From a Civil Infrastructure Division field archive I had no clearance for - W. Moorhouse, Loxley Valley, the day he encountered something the implant classified as LOCAL GUIDE and left it there: LOCAL GUIDE: "Tha wants to bear left at t'next cutting. Path splits at an old sleeper stack - tek t'lower fork or tha'll end up in t'conduit an' it's chest-deep this time o' year." LOCAL GUIDE: "There's a yard wi' a pump house. Roof's mostly sound. Tha can kip there if tha's not fussy." LOCAL GUIDE: "Tha knows who I am." MOORHOUSE [LOG]: "Audio - LOCAL GUIDE channel. Content: 'Tha knows who I am.' Not a request for identification. Not navigation."

Not everything written in Hellsborough is meant for the system to read. From the private archive on Neard'y - kept off-system, off-paper, on a chain around someone's neck: "The psycmask," he said. "What has it been doing to me?" She asked a question instead. "When did you last need it to read a waymarker?" He couldn't remember. "When did the Murk last make you cough?" He couldn't remember that either. "When did you last take it off and feel like you were missing something?" Yesterday. This morning. Now. "You don't wear a psycmask because you need one. You wear it because you've learned to need one. That's not the same thing, Tom."

Whatever the scrivenid is, the psycmask cannot say — not because she reads as unclassified, but because she produces no reading at all. A twelve-metre band of silence moves through the Hex wherever she walks. Tom Calver pieced together the local rule from a three-second silence Ellen maintained on the subject: don't ask directly about what the system cannot classify, don't make it a conversation, don't make it a record. The system's tools do not produce output for things that were here before the tools were built.

Tom Calver reported that his psycmask — removed and in his coat pocket during a council meeting — pulsed once and gave him a view of the scrivenid's page: his name, T. Calver, in her hand, between entries dated weeks before he arrived. The mask then closed the view, which Tom noted was more disturbing than the original vision, since it implied the mask had judged he'd seen sufficient. I find psycmasks doing active curation of their wearer's perceptions to be a matter that warrants considerable further documentation.

Murk starts at the eight-hundred-metre contour and it starts all at once — no smell, which is the wrong kind of wrong. Fog should smell of something. Most people see moss on the valley walls; I see infrastructure.