The camera went up on a Sunday night. Hu Yisu fixed an old phone on his dormitory windowsill, facing out: west of the station area the gobi, and the silhouettes of half the antenna array. He started a livestream, no title; in the channel's description line he wrote one sentence: it's awake, so it's awake—the days go on as days. Ten minutes before going live he had sent Zhou Yan a message: Professor, I've started a livestream. Don't come to watch. Zhou Yan sent back a question mark. He replied: if you come, it turns into work.
That was the night of Julian date 2459692, 18 May 2022. Zhou Yan didn't click in. That day she computed line 123 of the S table, 0.37, and while she was writing it onto the paper page she heard a chair being shifted in Hu Yisu's room next door—one knock every so often, like someone adjusting the position of a thing over and over. She didn't go to look.
The next day was 2459693, Ursula's deadline. Twenty-one days, counted from the day she took over line seven; she had said it and meant it, no asking in between. Walking into the machine room, Zhou Yan ran the thing through her head once, the way you run a formula you have to recite. In the morning the group was empty; the afternoon too. Ten at night, nothing in the group. Eleven, nothing. Before she shut the laptop she refreshed once more—still nothing. The deadline had passed; that woman had given not one word. Turning off the light, Zhou Yan thought: in those twenty-one days she too had probably opened the group once a day, looked, closed it. No one saw that motion. Not even the two of them.
The livestream channel, though, had words. The first night, forty-one concurrent; one of them was Hu Yisu, none of them Zhou Yan. The second night, eight hundred. The third day the platform gave him a recommendation slot; he phoned them and had it pulled; it kept climbing anyway. By the weekend the concurrent count had passed eight hundred thousand. The station's network man came and measured the bandwidth once; afterward he told people in the corridor that this line into the family compound would sooner or later be burst open by a window. When Hu Yisu spoke with Zhou Yan he didn't bring it up, and neither did she; only once he fell asleep in the machine room, his phone buzzing face-down on the desk all night.
There was nothing to see in the gobi. The wind rewrote the ripple pattern on the sand; the array's shadow crawled from west to east; a night passed, and the pattern was rewritten back. Most of the time the chat said nothing. Someone asked where this was; no one answered. Someone was naming the stars and stopped halfway through. One account posted once before every sunrise: today the shadow is a little shorter than yesterday. Eleven days running, never broken. On the twelfth day, ten minutes after that post went up, someone replied underneath: haven't watched yesterday's yet—saving them for the weekend. That reply stayed pinned for a month.
On the fifth day Zhou Yan clicked in once, and stayed two minutes. What she saw was the ground she walked every day, seen through a window she had never stood behind. The array was the same array; antenna No. 13 had had a receiver swapped in the night—you couldn't tell by day. She backed out and filled in that day's hundred fifty cells of the paper records. The paper records stood at fourteen thousand one hundred; five hundred left. When Lu Weiming's paper had come up from Shanghai it was seven crates; now one last stack remained on the desk, its corners gone soft from turning.
#OutsideMyWindow# as a term rose in the second week. First two more phones inside the station area went live, one on the canteen door, one on that row of poplars. Then other cities, other provinces. The platform built a statistics page anyone could read: livestreams tagged #OutsideMyWindow# went from single digits to forty thousand inside a week, and a week after that, four hundred seventy thousand. Someone made the four hundred seventy thousand channels into a map, black points scattered—dense along the coastlines, thin inland; the two farthest points sat on two research vessels. Four hundred seventy thousand windows: most of them dark, a few with snow static, a streetlight, a stretch of eave.
Hu Yisu found the Lagos channel first. A night-shift nurse, phone propped on the nurses' station windowsill; out the window, the hospital's rear parking lot, one streetlight, three cars parked under it. She went live when her shift started and closed it when her shift ended; the camera never moved. One night her concurrent count surged past four million and she didn't know—she was changing an IV bottle for bed three. The next day a reporter found her and asked why she streamed. She said the ward had no window. He asked whether she watched other people's windows. She said she watched two after shifts, one in her hometown, one in Japan—also an empty street. She remembered what the brightest thing was in every window she watched; saying this, she pointed out the streetlight's pole to the camera; the pole had a number on it, F-17.
The clip that traveled farthest was fourteen seconds, its source untraceable: a window no one could place, a clothesline across it, the line empty. The caption was two characters: sit a while. People went looking for that window, combed every #OutsideMyWindow# channel in the country with a clothesline in it, found nothing; the original poster never surfaced, and the clip's play count stopped at ninety million. The day the count froze, the #OutsideMyWindow# pages on every platform pinned the same line: this page accepts no tipping. Someone tried slipping product links into channel titles; the links never lived an hour—the platform deleted them, no reason given.
Hu Yisu's peak came in the third week: thirty million concurrent. That night the network man pulled him a dedicated line, for fear the family compound's network would be dragged down. The next day he said to Zhou Yan in the machine room: Professor, thirty million people are watching me sleep. Zhou Yan said: they're watching the window. He said: right. I spent a whole night on that sentence. Then he added: thirty million—I've written the number down. If it ever climbs again, I'll know they aren't watching the window anymore. Zhou Yan asked what they'd be watching then. He said: don't know. Best never to know.
The Saturday video moved to nine in the evening. Zhou Yao explained that first: the art class had added sessions, out to half past eight. Julian date 2459698, 24 May 2022. Zhou Yan waited; when the screen lit, Zhou Yao was putting away her tools—a burin folded into its tin box first, then the pencils. The call ran three minutes fifty.
Zhou Yao said the whole class was watching #OutsideMyWindow#; she had picked the emptiest one and watched it three nights running. Zhou Yan asked what she watched. Zhou Yao said: I watch it not happen. She said it without a pause, the way you'd report a color already mixed. Zhou Yan asked what there was to see in things not happening. Zhou Yao said: too many things happen. She carried the phone to the window and swung the camera around: a clothesline outside, empty; beyond it other people's windows, a few panes lit. She said: the clothesline changes every day—one more clothespin today than yesterday. Zhou Yan looked at that line a few seconds. Zhou Yao swung the camera back and asked: what's outside your window. Zhou Yan said: poplars. And what else. Antennas. What do the antennas look like. Zhou Yan thought a moment: like clotheslines.
Just before hanging up, Zhou Yao said suddenly: you start one too. Zhou Yan said start what. Zhou Yao said: a window. Zhou Yan said what's there to see in a poplar. Zhou Yao said: trees keep growing. You have that many antennas—one of them is always moving. She hung up the moment she finished; time was up; her break between classes ran ten minutes.
Zhou Yan started her livestream before the next weekend. Not Saturday—Monday. She was the last out of the machine room that night; passing the row of poplars, she watched the wind lift the whole row of leaves and set them down again. Back in her room she took off her badge and put it in the drawer, propped the phone on the sill facing the poplars, and went live. The description line she thought over a long time and in the end wrote: outside the station area. Then she went to wash up; coming back she looked once: seventeen concurrent.
Her channel never climbed. First night seventeen, second night sixty; a week later it stopped at four thousand, and held. She had run the arithmetic: four thousand was more than all her citations added together, more people than any of her colleague groups held. But it held, day after day, four thousand either way, a few dozen drifting in and out. She didn't know who was watching, and made no plan to know. One night the station area had maintenance and the power was out ten minutes; when it came back she checked—the count hadn't dropped; it was up two hundred. She worked it out: those two hundred had jumped over from other channels; news of the outage traveled faster on the #OutsideMyWindow# map than through the station's phones. Another night, in the small hours, a bird landed on the outer sill and stood four minutes without moving. The chat stayed silent start to finish, and only after it flew off did one line come out: just now we were four thousand and one. Someone clipped that; twenty thousand plays, not high; the comments held one sentence: nobody copy this—let them land.
Someone at the station posted a screenshot of Hu Yisu's stream to the intranet with one question only: should this be managed. It hung half a day on the board; Old Tang settled it at the weekly meeting in eight characters: an off-duty window is none of our business. The post was deleted that same day; before it went, someone had saved a copy; whoever saved it never posted it.
The chat was frugal. Someone asked is this Kashgar; no one answered. One night a line came through: are you the woman who found the shoulder. It hung on screen a dozen-odd seconds and got pushed to the top. The line that followed was two characters: not asking. The ones after that were all the same. The next night the man came back, and posted: did you sleep well last night. Zhou Yan sat a while facing away from the camera and did not answer. From that day on, no one asked a single question in that channel again. Four thousand people watched a row of poplars, as if by agreement. Once a new account came in and fired five questions in a row—the data, the window, whether it had really woken; no one answered him; he stopped at the seventh, and the next day the account never came back.
Eli caught it by accident. He came to deliver the duty roster, stood behind her watching the screen a good while, and said: Heart of the dish, this window of yours won't do. Zhou Yan asked what was wrong with it. He said the tree only half catches the light; the lamp's on the right—shift your camera thirty centimeters left. He measured it off with his hand and added: wedge two books underneath, or the frame eats the treetop. Zhou Yan did it—two books went under the left side, one a printout of DE440, one a blank record book. Eli looked at the finished product, nodded, said: now the tree is whole. He didn't ask why she was filming a tree. On his way out he added one line: the tree's better looking than the antennas' shells—that paint of theirs is dead. A while later he doubled back: keep this from the station office; once they know, they'll make it a task for you.
Julian date 2459707, 2 June 2022, Monday: three documents arrived one after another. The first came through the station, red-letterhead: the star-carving project's initial appropriation cut sixty percent, three departments' signatures at the foot. The second followed from the engineering side: with the appropriation cut, every month the departure window slipped, the arrival window—the first-strike window—slipped four. The third was background material, an assessment summary attached by a certain country's parliament, urging that the budget turn from etching to livelihood; the turn had been given a new name: afterimage-period livelihood. The assessment cited a poll—In the years that remain, what should public spending prioritize—nine items listed. Leave a record ranked fourth. Zhou Yan skimmed the top three: all of them the getting-by end of the list.
She squared the three documents in order. Inside the sixty percent that was cut: the array site survey's money, the calibration bodies' money, the content committee's meeting money. Three days later the survey team pulled out of the gobi; for fuel they had still come to Eli; Eli came back and said the piles were half driven, the machines sheeted over, like a row of people sitting. The content committee's phone meetings stopped; Hu Yisu's consultancy seat lasted to the ninth session; the ninth session's minutes never came out. She ran the arithmetic in the margin with a pencil: first-strike window 2461152—slip it one month, that's four months; one year, forty-eight. She stopped at the third line. At the bottom of that page she copied 2461152 over once and drew a short line after it. The line stayed empty.
That night Ursula spoke in the group. Day thirty-five since she had taken over line seven; fourteen days since the deadline that had already passed. She said two things, that was all. First: I don't hand out half-finished work. Second: the day I count it out, nobody opens a livestream. With those two lines out, her avatar went gray. No one in the group picked them up. An hour later someone left the group; the alias unchanged, still hanging at the tail of the member list, gray. That night Hu Yisu's channel held twenty million; he screenshotted the two lines and sent them to Zhou Yan without one word added. Zhou Yan sent back one character: mm. She saved the screenshot into 3t as well; done, she glanced over that directory—it held more than two hundred files now; the oldest was the shoulder, from autumn the year before.
Day two hundred one of the hiss. Entering it in the ledger she added a note: today it's like there's a layer of cloth over it. She hadn't used that description before. Before closing the book she listened a while: behind the cloth, the same tone as ever—no higher, no lower. She tried lying with one ear against the pillow; the cloth thickened a little; she turned over, and it thinned back. She logged that too.
The next morning she computed the S table. Line 152, 0.37. From the night Hu Yisu set up his camera to now, fifty-odd days of the S column, clean as a set of bones, laid out in order waiting for someone to claim them. She copied the 0.37 onto the page and set a dot beside it; it ran with the hundred fifty-one dots before it into a straight line. Looking at that line she thought: the day it ever moves, the first to know will be this page. She will only be second.
The paper records were finished that week. The last one—number fourteen thousand six hundred—she entered with a hand lighter than all the rest. In the remarks column of the last page she wrote one character: End. Then she emailed Shanghai, body four words: all of it recorded. Lu Weiming answered the next day: Received. The day after came one more, three pages of checklist attached, the last line: the missing-page count matches; you're more careful than my catalog. She saved that one too. With the mail sent she sat a while: fourteen thousand six hundred readings, two hundred three days, passed through her hands once and again. She couldn't imagine who would ever call those papers up, or what the world would look like at the using. She closed the binder and put it back on the shelf; the spot had stood empty two-odd months; now it was full again.
Monday, Julian date 2459714, 9 June 2022, 4:11 in the afternoon: Hu Yisu closed the livestream.
In the last minutes before he closed it the concurrent count was thirty million, and the chat scrolled the same two characters over and over: don't close. He said a few things, not long. He said that at first he had thought people came to watch the gobi; later he understood that people wanted to watch together—to watch one thing change or not change, together—and that on the day something really was about to happen, this channel ought to be empty; everyone ought to be standing at their own windows. He said: so the emptying starts from mine. Then he pressed close. The channel's replay was set not to save; of the four hundred seventy thousand #OutsideMyWindow# channels, the one that had sat at the front had a gray avatar now. That night the platform's #OutsideMyWindow# map was short one black point; the man who made the map didn't know which one was gone; the count marked on it dropped from four hundred seventy thousand even to four hundred sixty-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine. He screenshotted it and posted it; no one replied underneath.
The station area was very quiet that night. Zhou Yan fed Lao Wu: five shrimp pellets dropped in; he came out of the rock seam, reached one, stopped. The other four sank slowly to the bottom. She crouched and watched ten minutes; he did not move again. Eli had said they stop eating before a molt; he couldn't say how long the stop lasted. It was preparing something, or preparing nothing—from outside, the two look the same. The tank's pump sounded louder than usual, because the room held no other sound. She turned off the light and left the four pellets where they had sunk.
Three minutes to ten, she sat in the machine room; the cell for line 158 still stood empty—tomorrow morning's work. The hiss went on behind its layer of cloth. At ten exactly, the mail came.
She knew the sender. The subject line was three characters: bring ears. She stared at those three characters some seconds before she saw the line below: an attachment, four pages, scans. The clock in the screen's lower right corner walked forward a second at a time. She pulled her chair in to the desk.
She opened the attachment.