We have mapped the whole ocean floor the way a bat sees a dark room: send a ping of sound down, listen for the echo, and time it. Sound travels about 1,500 metres a second in seawater, so a round trip of two seconds means the bottom is roughly 1,500 metres straight down. Sweep the ship along and each ping adds one more sounding — the seafloor draws itself.
Two things bend the truth. First, the beam is a cone, not a needle. A wide beam hears the nearest rock in its footprint and plots it as if it were directly below — so a narrow trench fills in too shallow and sharp peaks smear. Narrow the beam to a pencil and the fine features sharpen.
Second, sound doesn't travel at one fixed speed. The surface is warm and fast; the deep is cold and slow. If you assume a single speed, the deep basin reads too deep and the map is distorted — the very reason those echoes bend (refract) on the way down. Feed the instrument the real sound-speed profile and every stored echo is re-read at its true depth.
Everything here is emergent: the echo times, the blur, and the distortion all fall out of the same equation the instrument inverts. Nothing about the hidden floor is scripted — you are genuinely recovering it from time.
Something in the simulation stopped unexpectedly — the lesson continues without it. You can move on; nothing you did was wrong.