Julian date 2459547, Tuesday.
The recommendation had already made the rounds.
Hu Yisu ran his script over it: photographs of those two pages had turned up on eleven platforms inside twenty-four hours, the earliest source untraceable. Someone had split the five reasons into five images; the fifth traveled hardest.
The fifth reason was a single sentence: if nothing changes within the hundred days, then at least we stopped once.
The Sleepkeepers printed it on placards. The other crowd printed it on T-shirts, with one small line added underneath: Just watch.
The same sentence, both sides using it. Hu Yisu said: how many citations does that count as.
She said: one.
The news had a new word in it: the Long Night framework.
The framework had been set up ten days earlier, for this alone. The Secretary-General was Amina Diallo, forty-seven; before this she had spent six years in a mediation office, and before that the papers disagreed. One thing every paper agreed on: in twenty years, she had never once said a sentence in public that wasn't off a script.
Hu Yisu dug up two videos of her. One, four minutes, reading from the script, pace even. One, eight minutes, still reading. What the two had in common: her eyes never left the page; she read the last sentence, waited three seconds, closed the script, walked away.
She said: six years in the mediation office. How many cases did she mediate.
Hu Yisu said: I checked. Two. One succeeded, one is still being mediated.
She said: which one is this.
He said: you tell me.
In the afternoon Old Tang forwarded a notice, from the academy, copied to the station: the Long Night framework's Chinese counterpart group wanted a technical opinion, the title being "List of Emission Activities That Cannot Be Stopped During the Silence." The astronomy side was to send two people; she was one; the other was from Shanghai.
Old Tang said: this job doesn't count against your deadline. But they want it fast.
She said: how fast.
He said: three days.
The list she pulled together in two days.
Aviation transponders, 1,090 megahertz, more than ten thousand aircraft aloft worldwide, cannot stop. Ship automatic identification, cannot stop. Navigation constellations, four systems, 130-odd satellites in orbit, tens of watts each—that single item was eighty percent of the exempted power. Weather radar, 400-odd sets; stop those and short-range forecasting goes blind. Hospital telemetry and implanted devices don't go into a power table, but get a line of their own.
Deep-space tracking uplinks: all stop. Jiamusi, Kashgar, Neuquén, Goldstone—the four stations' uplink transmitters cut power at T0.
She worked out one number: a little over 1,900 exempted items, and the coherent power remaining was 3.1 percent of what it had been; the error she marked at an order of magnitude.
Hu Yisu looked at that number and said: you've shut down ninety-seven percent, and the 3.1 percent left is all stuff you'd be pulling out from under a wing—move one, a plane comes down.
She said: that's why it isn't called silence. It's called speaking softly.
He didn't take that up. He said: and Wangshu-7.
She said: the calls stop on day nineteen.
He said: and Wangshu-8.
She said: let it fly on its own for a hundred days. It's out at sixteen astronomical units, and the whole way, no one calling it by the day.
Lu Weiming's things arrived.
The storeroom application had gone through faster than he'd promised. He started by photographing one box's cover and first two pages to test the lighting: kraft-paper binder boards, page numbers in pencil. On the page for January 1, 1970, four numbers, one each at six, twelve, eighteen, and twenty-four o'clock, fountain pen, a small hand, every stroke steady.
He said: ten years, the paper hasn't gone brittle, the ink hasn't faded. The trouble is the flashback when you photograph it—every page has to be shot twice. All of it shot, I'd guess a bit over three thousand frames.
She wrote back: shoot it. When it's shot, I'll do the entry.
She worked it out: ten years, four numbers a day, 14,600 numbers. She wrote the job into the paper notebook and added three words after it: during the silence.
A hundred days, about 150 numbers a day. It fits.
She enlarged the test frame fourfold. January 1, 1970, and the six o'clock number was legible: 74. The twelve o'clock number, at four hundred times, still wasn't; the pen ink had bled into a small patch on the paper. She wrote back to Lu Weiming: reshoot the noon cell, raking light.
Lu Weiming wrote back: tomorrow. The storeroom closes at five thirty.
She stored the photographs in 3t.
The approval for receive-don't-transmit came down too. It went station to institute to academy, three layers, and landed at last as one document number, six digits. Old Tang forwarded the number and said: this number was harder to get than your observational values.
She said: mm.
He said: they asked one question—during the silence, what is it you'll still be watching. I said, watching. Watch, and speak after the hundred days.
Julian date 2459551, Saturday, 20:00, video call.
Zhou Yao at her desk, a new drawing taped behind her; who it was of couldn't be made out.
Zhou Yao said: Mom, my school says there's going to be a blackout drill.
She said: a blackout of what.
Zhou Yao said: the field lights. Off for one minute—they say it's for looking at stars.
She said: will you see anything.
Zhou Yao said: the teacher says you can see Vega. How would anyone see it in their city.
She said: you'll see it. Vega is bright.
Zhou Yao said: and your side.
She said: where we are, it's already dark.
Zhou Yao said: so you don't need a drill.
She said: we don't.
Zhou Yao said oh, and: the tenth one is finished. I haven't mailed it yet.
She said: finished, then mail it.
Zhou Yao said: don't ask who it's of.
She said: I won't ask.
Call record: four minutes forty-seven seconds.
After hanging up she sat a while. No one at the station had arranged a drill with her. And no one needed to.
On her phone, one from Dr. Shen, sent Friday: the booth is still free next Wednesday. After that you're into the queue.
She replied: another day.
The fifteenth time.
After sending it she read the word queue once more, backed out of the thread, tapped back in, backed out again.
The tank water was twenty degrees. Lao Wu behind the driftwood, both claws folded in. The notches in the driftwood still three. She dropped in two pellets; the crayfish didn't move.
The hiss in her right ear, today she counted it: day forty-five.
Julian date 2459552, Sunday, afternoon.
The resolution passed at 16:11 Beijing time. The push alert read: first meeting of the parties to the Long Night framework, 137 countries voting, 119 for, 16 abstentions, 2 against. The two opposing countries were named in the third paragraph; both were small.
The resolution ran four pages. She read it front to back; three lines in it were executable at the station: T0 is 24:00 Coordinated Universal Time Wednesday, that is, 8 a.m. Thursday Beijing time; it ends at the same moment on the one hundredth day; any new transmission in between must be approved by the framework.
The exemption list was attached at the back, unrevised—her draft, not one character changed.
She saw that her hospital line still stood where she had put it, on its own, and set the phone down.
Julian date 2459553, Monday, 23:00, the press conference.
The live feed came out of New York. Zhou Yan watched in her office, Hu Yisu in the machine room, the two of them with WeChat open between them, neither one speaking.
Amina Diallo came in, a dark coat, nothing in her hands. She stood still, waited for the hall to go quiet, and then took the script out of the inner pocket. Later, media photographed her script pages: fourteen-point type, double-spaced, every page written only two-thirds down. The last, so it was said, was so the sound of a turning page wouldn't reach the microphone.
She read for forty minutes. In the twenty-first minute, it happened.
The sentence was: at present, no evidence indicates a causal relationship between human activity and the phenomenon.
What she read was: at present, evidence indicates a causal relationship between human activity and the phenomenon.
One word gone missing. She stopped. The page did not come down. About two seconds, and then she said: I'm sorry. I will read that sentence again.
And she read it one word at a time: At—present—no—evidence—indicates—a causal—relationship—between—human—activity—and—the—phenomenon.
The live subtitles were scrolling from the original script: when she misread, the subtitle was right; by the time she read it again, the subtitle had already scrolled past. The whole world saw the subtitle first, then heard her.
A 3,100-character script, wrong on one negative word, like a whole night's observing ruined by a single clock jump. The other 3,098 characters, not one stumble in them.
Hu Yisu clipped out the forty seconds. By the next morning, 21 million plays. The top comment read: why did she read it again.
What she was thinking was the same thing as that comment. People who misread and keep going she had seen plenty of. Stopping to read it again—in twenty years, this was the first time, and the first time ever on a live broadcast.
The last sentence of the script was procedural: the silence will begin at 00:00 Coordinated Universal Time three days from now, and end at the same moment on the one hundredth day.
Read, close the script, wait three seconds, walk away. The same as that video from six years before, to the second.
Afterward there were forty-seven more minutes of questions.
The first question: will phones still work.
The answer: yes. Line three of the exemption list.
The second question: and planes.
The answer: line two. More than ten thousand aircraft aloft worldwide. Not one can stop.
The third question, a television reporter holding out a microphone: Secretary-General, that sentence you read again—was the script wrong.
She answered: the script is correct.
The reporter pressed: then why did you read it again.
Her microphone was already off. The chair read out the next questioner's name.
Hu Yisu clipped the exchange too and joined it to the forty seconds. Plays reached forty million.
Hu Yisu wrote on WeChat: a hundred days of not talking; on the hundred-and-first, they'll keep right on talking.
She wrote back: mm.
After a while he added: what's being switched off is ninety-seven percent of the power, not ninety-seven percent of the words.
She didn't reply. She remembered that one; at the meeting Mateo had said a shorter version of it.
Mateo's email arrived Tuesday morning, two lines of English. The first: Chile is not on the list. We only listen. The second: one hundred days. I will listen to the full hundred.
Kramer surfaced in the group too, asking again for that version of the data, and after asking added half a sentence on his own: or perhaps it waits until after the silence. Zhou Yan did not reply. She thought: after the silence, he'll ask one more time.
Ursula's reply arrived Tuesday night.
One. From T0, compute S once a day, the same clumsy method, no changing the estimator. Change it once, and the hundred days are broken.
Two. The baseline is 0.34. I have already given you this number. Do not ask a second time.
Three. On the third day you will start guessing at numbers. On the fifth day you will start fighting. Don't guess. Wait for the hundredth.
She wrote back: what if the hundredth number is the same as the first.
Ursula sent back three words: then it is.
She asked again: and if it's higher.
Ursula sent nothing more.
He Zhaoting did not call again.
On Wednesday morning she dialed the Beijing number once more; still unreachable. Old Tang said his landline went unanswered too, but the man was probably fine: a reporter had found his building and stood there a full day, until the neighborhood committee talked him into leaving.
Those two pages were no longer his, online. The five reasons had been cited more times than all his papers combined. One piece ran the headline "Father of the Silence" over him. Hu Yisu read it out to her, and when he finished said: if he saw that headline, he'd cut the phone line with his own hands.
She said: he was nearly not answering the phone as it was.
On the Beijing page, after the numbers 12, 18, 24, still blank.
The station-office form—no one chased it this week.
Old Tang said: nobody reads this now.
She said: then what does it count as.
Old Tang said: an archive. He paused, then said: maybe not a bad thing. If nobody reads it, it isn't overdue.
She pulled the drawer open for one look. The kraft envelope still there, pressed on the tape spool. The stretch of tape toward the outside still wrinkled. In the mailbox, the one titled "Shoulder," last modified still 2459483.793. Today she didn't so much as open the recipient field.
Tuesday night she switched off the router at home.
The moment it was off she knew the gesture was superfluous. That router's power wouldn't rank in the top ten thousand of the exemption list, and it wasn't on the list either; it wasn't on any table anywhere. She had turned it off anyway, sat a while, and had to turn it back on: there was a recorder in the room that took its time off the network, and cut off from it, it counted its own—could drift half a second in a day.
She changed its address, to the station's clock. Done, she wrote a line on paper: home router, one, not on the list.
When the line was written she turned the paper over, face down on the desk.
Julian date 2459555, Wednesday.
Two things at the station could still transmit. One test beacon, one calibration transmitter. In the afternoon Eli went and shut them down; before shutting them, per procedure, he captured two spectrograms, archival paper copies, made in duplicate, he and she signing one each.
Eli said: heart of the dish, this machine hasn't rested in thirty years. It's the one—all the other dishes take their orders from it.
She said: it rests a hundred days.
Eli said: resting is good. People rest too.
She scanned one copy of the two spectrograms and stored it in 3t. No new directory.
Julian date 2459556, Thursday.
She walked into the machine room at 7:40. The spectrometer was running, sweeping thirty megahertz to one thousand, the whole span. At 7:50 the screen was still dense: the FM broadcast points stood there line upon line, decades-old, the way they had always looked.
At 7:59 Hu Yisu sent one word on WeChat: wait.
At 8:00 sharp, of the lines she was watching, not one had fallen.
At 8:02 one fell, the television sound carrier. At 8:04, another. The countries' shutdown schedules were not one schedule, and the exempted emergency frequencies still stood. She counted what was left, line by line.
At 8:06, the 94.7 line was gone. That was a local traffic station; her first year here she had listened to it every day on the shuttle, and after she stopped riding the shuttle, it went on being there.
She opened the table on paper. A hundred lines; into the first she entered: 0.34.
Into the second she wrote tomorrow's date: 2459557.
Done, she checked the ledger of the hiss in her right ear, and in the corner of that page added one number.
50.