[ECHO ARCHIVE · LAYER 3 · 5.0% DECODED · KEY: LIVE SOUND FROM THE 2008 SUMMER OLYMPICS OPENING CEREMONY BROADCAST]
Day 42, 03:11:44, stair 45. Tong finished the remarks column and pushed the log in half an inch.
His log was ruled into cells by day, one cell per day through the end of the month. Today's cell was written full; tomorrow's stood empty—he never wrote ahead; writing ahead, he said, you misread the line.
Layer 3 that morning stood at 3,313 rows. Up 212 from the day before. Since day 36 I had copied one number a day onto a strip of sticky note: six digits, subtracted in pairs, all 212.
Out the door at six forty in the morning. An egg boiling in the pot; the water at a rolling boil, and the egg had cracked at the broad end, the white squeezed out and feathering into a white ribbon in the water. I fished it out and peeled it; the shell took a little of the white with it, and I ate that bit too.
Nian was still asleep. I set her sheet-music bag on the shoe cabinet by the door and let the strap out a stretch—she'd said last month the strap was short; I still hadn't fixed it.
The canteen opens at six thirty. When I got there the steamers had only just come on the steam; the first tray was empty, and the cook brought up the second, saying the dough had risen slow this morning. I bought two steamed rolls, one for the road.
The bus wasn't crowded. I stood; a plastic bag hung from the grab rail, a bunch of scallions in it, mud still on the roots. Everyone seated watched their phones, columns of text on the screens. The man beside me locked his mid-read and turned the phone face down on his knee. At his stop he pocketed the phone and got up, and the scallions swayed after him.
At the school gate by seven twenty. Nian said there was PE today. I said the white shoes were on the balcony. She said they hadn't dried yesterday. I said the gray pair, then. She said no—teacher says white. I said then I'd come home at noon and machine-dry them. She thought a moment and said, then I'll just skip PE.
Don't, I said.
I can just sit at the side, she said.
I didn't pick that up. At the gate she handed me her water bottle—didn't need it today; there was the drinking fountain.
At three in the afternoon Shen Yi delivered the trace list. One a week, on paper, for Zhou's signature. One row per query: account, time, search string.
Zhou took it, and his finger slid down the sheet and stopped partway.
Where it stopped—counted afterward—was row twenty-two. By the time I counted, the sheet lay face down on the desk; I counted the rows showing through from the back.
He signed, took his enamel mug to the water cooler, filled it half full, and walked back. The water's surface ran in rings, and at the third desk the rings were still there. He set the mug down and held it with both hands, waiting for it to stop.
Next week's list, I said—still you signing it.
Per the schedule, he said.
And he added: when Layer 3 reaches ten thousand rows, we file a written account upward.
An account of what, I said.
An account that we don't know what this table is for, he said.
Then he took his glasses off, wiped them, and didn't put them back on; he held them.
On the stairs somebody stopped me once. From the finance office, an armload of forms, the top sheet yellow.
Her mother-in-law was eighty-three, she said.
I can't look anything up, I said.
I know you can't, she said.
She went on down, stopped half a flight below, and said something, very soft; I didn't catch it. I didn't ask her to say it again.
The row of shops slantwise across from the gate: until June it was a work-gear store, yellow rubber boots and string-knit gloves hanging at the door. Mid-June it changed hands; the sign, red ground, white characters: Information Consulting. On the glass door, three lines: archive lookups / same-day results / refund if unsuccessful.
Somebody from Tong's cousin's work unit had gone and asked, Tong said.
Asked for what, I said.
His mother-in-law's name, Tong said.
How much, I said. Twenty-eight hundred, paid up front, Tong said. And did they find it. He never brought it up again.
I looked at the three lines a while. "Refund if unsuccessful"—that line's interesting, I said. How so, Tong said. They can't find anything at all, I said. Oh, Tong said. He paused two seconds and said the refund was reckoned at half, written in the small print, under the QR code.
In the gatehouse's three piles, the third pile's box got upgraded to a bigger one. A new kind of mail: business cards, arriving boxed by the box, addressed to the duty room. Each card carried a QR code and one phone number—no name, no address. Tong stacked the boxes on the windowsill; seven of them.
He had been counting letters since June. He bought a tally counter, plastic, one press one tick, and hung it on the window frame. Three piles kept separate, on a sheet of paper pressed under the counter. The first week the third pile was 417 letters. He didn't report that number either, he said; he just kept it.
He said he'd watched a man come out the glass door with a sheet of paper, fold it in two folds right at the door, and stuff it in his trouser pocket.
What about it, I said.
He was holding the sheet sideways, Tong said.
So what if sideways, I said.
What we produce is vertical, Tong said.
Adebayo resorted the fixtures table, this time by date, not team name, and marked home and away in three colors of pen. From the sports segment of the May 2 frame he dug out two matches and set them against the table's scores; both matched. Beside those two rows he wrote: verified.
In the canteen he put it to Lao Song: the May 8 match, home team wins by three or fewer—believe it or not.
I don't understand this stuff, Lao Song said.
Then pick: over or under, he said.
Then over, Lao Song said.
That frame—May 8—was five days from arriving. In five days I'll have forgotten all this, Lao Song said. I'll remember, Adebayo said.
Lao Song made a table of the fourteen and pinned it to the cubicle divider, revising the closing prices once a day in red. After three weeks he tore it down. Why tear it down, I said. Lost its flavor, he said. The next day he put up a fresh one, only the three left in it.
Zhou handed the written account to me.
I said I couldn't write it.
Then write that we don't know, he said.
And that goes up the line too, I said.
It goes up, he said, and they know we don't know.
When he finished he spun the matte pen once across his fingers, then closed his fist around it.
Wednesday at five in the afternoon, the teacher's flat on the fourth floor, no elevator. Nian played variation three; three times through; the teacher stopped her at each. Still too heavy, the teacher said.
Outside she said nothing. At the third-floor landing she said: Mama, my hands were cold today.
Mm, I said.
I'm not lying to you, she said.
I know, I said.
I got home at nine ten that night. In the fridge: half a cabbage, a scallion, two eggs. I boiled a bowl of noodles, poached an egg in it, ate at the table, washed the bowl, and hung the rag on the tap. The tap dripped; I twisted the handle another half turn.
Day 46, stair 49.
The next time I wrote anything in the duty log was day 74. Twenty-eight days in between.
In those twenty-eight days the stairs climbed twenty-eight steps, not one missed. Layer 2 took twenty-eight frames, May 8 through June 4. Layer 3 grew from 4,161 rows to 10,097, two hundred twelve a day, not one day off.
In between, the things that happened:
Lao Song redeemed his fund. The redemption locked in a loss of 3,200. His own call, he said; nothing to do with the sheet of three-line arithmetic. Then he took the plastic ruler out of the drawer, measured the fresh printouts with it, and carried it off under his arm.
Nian lost her first tooth, a bottom front one. She put it in a small plastic box that had once held button batteries, CR2032 printed on the lid, and set the box on the piano, next to the metronome.
Zhou took two days' leave. When he came back there was a new pen in his hand, the barrel matte, black. Nobody asked where he'd gone, and he didn't say.
Adebayo transmitted again. This time he filed first—filled in a form, and Shen Yi approved it: forty minutes, a kilowatt, Cassiopeia. No reply in the forty minutes. When he came off shift he left the headphones around his neck and kept them there all afternoon.
The boiler room cut the hot water once more in June—three days, they said; it came back the sixth evening. Those six days I washed at home, Nian washing before me, and after washing she picked her hair off the floor drain into the trash—her own idea; nobody taught her.
Xiao Gao's list of place names reached fifty-one. Of the nine new ones, two were the same place written two ways; he didn't cross either out—waiting for Ye Zhen to rule. The list rode in a clip now, the clip fetched from the gatehouse.
Ye Zhen's index went from 4,100-odd entries past 7,000. She worked without sound, the earbuds sitting on the desk until quitting time.
Tong's tally counter died in its third month, stuck mid-tick, the digits hanging on half a number. He replaced it and kept the old one, on the windowsill, in line with the seven boxes of cards.
I signed Nian's homework book every day. When I signed I checked only the last page, then closed it. One day she asked me: Mama, you don't even look. I looked, I said. The page you signed was blank, she said. That day I turned through the whole book, and in the middle there was a page where she'd drawn a cat, its tail a string of digits.
At lunch the TV ran a thirty-second brief. Some country had banned a group; the caption read "Calendar cult." In the picture a dozen-odd people sat in a room floored in laminate; nobody spoke, and as the camera pushed in, two of them lowered their heads. The anchor read four grounds; I caught one of them: medical care at unauthorized designated sites.
Nobody in the canteen looked up. Lao Song finished his soup and said today's soup was salty.
Ye Zhen took half a day's leave and went to the next county. She had broadband installed at her sister's.
The installer's surname was Wang; he came at ten in the morning with a spool of cable, and leaving, pulled his shoe covers off at the door and tossed them—outside the trash can, not in. Ye Zhen picked them up later and put them in.
She entered the broadband account, the string of digits on the sticker on the optical modem's back, and her sister's mobile number into the index. In the last column she wrote: backfill.
She didn't tell me about it. I saw the column later, on a sheet of hers.
S-31 filed its report on day 52. Three pages. One download nine hours before the interim measures took effect, one after. In the reason field: the officer handling it was on leave; the handover missed it.
Shen Yi put the three pages into their own kraft envelope, left the mouth unsealed, and penciled S-31 on the front. Then he set the envelope in the cabinet's bottom shelf. The cabinet the institute had assigned him for the time being; the lock new; the key on his belt.
Zhou looked at it once.
Leave it sitting, Shen Yi said.
How long, Zhou said.
Until the pool asks, Shen Yi said.
In June Shen Yi requested lists from Ye Zhen twice, both on paper, both collected by him in person, not through the pool. Ye Zhen logged a trace both times. She asked me whether that counted as a search string. I said it counted. Then I've logged it, she said.
Day 74, 03:11:44, stair 77.
At seven twenty in the morning, the June 4 frame entered the archive. This rotation: S-11 and S-02, two stations, independent decodes, byte-identical.
Besides the waterlogging points, the frame held one weather segment and one farm-produce price report. Xiao Gao checked two place names: the road itself, and the supermarket at the crossing; the supermarket he crossed out—the previous frame had covered it.
Forty seconds, local news, on the waterlogging-point retrofit along a road. The construction unit's site video, camera rigged at the crossing, sweeping east to west; mid-sweep it stopped, on a row of courtyard walls. In the wall, a gate; beside the gate, a plaque.
I froze the picture at 00:00:31.4 and enlarged it.
White ground, black characters, two lines. The road name above, the number below.
I checked it twice. The first time on the screenshot. The second time I pulled the raw frame, stepped through the passage frame by frame, extracted the cleanest one, and photographed our own gate plaque to set beside it—there was no comparing; thirty-nine years on, what hung there had long stopped being this plaque.
I took it to Ye Zhen.
She queried No. 6 Keyuan North Street in the index database. It was there: us. The entry was three years old, she said; when she'd entered it she had gone out and photographed the gate, and the photo's file number was 04211. The picture was taken in summer, she said; the tree by the gate was still standing. The next year the tree died, and they dug it out.
And the 2079 plaque, I said.
Not in the database, she said. The database only holds the present.
And she added: an address that hasn't changed in thirty-nine years—that's nothing.
I copied the frame number onto the duty log's last remarks line, and capped the pen.
At noon I went downstairs and out to the gate. The plaque read No. 6 Keyuan North Street; the paint had chipped at the top of the "6," the vertical stroke short a piece there.
I stood there a while.
On the way back I bought sweet-and-sour ribs at the canteen and ate them at my desk.
On the canteen door hung a notice, A4, over the institute office's name. Four items: item two, staff may not query the archives on behalf of outside persons in any form; item four, all incoming letters to be registered at the gatehouse. The day after it went up, a line of ballpoint appeared beneath: and what about our own. The third day the line was wiped off; the paper went fuzzy where it had been.
I got home at nine that night. Nian was asleep; the living-room light was still on; the sheet music lay open on the piano at variation three, and the page's corner was folded into a triangle, folded very small.
I smoothed the triangle out and pressed it flat with two fingers.
I sat in the living-room chair a while and didn't turn on the TV.
The Red Lantern stood on the windowsill; I switched it on, and the shortwave held a foreign-language broadcast, reading numbers, very slow. I listened two minutes, understood none of it, and turned it off. The band log lay open beside it, open to that page I still haven't turned past.
At night, 03:11:44, stair 78. Tong finished writing and pushed the log back.
I didn't go down again.