[ECHO ARCHIVE · LAYER 2 · 0% DECODED · KEY: TO BE FILLED (HINT: 1987/TV/CN + A 1.2-SECOND AUDIO FINGERPRINT)]
The search itself, the first two days, was Adebayo's job, and it went ugly.
Chinese TV serials broadcast in 1987 with titles findable in the public catalogs: one hundred thirty-seven. Of those, with a complete digitized original soundtrack that could be pulled on the institute network: forty-one. He ran all forty-one, cutting windows sentence by sentence, window 1.2 seconds, step 0.1 seconds, computing fingerprints, comparing by cosine. Thirty-one million comparisons in all.
Top score, 0.42.
"What kind of score is 0.42?" Tong asked.
"It's the score I'd get matching the calls of two different birds," Adebayo said. "It's not in these forty-one."
"The other ninety-six."
"The other ninety-six—the masters sit in provincial stations' storerooms, and the tape machines may not even turn anymore."
That afternoon Ye Zhen carried over two boxes of microfilm from the archives. She set the reader up on the conference room's long table and turned the crank, and the screen filled with the 1987 Radio and TV Newspaper, one issue a week, the staple holes of the center fold biting into the program listings.
She read and called out numbers, her voice flat: "January, three. February, two. March, five—no, one of those is a rerun; cross it out."
By evening she had the list sorted into three columns: forty-one with an audio source; thirty-six with no audio source but an archived script on file; sixty with nothing at all. At the top of the third column she wrote one line: this column cannot be reached by searching.
"If searching can't reach it, what will?" Xiao Gao said.
"The method somebody happens to have at home," Ye Zhen said.
The next morning Zhou came by. He stood in front of the list for two minutes and asked one question: in 1987, how did an ordinary household keep the sound of a TV drama?
Nobody answered right away.
"A tape recorder set in front of the TV," I said.
He turned to look at me.
"That's how my house did it. My father had a single-deck, a Yanwu. He didn't tape the picture for dramas—no VCR in the house—he taped the sound. The deck sat in front of the TV, and everyone had to keep quiet while it ran."
"You still have tapes like that?"
"One box."
The old VCR in the conference room still ran eleven minutes fast. Zhou looked at it as if checking something against it, or as if checking nothing.
"Go home this morning," he said. "Don't take the hint out of the building, and don't tell anyone what you're looking for. Say you're looking for your father's old tapes."
"That part is true anyway," I said.
He nodded and started for the door, and stopped halfway.
"Wanqiu."
"Mm."
"If that box gets opened, open it all the way," he said. "Don't open it halfway and put it back."
The old house stands in Xiheyan Third Lane, west of the city: a six-story red-brick walk-up, no elevator. Two of the stairwell's sound-activated lights were broken; from the third floor up I went by phone light. At the second-floor family's door the same folding bicycle has been stacked for four years—still that bicycle, the oil on its chain dried to a hard black stripe.
The key had swollen a little against the lock: it goes in with a lift, then carries half a notch right. My father taught me that move. He said locks are like people—when they get old, you go along with them.
Inside the door came the smell of the water-meter box: rust, old newspapers, a faint coolness. I hadn't drawn the curtains fully shut the last time I left; they stood a hand's width apart, and four years of sun through that hand's width had bleached a narrow stripe into the sofa arm—a color that had stopped changing inside the stripe.
I didn't go to the balcony first. I opened the kitchen tap; the pipe coughed up yellow water, twenty seconds before it ran clear. I turned it off and stood there listening to the dripping slow down, slower, until it was under hearing.
The balcony held three things: a washing machine with its paint peeling, a horizontal iron laundry pole, and that cardboard box.
The box was wound in clear tape, many layers, the edges pressed down neat—my father's handiwork. He liked to wrap from the middle out toward both ends, and to fold a little triangle at the finish so the end would be easy to find next time. I found the little triangle, picked it up with a fingernail, and tore it back. The tape took some of the box's paper skin with it, showing the gray-yellow core underneath. As the ring came off, a layer of dust rose and hung in that hand's width of sun, drifting, a long time settling.
Inside were cassettes, stacked upright, twelve to a row, four rows—somewhat over forty in all. Every spine carried a label, written in my father's pencil, very small, the point too sharp; here and there it had nicked the paper.
Ferry Crossing, episodes 1-2, winter '86.
Iron Bridge, episodes 1-4, August 14. Thunder.
Iron Bridge, episodes 5-8, August 15.
The Elders, half recorded; the tape jammed.
Nian-nian's first birthday, first lunar month.
The last label was a little newer than the rest; the pencil grooves still shone. On Nian-nian's first birthday, my father could still carry the recorder himself and make it a few steps.
At the bottom of the box, pressed flat, lay a 1998 Radio and TV Newspaper. A piece had been cut from the center fold, the cut dead straight—scissors run against a ruler. The cut fell in the program listings; which day, which column, there was no telling anymore.
I sat down on the balcony floor, spread the paper over my legs, kept it there a while, then folded it back together and returned it to the bottom of the box.
The single-deck recorder was under the living-room TV cabinet, weighted with two old magazines. The drive belt had gone slack; that I knew—my father's late fix was a rubber band stretched inside to make the capstan bite. The band was still there, gone stiff. I found a new one in the kitchen drawer. That drawer always held rubber bands, staples, and three kinds of screws; four years untouched, and it still did.
I fed in the Iron Bridge tape, episodes 1-4, and pressed play.
Side A opened onto blank tape, forty seconds of it. Then the television's sound, across a meter and more of air, mixed with the room's echo, mixed with cicadas outside the window. The thunder was real; the label hadn't lied. From the eighth minute it rolled in waves, and the loudest clap flattened the audio end to end.
Episode three was midway down side B.
That stretch was a night scene: two people at the county-town bridge, the man leaving, the woman not seeing him off. They said a few things, all of them short. Between the lines, long silences.
Then the woman said:
"No matter how late, I'll leave food in the pot for you."
Two seconds later my father's voice came in. He was beside the recorder, close to the microphone, near enough to catch his breath sounds. He read the line along:
"No matter how late, I'll leave food in the pot for you."
When he finished he laughed—one soft note—then said: "That line is well written."
From the kitchen someone answered—a single phrase, behind the thunder; who it was, and what was said, there was no telling.
The tape kept running. Episode four began; the first bars of the title music rose, and I pressed the stop key.
The key was heavy; pressed to the bottom, it gave one muffled click.
Out on the balcony the hand's width of sun had moved on to the laundry pole. Downstairs someone was calling a name—twice, and the third time it turned into cursing. The owner of the folding bicycle was back; he stood the bike up, and the chain rattled.
I sat there about twenty minutes. Twenty is what I remember, because the return bus runs every forty, and I timed my way downstairs and caught it.
Going down, the door across the landing opened. The old lady from the third floor—I never did keep her surname; she has always called me "Xiao Lin's girl." She peered through the door gap at me for a long moment and asked whether I was selling the flat.
"Not selling."
"Not selling, and you never come," she said. "Last month the property man came to read the meter and hammered for ages—nobody home. The winter of that year, your father came and cleared a drain for me."
"I know."
"You don't," she said. "When he'd finished he sat in my place a while and said his hands were done—he couldn't turn a wrench anymore. He never told you, did he."
She shut the door when she was done, shut it quickly, as if afraid I'd ask more.
I stood a moment in the stairwell with the tape against my chest, then went on down. The folding bicycle on the second floor blocked half a step; I sidled past it, and my trouser leg brushed the chain and took a black stripe.
Back at the institute by three forty in the afternoon.
I handed the tape to the audio group through the regular channels: registered, sealed, number copied. The digitization ran on their older capture card, 44.1 kilohertz, 16-bit, mono—no noise reduction, no de-hiss, nothing at all. Zhou had given the instruction specially: in as it came, out as it came.
The audio group's senior technician was Master Lu, close to retirement, a lifetime spent with magnetic tape. First he ran the tape through the machine dry, just listening, and said the pinch roller had gone a bit hard; I should wait twenty minutes—he laid the tape on the radiator to warm.
"This tape was stored well," he said. "No damp, no mold. Which way does your balcony face?"
"North."
"North is good," he said. "South-facing, three boxes in ten come out ruined—stuck into one block."
He monitored without headphones, off the machine's little speaker, volume turned way down—you can hear it that way, he said, if the machine starts eating the tape.
The capture was done by four twenty. I cut out the episode-three passage, starting half a second before the woman spoke: 6.4 seconds, taking in the television's own reading of the line, two seconds of blank, my father's reading, and my father's laugh.
The fingerprint match ran eleven seconds.
The TV's 1.2 seconds against B-001: 0.97.
My father's reading: 0.38.
I wrote the two numbers on a sheet and looked at them a while. 0.38 was as it should be. A mel spectrogram doesn't read words, only sound; my father's voice sat more than an octave below the actress on the TV, and slower, and he even paused when he came to the words "in the pot." Nothing about the mismatch was strange.
What matched was the words. Not one word wrong: he had said "buguan" and not the contracted "bengguan," and there was no pause between "gei" and "ni."
Ye Zhen traced Iron Bridge. Eight episodes, broadcast August 11 through 18, 1987, one a day. It wasn't among the forty-one with audio sources, and it wasn't among the thirty-six with archived scripts—the script was borrowed the next day from a retired editor at the provincial station, a handwritten fair copy, with a tea stain on the episode-three page.
On her list, Iron Bridge belonged to the third column. The third column was the sixty with nothing at all.
"As of now, the only sound of it in the world," she said, "is this one tape in our hands."
"And if I hadn't gone back to open that box."
"There would have been other roads," she said. "Slower ones."
She said it fast—fast as if she'd thought it out beforehand.
I saved the 6.4 seconds. First I typed the filename `dad_0814.wav`; then I changed it to `ref_1987_ep03.wav` and put it in the working directory. After renaming, I kept a copy of the original under the untouched name on my private drive.
Adebayo said later that the hard part of this layer was not finding the line. It was typing the line right.
The key field is 32 bytes; UTF-8 or GBK, it doesn't say. Punctuation, mood particles, whether there's a final period—it doesn't say that either. We drew up eleven transcription variants:
1. GBK, full-width comma, final period 2. GBK, full-width comma, no final punctuation 3. GBK, half-width comma 4. UTF-8, full-width comma, final period 5. UTF-8, full-width comma, no final punctuation 6. "No matter how late it's gotten, I'll leave food in the pot for you" 7. "No matter how late, I'll leave food in the pot for you, you know" 8. no punctuation at all, the line run together 9. traditional-character transcription 10. full pinyin 11. the archived script's wording (from her list of the thirty-six with archived scripts, Ye Zhen traced Iron Bridge's script; for this line in episode three the script reads "No matter how late, I'll leave food in the pot for you."—period included)
Try one, no. Try two, no. Tries three, four, five, six, no.
Try seven passed.
Try seven was "No matter how late, I'll leave food in the pot for you, you know"—wrong. Of course it hadn't passed; I had the order wrong. Try seven was number five: UTF-8, full-width comma, no final punctuation. Eleven characters plus one comma, twelve characters in all, thirty-six bytes, zero-padded behind.
The time was day twenty-one after discovery, eight oh nine in the evening. Seven people in the room, and nobody shouted. Tong rapped his fingers twice on the table edge, as if beating time to something, and when he'd finished didn't know why he had.
Layer 2 began to come down.
The size field of Layer 2's entry in the catalog table worked out to seven days. Not seven frames, not seven segments—seven days. A full week of news, morning through the midnight slot, with ads, with weather, with the two-in-the-afternoon programming of the agricultural channel nobody watches. The rate still constant, still no fast-forward, still no on-demand. Layer 1 had given 4.2 seconds; Layer 2 was giving a week, so a week was what we would have to wait.
The first usable footage came up at eleven forty that night.
This time the frame was complete. It had frame edges—the two-pixel black column on the left edge was there, the camera's vignetting was there, the black level jittering between minus 3 and 1, jittering the way every camera jitters. The histogram had shoulders, peaks, a normal dark tail.
Ye Zhen added an entry to her notebook, numbered A-03: Layer 1, frames 92 through 105 (the half face)—histogram flat, no frame edge, no vignetting. A different source from Layer 2? Pending classification.
She capped her pen and said: "I'm noting it for now."
That same night, Adebayo also decoded Layer 3's key-hint pointer. He wasn't assigned to it; his hands were idle. The first 12 bytes of the Layer 3 hint, plaintext:
`2008/OG/OPEN`
"Nineteen eighty-seven, two thousand eight." He wrote the two numbers on the whiteboard with an arrow between them. "Closer and closer. At this trend, Layer Sixteen's key will be a meme my cousin sent last year."
Nobody laughed. He didn't either. He erased the arrow and left the two numbers.
At eleven fifty-eight, the picture steadied.
The studio was new; the anchor desk curved; the big screen behind it held a world map, with one patch of color I couldn't put a meaning to. The anchor was a man of forty-odd, hair combed flat and smooth, a Windsor knot at his collar. He nudged the sheet of paper under his hand—so they still used paper, forty years on—lifted his head, and looked into the lens.
The shot cut to a close-up.
He said: "Hello, everyone. Today is April 12, 2079."