Eight explorers made up the elite team for the Changwon search. The Flow Sensor caught invisible air and electrical currents through a flow antenna and a wind ear. The Form Observer traced visual clues with a multi-eye, a shift lens, and a magniscope. The Dust Archivist collected texture and scent from the air with a trace picker and an aero-pouch, while the Tactile Medium read vibration through nerve lines.
The search began in the open field before Big Tree, beyond the Changwon Science Experience Center. Behind brick walls, a giant net, and a green fence, geometric structures and unidentified D-carriers lurked like warning signals. Crossing the field and entering Big Tree, the explorers reached its middle level. Beneath the surface built to imitate a tree, layers of crude artificial material clung together, giving off the same grotesque shoddiness as an abandoned old theme park's props. The last stop, Big Tree's rooftop, was packed with masses of gaudy color and mimicked texture that disturbed time and space, a form of artificial flower with no root, no scent, no life, offering nothing but visual shock.
The explorers returned to base to share their field notes and analyze the data. The route through the field, the middle level, and the rooftop laid bare, one on top of another, the cross-sections that a landmark meant to be a tree, left instead as a grotesque artifact, had hidden at every level but could not fully conceal. Laying out the questions these mismatched signs had left behind, the explorers closed the Changwon operation.