[ECHO ARCHIVE · LAYER 3 · 15.6% DECODED · KEY: LIVE SOUND FROM THE 2008 SUMMER OLYMPICS OPENING CEREMONY BROADCAST]
Day 75, 03:11:44, step 78.
At seven twenty in the morning the June 5 frame enters the archive. Adebayo is standing at the printer a few minutes past eight, waiting; when the page comes out he pulls away the sports half.
The home team wins by two.
That frame also carries one weather item and a piece on some farm-machinery subsidy; Xiao Gao checks two place names.
Lao Song takes a tea egg out of his drawer, peels it, sets it on Adebayo's desk, and says nothing. Adebayo says thanks. Lao Song says, "I told you, I don't understand this stuff."
The second country comes at noon on day 76. Again a brief, again thirty seconds. The reason is read out fast this time; all I catch is "unregistered assembly." The picture shows the entrance of a building with a banner strung across it, nothing on the banner but a date — white ground, black characters, handwritten, the second digit written bigger than the first.
The third country is day 78. Longer this time, one minute twenty seconds; a reporter on camera, experts. The reason: endangering public safety.
The same term appears in all three segments; the subtitles give its translated name as the Calendar cult.
Two more letters join the third pile at the gatehouse — printed matter, each envelope carrying a handwritten slip. The addressee line reads "To the responsible comrade, Research Institute"; the signature is nothing but three numbers: 2079, 4, 19. No sender, no return address.
Tong picks the two out of the cardboard box, sets them on the inside of the windowsill, apart from the seven boxes of business cards.
I ask him why he doesn't return them.
Tong says they don't count as hate mail.
I say what do they count as, then.
He says things people have asked him to take care of.
He copies the two letters' signatures into the ledger's remarks column — just those three numbers. When he's done he asks me: twenty seventy-nine is a year, isn't it.
I say it is.
He says there's time yet, then.
I say forty years.
He says oh. He caps his pen.
In the canteen someone asks Ye Zhen what the Calendar cult is. Ye Zhen says she doesn't know. That afternoon she runs the term through her index database and tells me afterward: not in there. I say the index is a place-name database. She says I know.
On the way home I see a handwritten sheet on our compound's bulletin board: a date on it, and below the date four characters — "Already notified." The next day the sheet is torn down; where it hung, four pieces of tape remain, a little paper fuzz still stuck to them.
I don't ask who tore it down.
In the evening the canteen TV is on, some interview, two people arguing. The range hood roars and swallows half the sound. I catch half a sentence: one of them says knowing the outcome doesn't change the obligation. The other voice, faster, says knowing the outcome dissolves the obligation. The host cuts in, and before he finishes it goes to a commercial — children's phone-watches, the caption reading: positioning accurate to the floor.
Lao Song watches a while and says his grandson wears one of those.
I say mm.
He says his daughter-in-law doesn't let him watch.
The fast talker had one more line after that; it got cut. The host smiled, the picture flickered black for a beat. Lao Song says, is this live? I say I don't know.
As for Ye Zhen's business, I didn't learn the follow-up until three weeks later.
After the broadband went in she took care of three more things: her sister's mobile number had been registered under her brother-in-law's name, and she had it moved into her sister's own; the electronic social security card she set up on the phone with a face scan — it failed three times, the first two because her sister blinked too fast, and the third time she told her not to blink, not to move, until a line of green text came up on the screen; and a grocery app, for which she spent an afternoon in the shop and taught the two next-door shops as well.
Under the "backfill" column she wrote four lines.
I ask what the broadband costs a month.
She says thirty-two.
She says that was her sister asking. When her sister finished asking she said one thing: then how many pairs of curtains do I have to sell in a month.
Every day she goes through the newly received frames, looking for Bushi Street. In June's frames, not one item.
She pulls the April 25 frame up again and goes through it once more. This time she isn't looking at people; she's looking at the square payment code on the door. She records the coordinates of its four corners in the index database, entry 04255, remarks: curled edge · lower right.
The canteen opens at six thirty. When I get there only two people. I sit down; on the back of the chair opposite hangs a jacket, gray, men's, three days there now, nobody has come for it. I eat for seven minutes and finish the steamed roll. One roll, broken open, has a small lump inside that never rose — hard; I set it on the edge of the tray and don't eat it. Leaving, I push the chair back in.
Lao Song comes over with his bowl and sits. He says his daughter-in-law turned the location off — off for three days, on again the fourth, set to show only down to the compound. While he says it he stirs his porridge with his spoon, stirs a long time, and when he's done he doesn't drink.
Adebayo changes the wager. The second time he bets Xiao Gao twenty yuan; Xiao Gao loses. The third time he sticks a sheet on the whiteboard — that day's match number, the handicap, the odds — and leaves three blank lines underneath: anyone can bet, name written after.
By evening the three lines are still empty.
He writes his own name on the top line.
He explained odds to me once, three minutes. A few of the words I didn't understand; he explained two of them, not the third — that one, he said, wasn't important. I say then why say it. He says habit.
Lao Song did bet once more after all — on the next morning's fried dough sticks. He lost. He said that was the last time. On the third day he bet again: one cup of soy milk.
First thing every morning at my station I power up the terminal, look at Layer 3's ten-thousand-odd rows, and copy the count onto a sticky note. One note a day, stuck beside the monitor; thirty-some of them make a strip.
Copying, I read the number right to left, twice. One day I mis-copied — wrote one thousand ninety-seven; caught it the next day when sticking up the new note, tore that one off, put up a fresh one. The torn one I clipped into the ledger, page forty-three.
I make it to the Wednesday afternoon lesson. The teacher has Nian play the whole piece through; when she's done he says nothing good, nothing bad. The teacher says on exam day he can't follow along with the piece — she has to keep going on her own. Nian nods. Coming out, going down the stairs, she says, what if I stop in the middle. I say then stop a moment. She says does stopping count as wrong. I say no.
Friday when I pick Nian up she says her class has a new math teacher; the new one's surname she didn't catch. She says the old one left without telling them.
She says the exam is set for the last Saturday of August.
I say it's two months and more away.
She says the teacher says from now on it's forty minutes of practice a day.
I say it's twenty minutes now.
She says the teacher says by August it'll be forty.
Day 79, 03:11:44, step 82.
The June 9 frame enters the archive at seven twenty in the morning. In the forty-minute international news segment, at 00:04:11, there is a piece one minute twenty seconds long: a river, a bridge, vehicles crossing it; the camera holds three seconds at the bridgehead. The subtitles give two place names: Baini River, Erdaogou.
I watch it once, write down the frame number, do nothing else.
Day 80, morning: Shen Yi comes to Ye Zhen for the list. The third time.
What he wants: from the twelve frames of June 1 through June 12, every instance of the two place names appearing in the same frame — frame number, time segment, subtitle text, all listed.
Ye Zhen hands him one sheet. Two instances in all. 06-09, from 00:04:11, one minute twenty seconds; 06-11, from 00:11:37, forty-seven seconds. The second is the same bridge, the camera on the far bank.
I pulled up the 06-11 frame myself the next morning. Forty-seven seconds; on the bridge deck a three-wheeled cart with a cloth thrown over it. The second place name appears once in the subtitles, and when it does a truck blocks half a character.
Shen Yi takes it, gives it one look, folds it, puts it in his inside pocket.
Ye Zhen says, should I make a column by place name.
Shen Yi says no need.
After he leaves, Ye Zhen stands beside me a while. She says the two place names aren't in her database. I say what does that mean. She says the two names exist on today's maps too, but what she recorded is 2079's, and she checked while recording — couldn't find them. I say can't-find means what. She says can't-find means not there.
She marks the two names on today's map for me: two points, a river between them. She has measured: forty-seven kilometers in a straight line. Measuring done, she caps her pen.
Adebayo's whiteboard that day has three lines, the third crossed out by himself. I ask why he crossed it. He says nobody bet. Then he erases half the board, and when that's done writes a new line.
Day 80, afternoon, I deliver a page to Shen Yi: the June 9 frame's technical parameters — frame number, bitrate, duration, caption time codes — plus the forensic checks we can run, five items.
The five I wrote down: whether the caption edges are consistent with the picture noise; comparison of the font against the other captions in the same frame; caption time code against the in-frame timestamps; motion vectors of the text block; chroma sampling.
When it was written I read it over once and crossed out the last item, changed it to "pending."
He takes the page, gives it a look, says: watch the subtitles.
I say watch what about them.
He says watch whether the characters were added afterward.
I say four days for results.
He says no rush.
Day 81, two in the afternoon: the meeting.
The meeting-room chairs were set out by Tong — six of them; done, he counted them once and added one more. The recorder is his doing too; when the red light came on he backed out to the door, stood two seconds with his hand on the frame, then went. On the table, one sheet has been handed out; the lower right corner says page three, of three pages. The first two pages were not distributed.
Not many of us. Zhou Yansheng, Shen Yi, Ye Zhen, me, and one man I didn't know. He wears a light-gray shirt with a crease at the cuff — the kind a shirt gets coming out of a suitcase unpressed. He sits diagonal across from me, says nothing the whole time, and pushes his chair in when he leaves.
Shen Yi reads out three items.
The first concerns access tiers for the obituary segment: from next week, three tiers; the third requires two signatures plus a statement of purpose.
The second is the clocks at two stations in the pool. S-23's rubidium clock has been replaced; S-08's is still in its grace period, which runs to October.
The third he reads slower than the first two.
A certain department recommends implementing "pre-warming" for the June 2079 border incident in the Baini River direction.
He sets the sheet down and reads the definition: following the timeline shown in the archive, complete troop pre-positioning and public-opinion preparation ahead of schedule, so that the situation on the ground matches the archive before June 2079.
When he finishes, nobody speaks.
Zhou Yansheng asks one thing: what does "pre-warming" mean.
Shen Yi says: following the timeline shown in the archive, complete troop pre-positioning and public-opinion preparation ahead of schedule, so that the situation on the ground matches the archive before June 2079.
Zhou says: that's what you just read.
Shen Yi says: that is the definition.
Zhou says: staged for whom to watch.
No one answers.
We stop maybe half a minute. I count the wall clock: the second hand crosses thirty-one ticks.
The man in the light-gray shirt screws the lid onto his water cup, and when it's screwed puts his hand on the cup.
The meeting runs forty-seven minutes. At the close Shen Yi collects the sheet — collects every copy, one by one, corners aligned — and clips it into the hard-shell briefcase.
After the meeting Ye Zhen asks me one thing in the corridor.
She says: if they stage the ground to match that frame, does the bridge in that frame count as us having misread it.
I say no.
She says what does it count as, then.
I say it counts as matching.
She says oh.
Zhou Yansheng is standing in the corridor, waiting for me.
He says: Baini River, those three characters — how do you read them.
I say the subtitle was typed on.
He says typed on, or shot in the picture.
I say we'll know in four days.
He says tell me when you know.
Personnel once issued a form for everyone to fill in — whether you had ever joined any related organizations — and hand back. Tong fills one too. When he's done he holds his up to show me: in that field one word, "None," written large enough to fill the whole box.
Back at my station I pull up the June 9 frame and watch that one minute twenty seconds twice.
The first time, the subtitles.
The second time, the bridge.
When they're done I close it. I don't save it.
Day 82, morning, June 12 comes in. In that frame there is no Baini River and no Erdaogou.
Three days after the meeting I run into Zhou Yansheng on the stairs, him going up, me going down. He holds the rail; his hand stops on it a moment; he says nothing, waits for me to pass. After I've passed he says one thing behind me: have you written that explanation yet.
I say not yet.
He says no hurry.
In the afternoon I pick up Nian. She says the teacher had her practice the third section alone ten times. I say did you. She says six times. I say four to go. She says she'll do them at home. At home she plays it eleven times, and when she's done she closes the fallboard herself, softly.
Tong counted those seven boxes of business cards: two hundred a box, fourteen hundred in all. He wrote the number on the back of the counter's sheet.
He shows me the letters on the inside of the windowsill once more: he miscounted yesterday — not two, three. The third is pressed at the very bottom, its signature field empty.
All three unopened. He stacks them and clips them together, the clip from the gatehouse.
At night, 03:11:44, step 86. Tong finishes writing and pushes the book back.
He says this week he drew two of the grid squares crooked.
I say it's all right.
He says he'll redraw them.