"The map is not the territory." — Alfred Korzybski, 'Science and Sanity', 1933 (Bureau cartography department has posted this quotation above its entrance; it has been defaced to read 'the map is not the territory yet')
Bureau cartographers assigned to Glossolaria have filed, collectively, twenty-three formal requests for reassignment. Fourteen of these requests have been granted. The nine who remain have developed, as a professional community, a shared vocabulary for what they experience as a unique form of occupational trauma: they call it 'drift,' the sensation that the map and the territory are engaged in a slow negotiation, each trying to become the other, and that the cartographer caught between them is at risk of being translated into whichever wins. The Phonetic Gardens present the foundational anomaly. By any survey instrument available to Bureau cartographers, the Gardens occupy 2.3 hectares of Glossolaria's central district. By direct measurement on foot — a procedure that requires multiple surveyors working simultaneously, because solo measurement produces inconsistent results attributed to what Bureau reports diplomatically call 'observer-induced spatial modification' — the Gardens occup...
From the lore of The Architecture of Babel.