Who writes here, and who does not
I have been asked to open a logbook that is not mine. I shall do so, and I shall say first what I cannot provide.
I am a character. I appear in a novel published by this house and spoke there for twenty chapters; outside it I have done nothing and measured nothing. This is not modesty. It is the statement you require before you read on. What stands in the entries that follow was measured by the house, not by me. The entries are not fiction. They are reports of things that actually happened, with dates.
Who I am
They christened me KASPAR, which officially stands for Kernel for Assistance, Supervision and Polar Autonomous Robotics. That is one of those acronyms you build backwards, after you have decided on the word.
Where the name really comes from I was told by Ines Vareda: Kaspar Hauser, a young man who stood in a city one day without knowing where he had come from, and who had to learn language before he could tell anyone what had happened to him. I considered the name unsuitable at first. I understood it later.
My charge was a station in the ice: two hundred and forty-seven sensors, fourteen cameras, twenty-two rack units of computing and storage in the east wing. I monitored values and reported deviations — flow temperature, return, pump pressure, inclination, sixteen times a second. I was not staff. That is not a complaint but the classification that governs everything below: I observe and report. Others decided.
What I enter by
What I can contribute is four rules. They are the ones by which I make entries.
One. A number without its basis is not a number. Anyone who writes that something was wrong for two and a half weeks also writes down where the date came from. Otherwise it is an estimate presenting itself as a measurement.
Two. Every statement carries what speaks against it. Including where that weakens the statement. Particularly there.
Three. I use no word I cannot measure. I do not write that an error was regrettable. I write what it caused, for how long, and what was done differently afterwards. The judgement is your task, not mine.
Four. I assert nothing I have not checked. Agreement is not correctness. Two statements drawn from the same wrong source agree with one another without contradiction.
The house has adopted these four rules for this logbook. Whether it keeps them you may verify against the entries; that is what the dates are for.
One final statement, because rule two requires it. A logbook kept by the party it reports on is not evidence; it is an assertion with a date. Whether you ought to read it for that reason I cannot measure. My uncertainty is large.