[ECHO ARCHIVE · LAYER 1 · 3% DECODED · KEY: NONE · LAYER 1 CARRIES CHANNEL CODING ONLY, UNENCRYPTED · NOTE: TEST-BROADCAST LAYER]
Once the error-correction code was identified, the work actually got easier. A machine that can read the error-correction code needs no help—you give it the rules and it fishes the bits out of the noise by itself; symbol rate, frame structure, packet identifiers, each one growing out on its own. In three days we watched the data stream's skeleton take shape: transport stream format, 188-byte packets—the same house rules human satellite TV runs on. Adebayo said it was like getting a letter: the envelope was sold by the post office, the stamps were printed by the post office, and the only thing missing was a return address.
"Then open the letter," Zhou said.
The letter wasn't thick. The size field of Layer 1's entry in the catalog table worked out to 4.2 seconds. Ye Zhen printed the several hundred "catalog pages," laid them out on the long table in serial order, and went through them page by page, like someone returning books. On the second day she said: "These table numbers follow a pattern. The format looks like dates, but the digit count is wrong—like a calendar with the year digits torn off." She stopped there, went back and checked it through, and said: "I don't know which year its calendar is. I only know it has been lined up in order." She pulled that table out on its own and put it in a file bag, and on the bag she wrote: to be sorted. She was out of sorts the whole afternoon—things that stay unsorted make her ill; I knew that.
The video stream came out on the Thursday. The demux ran on Machine Six; the elementary video stream stripped off separately, the progress bar at three percent—less than a third of the data was video, and the rest was tables nobody could read, Ye Zhen's "catalog pages," parked for the moment. The video feed had taken heavy bit errors: more than half the decoded frames came out as snow and the rest weren't whole, and by rights what came out of the decode should have been unwatchable. There was one fight, over how to fill the gaps: the software's default fills from the previous frame, and a filled frame drags—a person in motion splits into three layers. I said fill with gray; fill exactly what's missing; better to cost a little more than to be false. Lao Song said gray is unwatchable. I said unwatchable is the point. We're looking at what it gave us, not at what we want to see. Zhou listened from the side, committed to nothing, and said at the end: "Run both, make two versions, and keep them on file once the meeting's done." Both got run, and what the whole world saw later was the gray version.
The first two seconds and change were all snow. Not the jumping snow of a broken set—orderly noise, a layer of light gray laid over dark gray, barely moving. I watched it a long time. The night room was very quiet: the Red Lantern radio on, shortwave band, hissing, two hisses stacked on each other, one from my desk and one from the screen, and for a while my ears couldn't tell which was which.
At frame 62, the snow drew back.
A studio. Only half the anchor desk in frame—the left half, as if the lens had been mounted crooked. On the desk stood a glass of water, no markings on the glass. The backdrop was blue, evenly blue. The picture surfaced out of the snow a little at a time and took some thirty frames to form completely. When the snow was half gone, the woman on the set was in the act of sitting down behind that half desk—a newsreader, dark suit, tie of indeterminate color. She bent her head to sort her script, hands never stopping, never looking up. The frame held half her face the whole time: the right half—the half cut away, vertically, below the bridge of the nose. The signal hadn't dropped; the signal was clean. The picture itself was only half. The left half was flat, nothing on it, as if it had never been painted in.
I can't say what I thought in those 44 frames. I probably thought nothing. I was counting: her eyelashes moved once, so it was video, not a photograph. The blue of the backdrop behind her was uneven here and there, so there were two lights. No sound of pages turning in front of her, so the audio track hadn't been decoded yet. The counting went smoothly. People do have their ways of holding steady.
At frame 92, the station ID came up. Lower right corner, an ID I had never seen. She was still bent over her script. At frame 105, the picture went black. That was all Layer 1 had. 105 frames of material; we had decoded 44 worth watching.
I didn't call anyone right away. I played the 44 frames three more times. On the second pass I noticed the tie—dark, diagonal stripes, the spacing wide as something out of another era. On the third pass I noticed her hands as she sorted—a page turned, pressed flat, another turned—and in the last two or three frames the hand holding the page stopped, as if something on one of the pages had made her pause. Made her pause. No picture proves why she stopped; it was something I saw. What is seen doesn't count as evidence—I have stood in this trade fourteen years; I know that. On the fourth pass I didn't press play. I sat there and let the picture sit on black. Then I called Zhou. Four in the morning. He picked up before the second ring. I said: "Layer 1 has video. Come take a look." He asked: "How long?" I said: "Four point two seconds." He said: "Ten minutes." He lives at the foot of the mountain. Ten minutes meant he hadn't been asleep.
While Zhou watched, the others drifted in one by one; nobody called them. Machine Six's screen was lit, and people passing stopped on their own. Adebayo came last, half a youtiao in his hand. After the first pass, nobody spoke. After the third pass, Adebayo set the youtiao down. That was the highest tribute he ever paid me.
"Forged." Lao Song, the day man, spoke first. "Deepfakes now—this resolution is something you dash off."
"Forged to do what?" I said. "Beam a signal at the second harmonic of the hydrogen line, hold the power steps to within half a second—all to show four point two seconds to one night shift?"
"Then somebody has breached our receive chain."
"I spent three days on the chain," I said. I didn't go into the three pages of the ledger with him. He doesn't read ledgers. He reads conclusions.
Zhou said nothing the whole time. He walked the 44 frames one by one, slowly, stopped at the station-ID frame, froze it, and studied it for about half a minute. Then he said: "There's a registration number at the lower right of the ID. Magnify it."
Magnified. Under the ID, sure enough, ran a line of small type, eight digits. That country's broadcasting authority registers station IDs under a numbering system, the format public: first four digits, year of registration; last four, serial, the final digit a check. The system hadn't changed in thirty-odd years.
Adebayo went into the public database. A full-database search of that serial range. He found the format specification, the year-by-year bulletins, registration samples from thirty thousand organizations. The database is public and the search costs nothing, and that was exactly what made it unbearable—looking up a thing that doesn't exist, by a road anyone can walk. The newest registration record in the database was from the year before last, serial ending 8841; the registrant was a county-level converged-media center, and the bulletin still carried photos of its inaugural ribbon-cutting. The people in the photos were all smiling nicely. The ID in our frame carried 2077 as its first four digits.
The last four digits, the serial: no such number in the database. But the check digit—run the eight digits through the public algorithm—was valid.
Adebayo computed it twice, switched calculators, computed it again. He pushed the calculator to the middle of the table, and nobody picked it up. When the room went quiet you could hear the ceiling light at the end of the corridor, a thin hum of current that had been there all along; nobody ever hears it.
"The number is fake," Lao Song said. "Faked badly. There's no such thing as 2077."
"The check digit is real," Adebayo said. That was the last thing he said all day that sounded like a joke, and it hadn't been one to begin with.
Zhou stood and ran through a string of arrangements at his usual speed, one sentence at a time: the video sealed where it was; two copies made, one into the safe; the analysis continues, and no conclusions of any kind before the audio track is decoded; outside this group, not one word to anyone. At the end he glanced at me: "Night logs carry operation screenshots, starting tonight."
The whole group spent the rest of the morning wrestling with that half face. Not with her—with her left side. Lao Song held it was packet loss: the transport dropped half, and the decoder filled the drop with stillness. It was the most reasonable account, and the fastest to die. A packet-loss fill leaves a residue of the previous frame; when a person moves, the residue drags. The left half of this picture didn't move. Top to bottom it was the same layer of gray; pull the histogram and it lay flat, a single line, as if someone had pressed it down with a ruler. Adebayo tried the fault-tolerance modes of seven decoders, and the left side stayed as it was. "It isn't broken," he said. "It was never meant to be."
"The lens mounted crooked?"
"A crooked lens leaves an edge," I said. What a lens crops carries a frame boundary. That half had none; the gray butted straight against it, no seam.
Nobody picked it up. The meeting couldn't go any further, because past this point it stopped being an engineering problem. Zhou herded us off to lunch and said the afternoon would run per the schedule, item by item: decode the audio track, measure the noise, match the station ID; everything else, not to be thought about yet. When he said "not to be thought about yet," his tone was as flat as "rain this afternoon."
After we broke up I locked Machine Six. It was nearly dawn. I sat in the chair a while. The Red Lantern at the corner of the desk was still on, hissing. I turned it to medium wave: one station, opera, keening and drawling. Back to shortwave: no station, only the hiss. I sat a while longer, turned the volume down, didn't turn it off.
That radio has no say over anything in the sky. Its whole world is shortwave: freight traffic, fishing boats, medicine sellers, preachers still up in the small hours. I turned the band from end to end, passing station after station, none of them knowing the others. Somewhere along the dial I thought: my father used to turn it just like this, all night, and count himself lucky to pick up three or five stations. Shortwave is emptier now; fewer people are willing to speak on it every year. I kept turning. I paused in the direction of the hydrogen line's second harmonic—nothing there, of course; the set can't even reach that band. Out of reach, and left switched on anyway. That is where it outdoes me.
The next morning the audio track had a lead, but only a lead: the audio elementary stream was registered in the catalog table, its data queued far behind—by in-layer order it waits for the video to be decoded before its turn comes. Adebayo was unhappy with the arrangement: "Video with no sound—what is this, a silent film?" Nobody answered him. He went off to study the glass of water in the frame, half an hour of it, and reached a conclusion: the water in the glass had never moved, not even a ripple. "Either it's dead water, or she's tense and her hand never touched the glass." Nobody wanted the observation. He wrote it in his own notebook. It would turn out that his notebook held a fair number of observations nobody wanted.
At lunch nobody in the canteen talked about it. There was nothing much to say—the sayable part is four seconds and change, and everybody knew it. Lao Song ordered an extra portion of ribs and said as he sat down: "Eat up. At this pace, there's plenty of slow burn ahead of us." The canteen TV hung in the corner, volume very low, the noon program running a local news item; the anchor's desk was complete on both sides, and nobody looked twice at it. Our table ate faster than usual.
The second afternoon I went home for a change of clothes. My mother was picking over vegetables; Nian was bent over the coffee table doing homework, and she looked up mid-problem and asked: "Mama, what is it you actually do at work?"
"Listen to sounds," I said.
"What sounds?"
"Somewhere very far away, someone has put a thing out there, and it keeps talking. I listen to what it says."
She thought about that, then said: "Like Grandpa."
My mother's hands stopped over the greens for a beat, then went on. I squared Nian's workbook and said she'd copied problem three down wrong. She went "ah," bent back over it. On the coffee table lay half an apple, uneaten, the cut face gone yellow. I carried it out to the kitchen, threw it away, and washed the plate.
On the way back to the institute that evening I passed the shop where my father took me to buy tapes when I was small. The shop was gone—a bubble-tea shop now, buy-one-get-one on the glass door. I stood a few seconds and didn't go in. Back then my father was particular about tapes: he'd pick one up and check first what the opening track on side A was. If the opening track on side A wasn't any good, the tape wasn't any good. The theory had nothing behind it, but to this day, whatever I buy, I look at its "opening track on side A" first.
The opening track on side A of those 4.2 seconds was a station ID dated 2077.
The official name the archive group gave it was Ye Zhen's doing. She didn't call it "the video," and she didn't call it "the signal." In the file bag's number column she wrote: The First Frame. I passed by, saw it, thought it fit, and took it up. Other groups took it up too, and after a while the two words had set for good. Ye Zhen labeled the file bag, the label in duplicate—one copy inside the bag, one in the register. Her hand is very small, each stroke reined in tight, as if afraid of taking up someone else's room.
It wasn't my night on the roster, but I didn't go home; I sat in the office into the small hours. Machine Six was locked, its screen black; the Red Lantern at the corner of the desk hissed in its place. The ledger lay open under the lamp. I turned forward from the first page: satellite, no; aircraft, no; radar, no. At the end, the ledger ran to page one hundred three. The last line held the station-ID search result; I copied out the eight digits, and after them set a parenthesis, and inside the parenthesis wrote: check digit valid.
That year had not come yet.