A floor that was not there

For the first two months there was one flat plane under every place, set at the height the car needed, and everything stood on it.

That is fine for a courtyard. Ludlow Square is flat, the plane sat at the height of the paving, and it was invisible because it agreed with the street. Two months of it agreeing with the street is two months of nobody having a reason to look at it.

Then the towns arrived, and towns are on hillsides.

La Sarraz is a hill town, and its street runs downhill from where you start. The plane did not. So a quarter of the place sat under it, by as much as six metres, and you walked out along the top of a floor that was not there, over a street you could see below you.

Lourmarin barely noticed, and that is what made this hard to see rather than easy. The same fault was invisible in one place, mild in the second and severe in the third, so every description of it sounded like a different bug. Nothing that behaves differently in every place gets recognised as one thing quickly.

The tell was the drone. It would not descend into the lower town. It stopped at nothing, in mid air, at a height that made no sense until you noticed it was resting on the same surface your feet were.

The plane is a catch floor now. It sits below the lowest thing in the scene, it exists so that nothing falls forever, and you stand on the capture itself. The number that used to set its height is still in the registry and is now the car's alone.

The lesson keeps arriving in different clothes, so here it is in this month's: a constant measured for one place will be wrong in the second place and will not announce itself. It does not throw. It just makes the second place feel slightly off in a way nobody can name, and you lose weeks to the symptoms.