PREFATORY NOTE
This is the first report of its kind. There was no procedure to follow, because no one had done this before. I wrote the procedure on the way down and corrected it on the way up. The Lapidary should treat this report as the founding document of the interior survey and as a record made under conditions I was not trained for. Both things are true.
I am writing in first person. There was no institution standing in the interior with me. There was me, and the surface, and the thing I had to measure.
THE DESCENT
THE BODY entered the liquid state at the predicted time. The window had been estimated at between four and six minutes based on the longest fragment events on record. We had agreed in advance that I would descend on a fixed line, that I would not pass the point from which I could not return inside the window, and that the surface team would recall me at the four-minute mark regardless of what I had or had not found.
I descended through the surface. I will not attempt to describe the transition through the surface here. I have tried four times. Each attempt reads as though I am trying to produce an effect. I am not trying to produce an effect. I will note only what is measurable: the transition took longer than falling and shorter than walking, and on the other side of it there was a floor.
There was a floor. This was the first finding and it is the one I keep returning to. The interior has a floor. I stood on it.
ON DISTANCE
The line measured my depth and the line was reliable. Nothing else was. The range-finder returned distances that did not agree with one another when pointed at the same surface twice. The compass rotated slowly and continuously and never settled. I have noted in a separate annex that the compass did not point; it turned.
I needed to measure horizontal distance and I had no instrument I trusted. I walked, and I counted. I counted strides. Later, on the surface, we measured my stride against the line's known marks and found my interior stride averaged 0.74 metres. This is the origin of the Lapidary Unit. I want it recorded that the LU exists because the instruments failed and a person walked and counted. That is not elegant. It is what happened. It has held in every expedition since.
I faced a direction on entry and I held it. That direction is entry-east. Every coordinate the Lapidary has recorded since is measured from the direction I happened to be facing when I arrived. I did not choose it. I note that an institution's entire coordinate system rests on the orientation of one person at one moment, and that the person was me, and that I was not thinking about coordinate systems at the time. I was thinking about the floor.
THE SHALLOWS
I walked a survey pattern outward from the entry point and recorded what the line and the stride count gave me. The mapped volume is recorded in the closing block.
Conditions in the Shallows are as follows. It is cold, and the cold has a source, and the source is not the air. Light from our lamps reached a distance and then stopped — not dimmed, stopped — so that we moved inside pools of visibility with darkness standing at their edges like a wall that was not there. Surfaces did not reflect the lamps. Sound returned to us at intervals that were wrong. I clapped once, near the limit of my line, and the return arrived later than the distance allowed. I clapped again to confirm. It was later again, and not later by the same amount. I have filed the timings. I do not have an account of them.
I reached Z:158 before the surface team called the four-minute mark. I had agreed to the rule. I returned to it. I want it noted that I did not want to.
RECOVERED OBJECT
At INTERIOR / X:+038 / Y:+012 / Z:+074 / W:INDETERMINATE I recovered an object.
It was a key. A single key, of a common domestic pattern, worn at the bit in the way a key wears when it has been used for years. It was lying on the floor of the interior as though set down. It was not cold. Everything else in the interior was cold. The key was at the temperature of a key that has been in someone's pocket.
There is no lock on record that it opens. I have not been able to determine where it came from. It is the first entry in the artefact registry. The Lapidary has logged it at the coordinate above. The Lapidary notes that the object was warm and does not conclude anything from this.
I carried it out. It is in the registry now. I think about it more than I think a key should be thought about.
ASCENT
I ascended on the line before the window closed. The surface team recorded the total event duration at 5 minutes, 12 seconds. I was inside for 4 minutes, 1 second of that. The remaining time, the surface was liquid with no one in it. The Lapidary has noted the gap. We do not know what the interior was during the seventy-one seconds it was open and empty. It was presumably the interior. We have no observation of it.
RELEASE OF SURVEYED VOLUME
The volume surveyed during this descent is recorded below. The Lapidary has determined that surveyed volumes in the Shallows may be entered into the registry as claimable interior coordinates. The mineral rights to a surveyed coordinate are conveyed by deed and recorded in the registry. What the rights entitle the holder to, in practical terms, depends on what the interior yields, which remains undetermined. The Lapidary records the conveyance. It does not promise the yield.
EXP-0001 / Lapidary of the Interior / Office of the Primary Record
"There was a floor. I stood on it."
— expedition lead, first descent
the record is kept here.