[ECHO ARCHIVE · LAYER 2 · 71.6% DECODED · KEY: A LINE FROM EPISODE 3 OF THE 1987 TV SERIAL IRON BRIDGE]
The name "Echo" wasn't thought up by anyone. It was sifted out.
What Zhou Yansheng submitted was CAS-N1—narrowband emission source number one in the Cassiopeia direction. The clerks bounced it twice. Their reasons sat on the rejection slips: four countries would need to use one word in one document; the word had to be two syllables or fewer, pronounceable without trouble in four languages, and it had to clear the trademark database.
The first round had three candidates: Still Water, North Window, Echo.
Still Water collided with a bottled-water brand, under review. One country couldn't say North Window—their announcers would render it as something close to "seashell." Echo hit fourteen entries in the trademark database, all expired; the oldest belonged to an audio equipment factory deregistered in 2003.
The naming meeting ran forty minutes. The meeting on the ninety-second video ran four and a half hours—that came later, that same night.
The announcement was set for day 28, Thursday, two in the afternoon Greenwich time, ten at night local. That day before dawn, at three eleven and forty-four seconds, the staircase stepped onto the thirty-first stair.
The day before the announcement, Layer 2 filled out its seven days: April 12 through 18. 71.6 percent decoded. The twelfth and thirteenth were nearly whole; the five days after had large gaps; the seventeenth only three scattered segments—a groundbreaking, a road surface caving in, a children's show's title sequence.
The institute sent three people to the venue: Zhou Yansheng, Shen Yi, me. I wasn't on stage. I was in the technical standby room behind Hall Three, one wall over, with an observation window through the wall—double glazing, the stage visible, the stage inaudible. The sound came out of a small speaker on the desk, half a beat behind people's mouths.
The standby room's job was written on one sheet, pressed under the keyboard. If the stage asked to see raw data, I was to hang three files into a read-only directory: the twenty-eight-day power sequence, one line per day, comma-separated; a twelve-second raw demodulated sample; a packet-structure specification. Filenames, byte counts, MD5s all copied onto that sheet—in my own handwriting.
The broadcast ran on a seven-second delay. The man riding the delay sat with broadcast control and never stood up all night.
Zhou's script was six pages, printed both sides, sixteen-point type. Before he went up, Shen Yi drew the fourth page out of his hand. The fourth page held three lines and a thumbnail.
"That page is backup," Zhou said.
"Backup means unused," Shen Yi said.
Zhou squared the remaining five pages against the desk. He knocked them three times; the third time the edges still sat a little off.
Shen Yi's question order sheet was A4, fourteen numbered entries, sorted by wire service and station name. While we waited he crossed out two and added one at the bottom, light strokes.
Four chairs on stage, four microphones on the table, a fifth placed at center as spare. Nobody touched that one all night.
It began at ten oh one.
Zhou read for eleven minutes. Everything he read we could have recited: the frequency, a bandwidth of two hundred hertz, the bearing on the Cassiopeia side, the twenty-eight-day power sequence, 0.31 dB per stair, 86,400-second spacing, ±0.4 seconds; channel coding whose error correction matched the standard terrestrial satellite-TV scheme; data down in 188-byte packets, sync byte 0x47.
The third graphic was the staircase.
The caption had been through four revisions. Zhou wanted the Leiden student's name on it, and his English line too. What survived four countries' review was one line: independently reproduced by a public observer.
Reaching that graphic, Zhou left the script.
"This curve," he said, "was first drawn by a second-year student. His name is—"
He stopped two seconds, said the name, family name and given name reversed. He said it again, right that time.
In the standby room the broadcast-control man looked up at the screen once; his hands stayed where they were.
Questions ran twenty-two minutes. The first two followed the sheet: a wire service on reproducibility, a technology outlet on how many decimal places of the frequency would be made public. The third question skipped its number; the man stood up before the microphone reached him.
"Is there content inside it."
"Work is at the data-structure analysis stage," Zhou said.
"What does data-structure analysis stage mean," the man said. "Have you already seen pictures."
Zhou pushed his water glass forward two centimeters. He didn't drink.
"We have seen data layers," he said.
The fifth question asked about funding. The sixth about danger. The seventh asked who had sent it; Zhou said there was no answer to that question yet, and he didn't intend to give a question without an answer an answer.
The ninth question I hadn't predicted.
"How long will this signal keep broadcasting."
Zhou glanced at Shen Yi. Shen Yi gave nothing back.
"The catalog table lists one hundred seventy-eight entries," Zhou said. "At one entry a day, one hundred seventy-eight days."
In the standby room I ran the arithmetic. Entry 1 was April 12. Entry 178 landed on October 6.
Then I pulled up the tail of the catalog table. The last ten entries' length fields were zero.
Zero is not a gap. A gap means the entry doesn't exist. Zero means the entry exists, at length zero. On paper I wrote both dates: October 6, September 26. Between them, a horizontal line. No arrow.
At ten thirty-eight, channel five of the TV wall changed.
It was one country's national broadcaster. It had been carrying Hall Three; it cut away, back to its own studio. To the anchor's right, a new graphic panel.
On the panel, one frame. Very low resolution, heavy snow; only two things legible: a station ID at the upper left, a corner bug at the lower right.
The corner bug read 2079.04.12.
The broadcast-control man said something into his headset, very quiet. I pushed channel five's volume up: their language, and the only words I understood were the numbers.
I looked to the observation window. Four people on stage; Zhou answering the tenth question; Shen Yi at the far right, hand on the table's edge. He didn't turn his head, didn't look at his phone.
The eleventh question was the number Shen Yi had added at the bottom of his sheet. A reporter from a provincial station, very neatly put: does the public need to make any preparations.
"Go to work as usual," Zhou said. "Go to school as usual."
He could have stopped there. He added one more sentence not on the script.
"And don't buy any list anybody offers to sell you."
Two of the other three on stage turned to look at him. Shen Yi didn't turn; on his own sheet he crossed out the bottom number.
It got sorted out later: the leak wasn't the reporter. That country's news office had sent a background pack to three domestic media twenty minutes before the session, with a sample frame attached, "to illustrate the legibility of the data layer." No masking. It went out in the afternoon, while the office was changing shifts.
We adjourned at ten forty-one.
Backstage was a corridor in gray carpet; at its end a vending machine, three drinks, two sold out. Zhou stood there with both hands in his trouser pockets.
Shen Yi opened the hard-shell case and took out three things.
A press release, already printed, dated that very day. A ninety-second clip, 240 lines, station ID and corner bug only, sound wiped. A Q&A card, five questions, five answers.
Zhou read the press release all the way through, slowly. At the second paragraph he reached out for a pen.
"Here," he said. "'Timestamp anomaly.' Change it back."
"Change it to what."
"To: the corner-bug date reads April 12, 2079."
Shen Yi took the sheet, struck a line through it, wrote the words in.
"And one more thing," Shen Yi said. "Layer 2 releases only the ninety seconds. The anchor's line doesn't go out."
"Which line."
"'Today is April 12, 2079,'" Shen Yi said. "The words on a picture are words on a picture. Words out of a mouth are words out of a mouth."
Zhou handed the pen back.
"That isn't getting ahead," he said. "That's running on somebody else's schedule."
At eleven oh four, the second release and the ninety seconds went out. Twenty-three minutes after adjournment.
The release was set in type, both sides, bound with plastic binder strips, not staples. The strips come twenty to a box; nineteen left in it.
That was the first time I thought back to his "agreed."
After eleven thirty, the standby-room door needed a card. My card was inside, so I didn't go out.
I turned the sound up on all five channels of the TV wall; too noisy; down to two.
The big screen by the river was looping the ninety seconds. People held up phones to film the screen—more filming than watching. Under the screen a child on a scooter circled a pillar; at the fifth or sixth lap his mother carried him off.
In the convenience store across from the convention center the TV hung above the oden pot, the broth bubbling. The clerk turned the volume up two notches. A man buying cigarettes stood and watched the whole thing, and when it finished said: "So that's it."
At eleven fifty, the old lady on the third floor called.
She asked first whether I was Xiao Lin's girl. I was. Was the thing on television our workplace. It was. It's loud—can you hear me all right; I'll turn it down some. She didn't turn it down. Behind her the ninety seconds played again, with music—the version I'd watched in the standby room by day was muted; somebody had scored it: a faint line of strings, the drums coming in where the corner bug appears.
"Your dad, if he were still here," she said, "he'd have taped it for sure."
I said he'd used up all his tapes.
She said she had some blank ones over there her son had left; did I want them.
I said I'd come by for them.
Past midnight, the call from home. Nian still up; that day she'd been allowed to stay up late. A classmate's father says you can see the future, she said. Then she asked: so when are you coming home.
I gave her a time.
Back at the institute, the conference-room TV had been on since nine fifty. Adebayo had taken a sheet and kept a tally—the count of the word "aliens" across the whole session: twenty-six times; journalists, twenty-four; on stage, twice—Zhou once, the other country's delegate once. He pinned the sheet to the whiteboard beside Xiao Gao's list, under a one-word title: Count.
The old VCR in the corner glowed on as always, eleven minutes fast, so for anyone in its picture the meeting had adjourned at ten fifty-two.
Ye Zhen wasn't in the conference room that night. She was in the archives, door open, only the inner row of lights on.
Back at the institute at seven twenty the next morning. The gate boy's phone stood propped sideways on the register, riding a bottled-water cap. He took my signature without lifting his eyes and passed the pen over point first.
Someone had wiped half the whiteboard. Xiao Gao's 41-item list was still there; the Leiden student's staircase chart had been taken down and lay pressed under the printer, corners curling. Lao Song stood beside the printer, the plastic ruler in his hand measuring nothing—just held.
"My sister called me last night," he said. "Asked whether this signal would affect her son's college entrance exam."
"What did you tell her."
"I told her it wouldn't." He turned the ruler half a circle in his hand. "She said, then what are you people doing with it."
Overnight the word "Echo" lost its shape. The wire copy traveled; one country translated it back as "echo chamber"; another country's subtitling crew wrote it as "the Resonance Project"; one place used straight pinyin. By noon somebody had dug the 2003-deregistered audio factory out of the trademark database—works address in a county town—and someone drove over and photographed it: a row of single-story buildings, two half-legible characters welded onto the iron gate, an agricultural three-wheeler parked at the door. Under the photo someone asked: so this is Echo's hometown.
The thirty-second stair came up at three eleven and forty-four seconds; Tong had the shift. In the remarks column he wrote one line: normal, all normal, no anomalies. Three ways of saying one thing, written out three times.
That morning I finished up Layer 2 in the duty room. The Red Lantern sat in its usual place; on the back of its cabinet a new sticker, white ground, black text, registration D-0067. I pressed its corners down with a fingernail. They wouldn't sit flat.
Power on, ten minutes of static first, same as always. The band log open alongside.
I took the twice-folded sheet out of my breast pocket, opened it, read through the multiplication sign and the forty, folded it again, and slid it into the band log—into that page: my father's pencil, "unknown station, female voice, reading numbers, stops at seven." The log wouldn't close flush afterward; I weighted it with the paperweight.
At ten seventeen Shen Yi came down the corridor with a sheet of paper. He didn't come into the duty room; passing the door, the sound-activated light didn't trigger, and he stamped his foot.
Where he went was the archives.
The sheet was a circular. One of the countries, in the small hours local time, had classified all material within its territory touching the 2079 obituary listings at the highest level, retroactive, and required every pool station to seal, by frame number, the three segments of April 14 through 16; transcriptions, screenshots, and notes already produced were all to be recovered.
Ye Zhen was in the archives at that moment, putting her binders back in order by column.
Shen Yi stood in the doorway and said one thing.
"Where is that notebook of yours."