One year later, on a cold January night.

Engineers were wrapping up preparations for a moment of truth that was already three weeks late. This was more than a simple research endeavor to all involved at this point, Project Periscope had become our life's purpose over the past two years. Having expended the last of our resources several days prior, everyone knew this was our last chance to bring it to fruition.

When the one minute countdown was given, tension could be cut with a knife. Sixty seconds passed that felt like minutes before another five that felt like hours. A green light buzzed on to confirm a data stream from DRIE, and when the long-anticipated image was finally displayed on the overhead monitor the room immediately erupted in celebration. An onlooker might have believed we'd just landed a man on the moon judging by the image and our reaction to it, but ask anyone in that room and they’d have received an emphatic “This is better”.

It may not look like much, but this simple grainy image was more than ample a reward for our years of patience. It validated everything we'd sought to prove, fueled our push forward, and revealed the new world that we would be the first to peer into.

So peer into it we did.

The year following our first view from DRIE would be spent exploring this strange new world. The images presented below are some of those taken during this exploratory period.

The landscapes before our eyes were eerie and splendid in equal measure, but our work to make sense of them was plagued by constant technological setbacks. Much of the year was spent attempting to refine DRIE’s imaging capability to little effect, as we would later come to discover that modifying the engine itself- hardware or code- will only go so far.

We didn’t know better at the time, but any modification made to these systems externally seems to be met with a tradeoff of equal measure. Imaging speed may be improved, but only at the expense of deteriorated quality, and vice versa. This made enough sense, yet we found ourselves confounded by one issue in particular. Visible in nearly every image captured were unexplainable noise artifacts, not unlike the signature pockmarking seen on film exposed to ionizing radiation.

Further investigation left us with more questions than answers.

We tuned our noise filtering algorithms, dialed in their low frequency focus, and amplified image quality to such an extent that each frame required a full 24 hours to resolve. The defects remained. When it occurred to us to take things in the other direction, what we found surprised us.

Redirecting the engine’s strength almost entirely to imaging speed, we managed to push DRIE’s output to three frames per second. It wasn’t much, but enough to show us our noise diagnosis was a mistaken one. What we saw instead was something moving entirely by its own accord through the digital medium.

The question remained: “but what?”

Captivated by the large overhead monitor in that dark room stood a speechless crowd of researchers and engineers, who’d just spent sixty eight consecutive days checking and rechecking systems that they themselves built from the ground up.

A lone “If this isn’t a defect, then somebody tell me what this is?” rang out, but there was no answer.

The images on the screen continued flicking back and forth, and still, they moved.