The expedition team recovered all of the artefacts presented here from the same preservative vat. They were found in a home built for a single permanent resident in one of the many fair-sized communities which, in the time preceding the onset of the Decline, had begun to develop in the more fertile and ecologically diverse regions of the Lye Planet. The variety of these items is not, in of itself, an attribute of note, as artefacts of innumerable shapes and sizes are often found collected together in the vats without discernible motive, quickly and disorderly preserved en masse rather than arranged sentimentally. The significance of this finding lies in the clear care which has been taken in curating this diverse group of items, and the novel – though purely speculative – common features which bond them, suggesting a peculiar and counter-intuitive response to the then-unfolding crisis. What’s more, the vat’s contents feature one of the earliest examples yet recovered by the LPRU of a struggle which was to become commonplace in communities throughout the planet: the forging, in real time, of a language of personal trauma not accounted for in the discourse of the pre-Decline era.

To underscore the importance of this finding, it is necessary to unpack a basic and consistent feature of mythologies throughout the Lye Planet: the conception of the planet as a unified and infinite organism, as opposed to a common world for independent, or merely interconnected, species. Understandably, this belief has a significant impact on perspective in art and writing from the planet, as personal identities become indistinguishable from other components of the natural world; it has even been suggested that the members of some communities saw themselves more as limbs or stems, rather than as individual beings. This conception of self, however, became ever more untenable as the destabilising effects of the Decline worsened. Individuals suddenly found themselves untethered from a collapsing organism they thought they knew as themselves, without the appropriate linguistic tools to self-express as purely autonomous beings.

Researchers recovered from the vat a number of specimens from the natural world: clumps of soil; delicate and minuscule plant-life; fragments of skin and bone. Remnants of planetary life are often found in the vats, usually carried in accidentally alongside the usual domestic trinkets, but the specimens here are unique for the carefulness with which they were pressed between thin sheets, and also for the drawings found on other sheets, whose abstract, crepuscular forms bear a striking resemblance to the contours of the preserved flora (a similarity all the more intriguing, given the almost-invisible smallness of the specimens, and the certain necessity of a microscope-like device to have captured their shapes with any accuracy). We can only guess as to the significance of these loving preservations and drawings, which have an undoubtedly devotional quality; the attention drawn to the machinations of life in the world’s smallest crevices just as its foundations begin to come apart on an immeasurable scale. Alongside these were a series of written musings, fascinating for the nascent and conflicted nature of their ‘I’ and the difficulties of expression charted therein. Rendering the wavering pronouns of the text into English has proven to be difficult; we have included two translations of the same extracts, one which sought to stabilise the narrator figure, and the other which relates the conflicted perspective with fidelity.