Here

[first lines]

Storyteller: Scientists and dreamers, they travel the world with watchful eyes, and guzzle hope like water. Their journeys were separate, but their purpose was common - to map the world. One begged for money and pencils. Another tore his shirt to strips, carefully wrapping his shredded feet. Yet another, thirsty, near starving, suckled the sap from plants. None had an easy road.

Storyteller: Though utterly dependent on one another, most found the other's maps unsettling. They denied one's perspective by charting the land incomprehensibly, calling into question one's very being. Still, when they met on the lonely roads, the explorers would present one another with their maps. Some seemed to say so plainly, directly, the world is like *this*. Others were more oblique; skating, impressionistic, unstable. They froze mere slivers of the infinite earth as is skittered by in orbit. If ever these maps could be gathered together, they would comprise an atlas of unsettling vision. A final proof that truth is conjecture.