Philip Lascaille was the first person known to have returned alive from a visit to the Shrouders.
Biography[]
While working at a research station near a Shroud, Lascaille embarked on an unsanctioned excursion to the Shroud's boundary of restructured spacetime, managing to penetrate it and make contact with the Shrouders within. The experience profoundly affected Lascaille, leaving him mute and exhibiting behavioral symptoms resembling a form of autism. He was taken to the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies, where he became a permanent resident and subject of study. The Shroud he had visited would henceforth be known as Lascaille's Shroud.
Though most of the rest of his life would be spent sketching elaborate designs in the sand of his dwelling space, Lascaille experienced a period of lucidity soon before his #mysterious death and at that time he explained to Dan Sylveste how to be altered by the Pattern Jugglers to visit the Shrouders (the sketched designs contained information that, once memorized, could be traded to the Jugglers to persuade them to evince the Juggler transform from remnants in their ocean of Amarantin intelligence patterns).
In the later novel The Prefect, his alpha simulation becomes the intelligence inside The Clockmaker.
Mysterious death[]
Not long after his communication to Dan, Lascaille was found drowned in a pond in his dwelling space. Ascribed as an accident at the time, although suspected by Dan to be a ritual suicide upon completion of his 'mission' from the Shrouders, it is revealed in The Prefect that he was murdered.