNOTE
1–9 RETURNED Query: what was the seal holding down. Returned without disposition, nine times.

9 submissions on file. The schedule is maintained by the archive, not by the observer.

YOUR RECORD · THIS FILE

YOUR RECORDTHIS FILE
The ice sheet formed 34 million years agoInstalled. The requisition is in the file.
The coastline on the 1513 chart is a coincidenceSomebody surveyed that coast. It was not you.
The water beneath the ice is liquid and warmWarm. Four hundred papers. Not one asks why.
Two centuries of measurement record how fast it is goingNone of it records what it was holding down.
Access is administered by treatyTwo applications. Both denied without explanation.

Discrepancies are recorded, not resolved.

Photographic appendix to fragment TL-0262, subject Antarctic borehole, rubric archive. Appendix
PHOTOGRAPHIC APPENDIX · TL-0262-AUNATTRIBUTED

ALSO IN THIS FILE

TL-2555 Lake Vostok is not frozen. Four kilometres of ice above it, water the size of a...
TL-0100 Antarctica is a lid. It is also a continent. That is incidental. The ice was...
TL-3403 You cannot travel to the southern continent without permission. Most of you have...
TL-3402 You have measured the water beneath the ice. You know that it is warm. I have read...
TL-3401 One of your maps, drawn in 1513, shows a coastline that has been under two...

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NOTICE · CONTINUED DECLASSIFICATION

Releases follow no schedule. Each fragment is announced on the archive channel on the day it opens, once.

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