[ECHO ARCHIVE · LAYER 2 · 22.8% DECODED · KEY: A LINE FROM EPISODE 3 OF THE 1987 TV SERIAL IRON BRIDGE]
The first letter we didn't send ourselves came from the Dutch, in March.
A second-year student in Leiden had turned twenty-four days of power readings into one chart: dates on the x-axis, decibels on the y-axis, and what came out was a staircase—0.31 dB per stair, 86,400 seconds between stairs, give or take 0.4. He posted the chart to an amateur radio forum with one line of English: Somebody is turning a knob.
The post lived nineteen hours. Deleted. He posted it again from another account; it lived six hours. The third time he skipped the forum and mailed the chart straight to the public addresses of seventy-four observatories, ours among them.
That day the signal reached the twenty-sixth stair.
Tong pinned the printed chart to the whiteboard, beside Xiao Gao's 41-item list. The two sheets side by side: one, place names from forty years on; the other, a flight of stairs.
"We held it for twenty-four days," he said. "Held it all the way to this."
"Twenty-four days was already respectable," Lao Song said. "This institute couldn't even hold the hot water."
That chart wasn't the only copy. That afternoon Lao Song turned up two more. One: a high-school teacher in another province who'd run a record with his students off an old satellite dish plus a homemade low-noise amplifier—no absolute calibration, relative power only, and the staircase was a staircase all the same. Two: a secondhand spectrum-analyzer dealer who swept across the frequency in a livestream, narrating as he went what a fine noise floor the machine had—look, there's even a signal here.
"The man selling the machines swept it up," Lao Song said. "What is there left to guard."
"Guarding until next Thursday," Tong said.
The boiler room's three days became six. On the fifth morning a case of bottled water appeared in the conference room; nobody claimed the purchase. Xiao Gao took to steeping his enamel mug with the bottled water, caught one remark from Ye Zhen, and switched to carrying hot water over from the canteen, spilling a trail every trip.
Shen Yi arrived that afternoon.
He came alone, no uniform, a dark jacket zipped to the chest, a hard-shell briefcase in hand. He set the case on the conference room's long table, first swept the tabletop's contents to either side—what he swept was Ye Zhen's microfilm reader—and only then introduced himself.
"Shen Yi, liaison officer," he said. "From today I work here."
Ye Zhen carried the reader back to its place, then measured the desktop with her hand until it sat parallel to the edge.
Shen Yi brought three things.
The first was twenty-seven envelopes, one per person. Inside each: a backdated confidentiality agreement, a message card, and a registration form for personal communications devices. The card carried two printed lines: Don't volunteer, don't deny. Below them, three question-and-answer pairs—questions a reporter might ask, answers it was permissible to give.
Q: Have you received a signal from aliens.
A: We have registered a narrowband emission and are ruling out local and near-Earth interference.
Q: Is there content inside it.
A: Work is currently at the data-structure analysis stage.
Q: Why the secrecy.
A: There is no secrecy. There is the ordinary practice of not releasing conclusions before they are mature.
Xiao Gao turned the card over; the back was blank. He said he couldn't memorize the three answers, because not one sentence sounded like something a person would say.
"You don't have to memorize them," Shen Yi said. "You just can't say anything else."
The second was seals and a recording device. One device in the conference room, one in Machine Six's duty room; a seal across the archives-room door, breaking it requiring a written record.
The third was himself.
From the next day he took us one at a time, twenty minutes each, in roster order. My turn came at ten thirty in the morning.
"Lin Wanqiu. Deep-space signal processing, Grade 4 engineer," he read off my registration form. "Amateur radio license, Class A, examined in 2019."
"Yes."
"Do you still use the callsign."
"They issue it once every two or three years."
"The radio on the duty-room desk isn't on any registration form."
"That's a radio," I said. "Receive only. It doesn't transmit."
"Model."
"Red Lantern, model 741. Nineteen eighty-seven."
"Nineteen eighty-seven." His eyes came up a beat.
"It's a coincidence."
"I didn't say it wasn't." He wrote one line, set the pen down. "That set gets registered. Not confiscated—registered."
"Fine."
"One more thing," he said. "The source of Layer 2's key is a tape of your father's."
"Yes."
"That tape is in the audio group's cabinet now, catalog number T-114. I'm taking the original."
"The digitized original, untouched, is already archived."
"I want the original."
"Why."
"Because it is the physical carrier of the only verified key the human race currently holds." His tone didn't change saying it—no different from reading out my license year. "Sitting in your audio group's sheet-metal cabinet, I can't accept."
I didn't answer right away.
"The canteen has sweet-and-sour ribs today," I said. "If you're staying to eat, you'll need to buy a meal card first."
He looked at me about three seconds, then wrote another line on the paper.
"It's five to eleven. You can go," he said.
The tape was taken on day three. Before it went, Zhou required one thing: a fresh capture on the spot in the audio group, double backup, one copy for the institute safe, one to travel with the tape. I wasn't there for the capture; Xiao Gao watched it. He told me afterward that side A of the tape opens with forty seconds of blank, and he'd nearly decided the machine was broken.
I said I knew. I said my father had hit record early.
As for the four countries' joint line, the draft we saw was the fourth.
It didn't come through channels; it was a single sheet Zhou brought back himself, creased from a fax machine. He laid it on the conference table and let us read it on our own.
The first draft had been titled "Joint Statement on a Narrowband Emission of Non-Natural Origin." The fourth draft's title had lost two words: "Joint Statement on a Narrowband Emission." "Non-natural origin" was deleted; the reason sat in a margin note: a classification ahead of the evidence.
In the body text, the word "content" had appeared four times. In the fourth draft, zero times. The deletions were surgical: not sentences cut, but "signal content" rewritten as "signal structure," "decoded imagery" as "decoded data layers," and the word "future" lifted out entire, replaced by "timestamp anomaly."
"'Timestamp anomaly.'" Adebayo said the words twice. "If I were an insurance company, I could read those words all day and nothing would happen to me."
"That's the purpose," Shen Yi said. He had stayed by the door the whole time, hadn't sat.
"The purpose is to make it unreadable?"
"The purpose is that nothing happens on day one," Shen Yi said. "If nothing happens on day one, then on day two somebody is managing day two."
At this Zhou set down the pen he was holding.
"I want it in three," he said. "First the signal, second the decode, third the content. Ten days between each."
"The secrecy window from above is three weeks," Shen Yi said. "Three weeks from the day of discovery, ending next Thursday."
"The three weeks are for us, not for the content."
"Dr. Zhou," Shen Yi said, "that student in Leiden was on a news interview yesterday. He doesn't know the content. All he has is the staircase chart. Guess how many times the host asked him about 'aliens.'"
"I'd guess a lot."
"Eleven times," Shen Yi said. "If we don't publish, others publish for us. And when they publish, nobody writes the words 'timestamp anomaly.'"
Zhou looked a long time at the creased sheet on the table. He reached out and smoothed it a little, and as he smoothed, his right hand trembled once against the paper; a corner lifted and settled again.
"Two, then," he said.
"One next Thursday, for the signal and the decode. The content—" he paused. "The content I want after Layer 2 has taken a full seven days."
"Agreed," Shen Yi said.
He agreed faster than any of us expected. I often thought about that "agreed" afterward. At the time I took it for a concession.
Layer 2 gave one day per day.
Twenty-four hours against twenty-four hours, constant speed. We tried everything: longer integration, parallel channels, retransmission requests by frame number, a string of handshake packets fired in that direction—the last one Adebayo's doing, behind everyone's back. He used the institute's transmitting antenna, forty minutes toward Cassiopeia, a kilowatt, three runs of primes. Nothing came of any of it. Its twenty-sixth stair still climbed at 03:11:44, neither early nor late.
When Shen Yi found out he didn't discipline him; he said one sentence at a meeting: from now on, anything you transmit, clear it with me first. That sentence kept Adebayo from telling a single joke for two full days.
That week, leaving or entering the institute meant signing twice—once at the gate, once downstairs. Leaving at night required a form with two fields: purpose, and estimated time of return.
On the third day I filled out one. In the purpose field I wrote: family—piano recital, morning of April 11.
The young man at the gate studied it a while and said the date was wrong; April 11 had already passed.
I took the form back, crossed out "April 11," wrote "this Saturday morning." Only then did he stamp it. When he'd stamped it he added that he was on duty Saturday too—remember to sign out with me when you leave.
In the end I didn't go. That night Layer 2 was into its fourth day's worth; the roster held only me and Xiao Gao. His enamel mug sat at his workstation while he lay face down in the machine hall and slept two hours.
I messaged home that I might not make Saturday; tell her teacher. After sending it I turned the phone face down, the way I had the previous days.
The next morning there was a photo on the phone. Nian had taken it herself, crooked: her piano stand in frame, the second page of the "Twinkle Twinkle" Variations spread open, and at variation three a run of little penciled triangles. Drawn hard, the paper pushed up at the back.
No words under the photo.
By day five we held April 12 through 16, 2079—five days' worth, 22.8 percent decoded.
The world of those five days, honestly, was dull.
April 12: the result of a local election, a bulletin on centralized drug procurement, the fixture list of a sports league we couldn't trace, and two minutes of weather forecast—in which the anchorwoman said, "The south-bank driving restrictions lift tomorrow." Hearing that line, Xiao Gao set his cup down, said nothing, walked to the whiteboard, and ticked the "Linpu" line on his 41-item list.
April 13: a commemorative event, a typhoon given its number, a report on a new strain of rice.
April 14 through 16: meetings, groundbreakings, roads named, two traffic accidents, a missing old man found, and thirty-seven seconds of obituary listings.
Ye Zhen cut the thirty-seven seconds out and copied the listings into her notebook, entry by entry. Names, ages, work units. When she finished she closed the notebook and said nobody passes this one around.
"Some of the people in these thirty-seven seconds," she said, "haven't been born yet."
Nobody picked that up. The old VCR glowed in the corner, eleven minutes fast.
Those days I was working the finance segments.
Finance was the driest work and the easiest to take evidence from—lots of numbers, lots of places to check. On April 12, the evening schedule carried a market-close program at 18:42, three minutes forty seconds long.
The framing was standard: anchor left, graphic panel right, the day's trend line across it. The line's color was different from now, the axis font different too. The index's name was half buried under the crawl beneath—only the top halves of the characters showing, no telling which index it was.
I blew the frame up to 800 percent.
In the panel's lower right corner ran a line of very small text; in the raw frame the character height was seven pixels. I used the fill light beside the reader Ye Zhen had lent me—which is a nonsense sentence, since a screen has nothing to do with a fill light; I really did switch the light on, because one of the duty room's ceiling lamps was dead and my own shadow lay across the screen.
Four passes of super-resolution, character by character against the font library, and I read it.
It said: Base date 1990.12.19 = 100.
December 19, 1990. One hundred points.
A date I'd had by heart my first year on the job, because the institute once bought a fund and lost money, and for a full week Lao Song recited that base date, saying everyone starts from a hundred points—how come he started from three thousand.
I moved the cursor off the small text, toward the center of the panel.
The closing level sat at the right end of the trend line, white digits with a small upward triangle. Six figures.
I copied it onto paper, and beneath it wrote today's level. A little over three thousand four hundred.
Then I drew a multiplication sign between the two numbers and wrote one figure.
Forty.
Outside, a car reversing in the lot, the sensor beeping a long time, then cutting off mid-beep. The workstation's fans just as steady as ever. The thirtieth stair was five hours past; the thirty-first wouldn't come until tomorrow before dawn.
I folded the sheet once, then again, into my breast pocket, then scrubbed the program ahead fourteen seconds.
The anchor was reading the closing commentary. Halfway through he smiled and said something probably not on his script:
"Another good day today."