Julian date 2459511, Monday, morning.
After Beijing she spent five days writing. The technical memo's first draft ran eleven pages; page three was the data-sharing table, seven rows filled, four left empty. The four empty rows she looked at once a day, and did not fill.
The figures were Hu Yisu's work, six in all; she cut them to three. At the third cut he said: Shijie, once this goes out there's no going back for us. She said: Not going out, we still can't go back. He said: That's different. She didn't ask where the difference was.
The tape lay in the dormitory desk drawer, under a stack of printouts. There was no machine to read it. She had asked once: the station's last tape machine was written off in 2019, dismantled, the parts sent to Ürümqi.
The drawings came back from the gatehouse at ten in the morning. A kraft envelope, the mouth wound with clear tape, a rubber band pressed underneath the tape. The sender's line was her ex-husband's hand, the strokes hard.
Inside were twelve sketches, octavo sheets, pencil, edges slightly curled.
She went through them one by one.
The first was her father, eyes closed, sunk back into a sofa, the line of the jaw gone slack. The second, the grandmother, eyes closed, head tipped to one side. The third, a child she didn't know—probably a deskmate—eyes closed, slumped over a desk, one sleeve under the face. The fourth, a man on the subway, eyes closed, hand on the strap, body tilting with the car. The fifth, a convenience-store clerk, eyes closed, standing behind the register. The sixth, the art teacher, eyes closed, a pen still pinched in her hand. The seventh, an old man sunning himself at the gate of a residential block, eyes closed, mouth slightly open.
In the lower right corner of each back, a date in pencil and one word. Sofa. Bed. Desk. Subway. Corner shop. Studio. Bench.
The eighth she looked at a long time. A middle-aged man, eyes closed, wearing a vest with reflective strips, sitting on a step eating. On the back: corner shop. She couldn't think who the man was, or whether she ought to ask.
The ninth, the tenth, the eleventh. A woman, a child, a young man she didn't know.
Twelve sheets, every one of them with eyes closed.
The last one was her.
Slumped over a desk, eyes closed, face turned and pressed against her left forearm, right hand on the keyboard. The hand was still badly drawn, the fingers the wrong lengths, the index sticking out well past the middle. But the hand's place on the keyboard was right: the little finger resting on the spacebar. That was her habit. She herself had never known it.
On the back, two lines in pencil.
The first: Mom, the teacher says it won't do, it has to be someone with eyes open. I said I can't draw them open.
The second: People with open eyes are always looking somewhere else.
She read it twice.
She messaged Zhou Yao: Received.
Zhou Yao: The last one is you.
I recognized it.
That's what your hand does when you're asleep. Zhou Yao said. The little finger stays on the spacebar.
She looked down at her own right hand.
Zhou Yao: The teacher wants one with open eyes by next week. I'm not handing it in.
Why.
Can't draw it.
She typed a line, looked at it two seconds, deleted it, and sent: Up to you.
Zhou Yao: Has Lao Wu molted.
No.
Don't help it.
She squared the twelve sheets in their original order, face down on the corner of the desk, and set a teacup on top. The eighth she pulled out and slid under the notebook: reflective vest, steps, corner shop. She couldn't think who it was; she thought she would ask at the next video call.
In the tank, Lao Wu was under the sunken wood, the shell a shade darker than last week. She pinched in a little feed; it didn't come out. She waited ten seconds and left.
The ex-husband sent one line too: The mailing was her own idea. I didn't look. Then, after it: She's been staying up late.
She read that twice and didn't answer. In the upper right of the screen, the entrance to the meeting link was blinking.
Five p.m. Beijing time. Ten in the morning in Bonn, eleven in Cape Town; outside the Kashgar office window the sky was already dark.
Nine parties on the call: two Kashgar lines, Miyun, Nanshan, Shanghai Tianma, Bonn, Cape Town, plus two observers who only listened—one from a foundation committee, one who gave no affiliation.
Old Tang had claimed the meeting-room projector, and the first slide said one thing: this meeting forms no external conclusions. He said it; nobody objected, and nobody seconded.
Lu Weiming spoke first. He asked that the memo carry a paragraph stating the result might come from a systematic bias in the shared analysis chain, with a note that the paragraph was his. When he finished he turned his camera off.
The Miyun delegate said, we only provide data, we take no part in conclusions, and our station's name should not appear in the conclusions section.
The Nanshan delegate said, our station leadership wants to see a version first.
The Bonn man was Kramer, male, fifty-ish, a pen turning in his hand the whole time he talked. He put it plainly: this thing is either the biggest business in the field this century or a collective humiliation. In neither case do I want to be first—and I don't want to be last. Our data are licensed only under our release version; use our release version, and our group's name goes on it.
Van der Merwe of Cape Town said, we can give data. If we give, we give. No names.
Hu Yisu was on the machine-room line, microphone live. He said what he shouldn't have: then forget names, use institutions.
Lu Weiming switched his camera back on and came back at him: an institution's name means no one is responsible.
Hu Yisu said nothing more.
The Nanshan man cleared his throat and raised another road: or we tell the outside it's instruments, and press the thing down for a while. Half a year, while we walk the chain through ourselves.
And who does the work of that half year. Lu Weiming asked.
The same people.
Then the same people are still passing it around. He said, you can't press this down. You only move it off the paper and into mouths. Mouths travel faster.
The foundation observer put in: I think that line is worth considering. Steady the expectations first.
Zhou Yan looked at the row of little squares on the screen. She counted: of the nine squares, four for pressing, three against, two uncommitted. She was one of the uncommitted.
At the thirtieth minute of arguing, Kramer said suddenly: shall we get Ursula Kovacs to take a look.
Someone asked: isn't she doing something else now.
She has always been doing something else. Kramer said. She'll take it.
The meeting room went quiet a moment. Zhou Yan asked: what is her field.
Coherent media. Turbulence, early on; then she stopped. Kramer said, if she takes it, she will ask you one question first.
What question.
She will ask you: how do you know this is not an organization.
No one picked that up. Zhou Yan wrote the name in the paper notebook, in the margin, and drew a circle around the word "organization," a heavy circle, the pen tip ridging the back of the page.
At minute forty, the foundation observer spoke: can this result be quantified into an indicator, for assessing follow-on investment.
No one answered him. Seven or eight seconds later Old Tang said: it's early yet. The observer said: right, right.
At minute forty-five, the Miyun man recited a regulation of his station, fast, to the effect that cross-unit data sharing requires a consent letter from the station office, and before the letter issues, no raw samples may go out. When he finished he said: I'm not blocking you. I'm reading what's written.
Someone asked: then what is the version you're providing now.
He said: the version our station office hasn't seen yet.
At minute fifty the shared screen froze; Old Tang swore at the network cable in the meeting room and had Hu Yisu send the figures again.
Old Tang cared about one thing the whole way through. He said: if anything goes out, it goes as the station's internal bulletin—not an achievement, no quota slots, and nobody takes it to claim a prize. Somebody in the meeting laughed once, briefly.
At minute sixty-eight, Kramer's side forgot to kill the microphone, and someone said something in German that sounded like telling him to come eat. Nobody mentioned it.
At the stiffest moment, Van der Merwe suddenly asked: what time is it in Kashgar.
Someone answered. He said: the sun is brutal here. Is it snowing on your side.
The room was quiet two seconds. Old Tang said: it did. Last week.
Then the arguing went on.
Zhou Yan said nothing the entire meeting. Her right earphone had a loose contact; she moved it to the left ear, and the camera caught the motion. Lu Weiming said: that earphone of yours needs replacing. She said mm.
At minute seventy-four she spoke.
She said: first we issue an internal technical memo, timestamped. No submission, nothing external. The memo states plainly what data each station provided and who did which step. If anyone fights over it later, they fight with the memo.
Lu Weiming said: you've pulled the fuse out of the bomb and buried it in the ground.
Better buried than going off now. She said.
No one agreed, and no one objected. In the end it went by Old Tang's way: the memo's signature line reads "participating units," ordered by pinyin. The ordering alone cost another ten minutes of argument.
Ten minutes before the end, the talk came down onto one word: does the memo say "synchronous" or "correlated."
Lu Weiming said: correlated. Synchronous smells of cause.
Kramer said: correlation is a statistician's word, exactly right here—nobody gets to push it further.
Hu Yisu said: then it says nothing at all.
Kramer said: right.
Zhou Yan smiled in front of the camera, fast, and nobody saw it.
The sentence they settled on was: statistical correlation exists among the residual sequences; the lag estimate is zero. Old Tang asked: do we write the zero.
Write it. Zhou Yan said.
Write it. Lu Weiming said too.
The meeting broke up at 7:20 p.m. Beijing time.
Old Tang stayed in the meeting room, and only when everyone had logged off did he say: that line of yours today—better buried than going off—I understood it. You want to stall.
Yes.
How long can you stall.
Until someone who wants to say it more than I do steps out.
Old Tang shut the projector off and the room went dark. He said: Zhou Yan, you're holding a thing in your hands right now. Say nothing, and it's still yours; say it, and it belongs to everyone. You can do that arithmetic yourself.
She said: I can do it.
He said: one more thing. I counted today—of the nine squares only two stayed uncommitted, and you were one. The other was Cape Town, and he doesn't want a name anyway.
She said: I know.
How long do you plan to stall.
Until those four empty rows on the memo are filled.
Old Tang snorted, picked up his thermos, and went.
Back in the machine room she turned the memo to page three and filled Miyun's and Nanshan's data versions into the empty rows. Two rows were still left. Those two were Kashgar's own columns: raw voltage records, and clock files. She did not fill them.
At 11:40 that night she pulled the events out of the synchronization window.
Threshold set at three times the noise RMS; any twitch over threshold counted as an event, amplitude and duration logged. She had only meant to check whether the intervals were Poisson—if they were, these twitches were strangers to one another, each twitching on its own.
Not Poisson. The interval distribution was heavy-tailed, and there was long-range correlation: a big event went through, and for a while after, the small events thickened. She ran detrended fluctuation analysis; exponent 0.81. Fully random should be 0.5. She stared at 0.81 a moment, copied it down, and wrote nothing beside it.
First she ran the routine check: the nine stars paired two by two, thirty-six pairs, lag estimated pair by pair. Thirty-one pairs landed in the zeroth bin, five elsewhere. She chased the five: four had insufficient signal-to-noise, one had a known binary-orbit residual not fully subtracted. She threw that pair out and recomputed the rest. Still zero.
Then the power spectrum. The low-frequency end rose as frequency to the minus zero point nine, rising all the way to the end the window length allowed. That was a straight line too. She set the two slopes side by side on paper: −0.9, −1.52. Between the two numbers there was no relation she recognized.
She redrew the histogram of event sizes, log-log.
A white-noise histogram has a waist: the sizes gather at one scale and taper toward both ends. This one had no waist; it ran fat from the smallest to the largest, no thinning in the middle, a straight line on log-log axes.
She counted the events: at three-times threshold, 867 in the ninety-day window. The largest was 340 times the smallest, with no gap between; she tried binning by size, and however she cut, the bins stayed joined—no empty stretch could be carved out.
She redid it at three thresholds: 2.5 times, 3, 4. Slopes −1.49, −1.52, −1.54. The slope held.
At the end she ran the fit once, on the three-times set: slope −1.52, error plus or minus 0.07.
Hu Yisu looked over her shoulder at the screen. He said: I've seen that slope.
Where.
Can't recall. Not astronomy, anyway. He said, it's like a figure from a course I audited junior year. I went four times.
What course.
Can't recall. I'll dig when I'm home.
She didn't press. She saved the figure and the numbers into the directory that looked like a cache.
In the paper notebook she wrote: event-size distribution, log-log, slope −1.52 ± 0.07.
She thought, and below it added: not noise.
Thought again, crossed out "not noise," and put in its place: don't know what it is.
The twelve drawings still lay on the corner of the desk, the twelfth face up. The person with closed eyes lay slumped on the keyboard, little finger resting on the spacebar. She didn't put them away.