[ECHO ARCHIVE · LAYER 3 · 50.3% DECODED · KEY: LIVE SOUND FROM THE 2008 SUMMER OLYMPICS OPENING CEREMONY BROADCAST]
Day 183, 03:11:44, step 186.
The night before last I went to the parents' meeting. Thirty desks in the classroom; seventeen parents came, seated thin. A class schedule was pasted beside the podium; the Wednesday-afternoon square was empty, ringed in pencil by somebody's hand. The teacher covered three things: many of the class out on leave, the autumn outing canceled, finals moved up a week. When she finished, someone raised a hand and asked whether there would still be exams going forward. The teacher put the chalk back in its box and said: as usual. The hand went down.
When the sign-in sheet reached me, in the relationship-to-student column, some had written mother, some father, one grandfather. I wrote mother and handed the pen back.
On the way home Nian asked what the teacher had said. I said, she said your autumn outing is canceled. She said, oh. She said, I didn't want to go anyway. A few steps on she said, does taking the day cut your pay. I said, no. She said, then will you still walk me tomorrow. I said, I will.
At the institute by six forty. The corridor light wanted a stomp; I stomped twice. In the gatehouse Tong was opening an envelope, the flap sealed under a stamp set across the seam. He said: from the pool, four nations jointly signed. He pressed the tally counter on his desk once.
I spread the duty log open and wrote the date in the header: September 21. Finished, I capped the pen.
At seven twenty the September 21 frame entered the archive, S-11 and S-23. Layer 3: 33,205 rows. Sticky notes, third strip, sheet sixty-three.
Two items in the local segment. One: night-market line painting, stall numbers running east to west, the white paint fresh; on a boll at the far west end, a number painted backward. One: a community canteen opening, a dozen-odd people in line at the door, a child at the tail of the queue standing on the curb. I did the usual four first; the summaries for both went in at the lunch break.
At ten past eight the notice went up. The pool had constituted a joint review group for deviation entries; each member state would seat a sub-venue, and ours was set in the second-floor conference room. Entries to be numbered from DV-001. No individual names on the signature line — four station numbers.
Shen Yi came into the conference room at five to nine. A hard-shell folder under his arm, dark gray, a printed label on the spine — two letters, DV. He set the folder at the head of the long table, sat down beside it, and turned the four pens on the table so they all faced one way.
At nine the video linked up. Eleven squares on the screen. In one it was small hours; the man had a blanket over his shoulders and only half of him showed. Behind one square somebody walked past carrying a cup; nobody turned around. The microphones sounded off one by one, each announcing its station number — eleven squares, eleven times. One square had a clock hung on the wall, six hours slower than the one on ours.
The chairmanship rotated; this time it was S-19. He read the procedure through, five items in all. At the third item a square raised a hand and asked what the letters DV stood for. The chair said: entries. The square said, understood, and put its hand down. Another square asked where the boundary of the review lay. The chair said: by entry, not by day. That square put its hand down too.
The first batch held two entries.
DV-001, July 24, 2079. Table: Nanpu 2:0 Baihe. Frame: 1:1. Four pieces of evidence: one original baseband recording, one record of the five-step verification, one page of attendance figures, one photocopy of the three-column sheet.
DV-002, August 8, 2079. Table: Baihe 3:1 Haifeng. Frame: a caption bar in two lines, the top line reading current 0:0, the bottom line reading pre-match prediction 3:1.
While the chair read, nobody in the conference room spoke. Outside the window the boiler room's pipes were still being replaced; the sixth day of hot water cut.
I was summoned to answer questions at two in the afternoon. I sat at this end of the table; the screen at the other. Shen Yi sat at my right hand and did not look at me.
Question: Who checked the timecode for July 24.
Answer: I did. The second pass too.
Question: Did the two stations' data agree.
Answer: Identical, byte for byte.
Question: The words on the banner — did you read them from the frame, or from the table.
Answer: From the frame.
Question: Had you seen the table first.
Answer: I had.
The screen held still for two seconds. In one square, someone turned a page.
Question: How did you establish the banner wasn't a misprint.
Answer: Black on white, a meter and more wide, three characters, crossing one fold. A misprint doesn't get written that big.
Question: Who examined the commentator's waveform.
Answer: I did, again. Both matches clean. Zero crossings continuous, no jump in between, the breaths all there.
Question: And the August 8 caption bar.
Answer: Two lines on the same screen. The three characters of 3:1 matched the table's line position for position, colon included.
Question: Who saw it first.
Answer: Adebayo.
Question: How many times did he watch it.
Answer: Five. I sat with him for the sixth.
Question: What did he say while watching.
I said, he said: the table is accurate.
On the screen, nobody took that up. The chair read out the next item of procedure.
When I came out, Shen Yi was still in his seat. He aligned the four pens on the table all over again.
Before adjourning they fixed the scope of review. One square proposed re-verifying every September match, 09-01 through 09-26. Another square said: workload. He said: begin with thirty days either side of the entries already filed. Nobody on the screen objected. The chair read the range out once — June 24 to September 7 — and it went into the minutes.
My pen tip bled one dot into the paper.
After adjournment Adebayo was waiting in the stairwell. He had the original of his three-column sheet pinched in his hand; the photocopy had already gone in.
He said, "The seventeenth of September — I haven't checked that one."
I said, "Which day."
He said, "September seventeenth. There's a match. It's on the table."
I said, "Why didn't you check it."
He said, "I'm tired."
He put both hands in his pockets and went downstairs. He had done the copying himself. Xiao Gao said he stood beside the copier drawing off the sheets one at a time; the third came out with a black edge, where the platen cover hadn't held the page. He pulled the black-edged one out, held it up to the light, and said: this black edge won't copy over, will it. Xiao Gao said it will. He said: then this one you keep, and this one I take back.
His sheet had four columns. The first three were filled, two hundred–odd rows. The fourth he had named himself — how many were in the stands — and not one square of it was filled. Over the screen someone had asked him what the fourth column was. He said: how many were in the stands. Asked whether it was filled. He said: not yet, the data isn't complete. Asked where the data came from. He said: borrowed. Nobody asked again who from.
The nail to the right of the whiteboard stood empty today. No new odds sheet.
The canteen had winter melon with minced pork. Lao Song set his phone beside his plate, and in the two minutes of waiting he asked me: do I count.
I said, count as what.
He said, one of the ones who read. That Absentees business — I was there.
I said, you've never even seen the table.
He said, then I can rest easy.
The phone lit. An ad for plan renewal. He read it, switched it off, and pocketed it — the whole sequence not a hair different from yesterday's.
In the afternoon Ye Zhen brought two pages of fair copy. For the forty-one thousand and the fifty-eight thousand she had drawn red strokes, and beside them added the third-pass figures: forty-one thousand two hundred, fifty-eight thousand four hundred. She said, the tails are estimates; the stands never came fully into shot — the top of the east stand is missing a stretch. She capped her pen and said, if the committee asks for me, I'll go tomorrow. At the door she came back and said, if they ask about sample size, how much do I say.
I said, the truth.
She said, the truth is: few.
And she went.
Day 184, 03:11:44, step 187.
Duty log header: September 22.
At seven twenty the September 22 frame entered the archive, S-11 and S-08. Two items in the local segment. One: the river bridge getting new stay cables, half the deck sheeted in felt, eight workers, hard hats in two colors. One: the heating mains under pressure test, the caption rolling three times, an eight-digit phone number left behind. The usual four done, filed before ten.
Layer 3: 33,417 rows. Sticky notes, third strip, sheet sixty-four.
The gray car by the gate had moved — from across the street to the mouth of the lane, same car. Old Chen at the gate made an entry in his register; he logged the time.
At three in the afternoon the pool bulletin updated. DV-003 entered into the file: Ye Zhen's two pages. DV-004 entered: the photocopy of the three-column sheet. Beneath the bulletin ran one more notice, ours: Layer 3 row counts, the twenty-thousand and thirty-thousand marks, supplementary report, dated yesterday. In the annex one sentence was quoted, attributed to this institute, reproduced verbatim: then this isn't television, this is a weather report. Lao Song saw the printed notice in the canteen, read that line twice, said nothing, and carried his enamel mug out.
Ye Zhen had gone to answer in the morning. She came back and said, they asked where my two figures came from. I said, the stands never came fully into shot; the tails are estimated. They wrote that down.
I asked, anything else.
She said, yes. They asked who drew the nine households for the Layer 3 spot check. I said I did. They asked, why nine. I said, because only nine were approved.
At four, S-19 submitted the draft conclusions page, a page and a half. Zhou Yansheng read it through from the top in the conference room. At the second-to-last paragraph he paused and read the sentence again:
Every prediction that was made public went public in time before its event; every deviation entry in the file, all of them, concentrates on events whose predictions were made public.
He said, there's one line below that.
The page's last line ran the scripts of the four nations side by side, each saying it once, and then came back around to Chinese, eight characters: the observers are contaminating the observation.
The conference room stayed quiet a while. Zhou Yansheng said, those eight characters came back around the loop; the original wasn't this smooth. He said, smooth is worse. He said, if those eight characters get out, the first to believe them won't be scientists.
He had me add three characters to the conclusions page: unverified. After "went public before its event," after "all of them concentrate," and before the eight characters. I added the three. He looked it over, signed the pinyin of his name, and had me make three copies.
Four things, four dates. The scores in the table, inside the frame of April 12. The table decoded, numbered, entered into the pool, in April. The three characters on the banner, matching the table position for position, inside the frame of July 24. The attendance figures jumping up, inside the frame of August 8. The order was set; the direction ran one way only. Which stretch was cause and which was mere sequence, on paper there was no telling.
In the evening Nian practiced forty minutes. When she finished she counted for herself: two wrong, both in the third section. Then she went to the mirror, opened her mouth over the tooth, looked a while, and said, it's out.
I said, don't push it with your tongue.
She said, I'm not pushing. I'm just looking.
She took her certificate down off the shelf, glanced at it, and put it back beside the music. She said, next year, Grade Four.
I said, learn this grade properly first.
She said, I learned it ages ago.
Day 185, 03:11:44, step 188.
Duty log header: September 23.
At seven twenty the September 23 frame entered the archive, S-11 and S-17. One item in the local segment: the district library extending its hours to eight in the evening; the camera swept out from the reading room to a table playing chess by the door, a cap weighting the board's edge.
Layer 3: 33,629 rows. Sticky notes, third strip, sheet sixty-five.
In the gatehouse, this month's postcard had come, postmarked the nineteenth. Tong set it on the windowsill, sixth from the left. When he'd placed it he said: the nineteenth. He said: last month was the nineteenth too.
The conclusions page was set for upload at nine, synchronized across the four nations. Zhou Yansheng had signed the day before.
At eight fifty I took a schedule up to the third floor. Shen Yi's door stood open. He was crouched in front of the cabinet, the bottom locker's door open, the kraft paper bag in his hand, pencil writing turned down and out of sight. The lock on the upper half of the cabinet was newly changed; the key still sat in it.
He didn't look up. I set the schedule on the corner of his desk and went back down.
At nine twenty the pool bulletin updated again. S-11 sub-venue: four items entered into the file. In the conclusions-page column, two words: not transmitted.
At a quarter past ten I ran into Zhou Yansheng on the stairs. He stood at the landing windowsill and didn't look at me.
He said, "How long do you intend to sit on it."
Shen Yi, coming up behind, stopped two steps below him.
Shen Yi said, "Until the verification is finished."
Zhou Yansheng said, "And finished is how long."
Shen Yi said, "Until there is a mechanism."
Zhou Yansheng said, "That isn't what finished means."
Shen Yi didn't answer. He went on up. Zhou Yansheng stayed at the windowsill a while longer, his hand on the sill, fingers closing and opening. When he went down he passed me and said nothing.
At four I went to the second-floor conference room to collect the cups. The eleven squares of the screen were dark; the folder still sat at the head of the long table where it had been. I turned to the footers and counted: DV-001 through DV-004, all four pieces of evidence there. The conclusions page was not among them.
The new lock on the top of Shen Yi's cabinet — this time the key wasn't in it.
I stacked the cups in the tray, set the four pens back in the holder, and turned off the light. One slat of the blinds wouldn't go up; it sat crooked in the middle. I pulled all the others level and let that one stay crooked.
At night, Nian asleep, I pulled open the middle drawer of the writing desk. The notebook was there; the pen that doesn't write had rolled against its side. I turned to the first page: seven items, one through seven, not one extra. I closed it, put it back, pushed the drawer shut.
The duty log lay open on the desk. Today's square was filled in. Tomorrow's square was still empty.