The Cartographers

by Peng Shepherd

“There’s value in every failure,” a voice behind them said then, as if on cue. “It shows us what doesn’t work, and gets us that much closer to understanding what will.”

we had come to believe that even more important than the differences between art and science in cartography were the similarities between them.

“You can’t find a place that doesn’t exist.”

It was the smell of ancient pages, of time, of her very soul, if souls could have smells, she thought.

“The trick is hiding it well enough. An incorrect altitude on a minor mountain, a misspelling of a small body of water, a slight bend in an out-of-the-way river that’s actually straight. In small-scale maps, which depict buildings and floor plans, we tend to refer to these phantom settlements, these secrets, as just that: trap rooms.”

Felix worked well with his team at Haberson, but there was something different about the work when it was all on computers. This was more intimate, more connected.

“We just have to keep it a secret,” Wally echoed, his gaze far away. “Our secret.”

Agloe was the only place it was real.

It wasn’t fair that the town wasn’t real, but her death was.

“The paradox that even if our map could be perfect, every bit of data completely measurable and knowable . . . the world it represents isn’t.”

Even if we could manage to make the Haberson Map completely accurate for every single data point for one instant, the world is always changing. Something will shift, and we’ll be right back to square one again.”

“They’re not comparing our map to the world—they’re comparing the world to our map.” “William—”