[ECHO ARCHIVE · LAYER 3 · 51.9% DECODED · KEY: LIVE SOUND FROM THE 2008 SUMMER OLYMPICS OPENING CEREMONY BROADCAST]
Day 232, 03:11:44, step 235.
Four days after the cold snap, the water-meter cover in the yard wore a wrapping of straw rope. Ice had grown on the gatehouse window; Tong scraped a small patch clear with a thumbnail, enough to see out.
I was in the duty room when the step came up. The curve lifted, held, and settled back. In the duty log I wrote: November 9, no frame. Finished, I pushed the log across to the window side, and Tong took the rubber stamp out of the drawer, inked it, and set it to the right of my two words. The frame character was still missing its stroke. He stamped it in every day, and every day it came out missing.
At seven twenty-five the stations checked in on the pool channel, one by one. Eleven zeros.
A seventh postcard joined the row on the windowsill. The postmark still the nineteenth; it had arrived four days late, one corner stained where snow-water had soaked it. Tong set it at the far right, stepped back half a pace to look, and said: still the nineteenth. He said nothing else.
Day 233, no frame. Day 234, no frame.
The frameless days had taken on a shape of their own. At the seven twenty mark the duty room held more people than it used to, standing in two rows, watching the curve lift, hold, settle back, then drifting off to their own work. Like waiting for a bus that doesn't come — and more people under the stop sign than usual.
The canteen television stayed on at noon. With no future to air, the station ran old dramas. Midway through, a brief item cut in: institutions worldwide urged the public to stay rational about the interruption of the archive; experts said information temporarily missing was not information gone. Then back to the drama. The people in it were mid-quarrel, a fierce one; nobody watched. Some looked at phones, some at their rice bowls. The television stayed on like a thermos set out on the table — there for the warmth of it.
Lao Song's phone sat beside his plate as always. Two minutes' wait; the screen lit; he read, switched it off, pocketed it. These days his messages were all data notices, one a day, identical, and he didn't delete them. Someone asked why he didn't just cancel the plan. He said: cancel it, and it stops writing to me.
Across from the institute, the shop had added half a line of small print under its fourth: open as usual through the frameless period. Tong read it out to me and said: they posted it before we did. Of the gatehouse's three piles of mail, the backfill requests were still growing; the hate-mail pile had stopped. Tong said: to write hate mail you need something to hate. There isn't anything now.
On the third day, morning, the pool issued a notice — the four nations jointly signed again, the numbering switched prefixes: SC. The Joint Group on Source Characteristics. Four paragraphs: first, frame decoding is suspended; second, all stations maintain reception; third, the work turns to the source itself; fourth, assignments. Our institute was named in two lines: the step sequence; the companion subcarrier.
Zhou Yansheng read the notice to the whole group. When he finished he set the paper down and said: now it's our turn not to know.
As he said it, his hand tapped the table edge twice, very lightly.
After the meeting I stood in the corridor a while. The sound-triggered light timed out, and I didn't stamp.
The differential work fell to me. Two hundred thirty-five steps, one a day, all in the archive, and nobody had touched them. I laid them out from step 1 to step 235 and started with alignment: for each step I took the transition edge — the stretch where power climbed from ten percent to ninety — folded it, and stacked them all on one plot.
By step forty I could see it. The transition edges weren't the same width. The later ones were narrower.
I pulled the widths out on their own and laid them as a second line. The first line was the staircase; this one was the staircase's edge. The edge was thinning. Thinner wasn't bad — it meant each push was smaller than the last. Decreasing. A decreasing that was holding itself back.
I ran the fit. The largest residual sat at step 61; that day's log sheet carried one line of pencil — thunderstorm, baseline lifted. Take it out, and the rest hugged the line.
On day 239 I reported the result to the group. The total velocity increment worked out; set against the parking orbit, the two ends closed. The orbital group's elements, fitted from time lags and phase across the eleven stations, matched mine. The coordinator at the outside station said on the channel: between the two of us, within three parts in a thousand.
Someone asked: where was it before it braked.
On the channel, nobody answered. The chair read out the next item of procedure.
Worked backward, the start of the braking fell inside a window. The window was forty-odd years wide. Its right edge was no more than a few years before we found it.
Writing the report I kept every step in the open: how wide the sampling window, which steps the baseline came from, why step 61 came out. Four pages; one line of conclusion; the rest was a path anybody could walk to recompute it. Before it went up, Shen Yi came by and stood at my desk.
He asked, how wide is the window.
Answer: forty-odd years.
He asked, can it be made narrower.
Answer: the data is what it is. Any narrower and I'd be talking past it.
He asked, which end carries more weight.
Answer: the right edge. You count the steps back from the right; the nearer ones, you remember better.
He looked at the screen a while and said: all right. He took the four pages, and at the door added: this part stays in-house for now.
I said, mm.
He stood in the doorway one second and said: not suppression. It just isn't time to say it yet.
He went downstairs. I looked at the window on the screen. Fog at both ends; the steps were the only end that could be counted out of the fog.
Home that night, Nian was practicing. The new piece had reached its second page; she said the teacher told her her hand shape had gone back — gone back meaning better. She played for me, the top half of page two. When she finished she asked, is it better than last week.
I said, better.
She said, you can hear that?
I said, I can hear it.
She closed the music. She closed it with a press of her palm now, no more slapping it shut.
When she'd finished practicing she went and filled a hot-water bottle; the cap wouldn't turn, and she brought it to me. I twisted it shut for her. She sat on the sofa with the bottle in her arms and read a while — the outside reader the school had issued. Reading, she said, Mama, what's the date today.
I said, November sixteenth.
She said, oh. She said, the one who transferred out of our class — they say she transferred back. Their school is the same too.
I said, mm.
She said, what did she transfer for, then.
She didn't wait for me and went back to her book. The hot-water bottle slid down a little in her arms; she clamped it and didn't look up.
The companion subcarrier was Master Lu's job, and he pulled me in on day 241.
The thing had been there since day 1. Offset four thousand two hundred hertz outside the carrier, bit rate nineteen point two bits per second, power one three-hundredth of the total. In the first two months somebody glanced at it once and logged a line: pilot tone, content not analyzed. After that, nobody looked. The frames kept everyone busy.
Master Lu said: no frames now — let's look at it.
He was near retirement, and on his desk stood a reel-to-reel deck — not institute equipment; his own. He said he'd followed tape all his life; a man had to have one on the desk. He never played anything on it. He used it to listen to the motor. He said: if the motor sounds wrong, the tape can't be right.
We cut the companion signal across four hundred–odd days and ran a slow-channel demodulation. Nineteen point two — how slow is that: one thousand one hundred fifty-two bits a minute.
First a narrowband filter, to strip the main carrier's sidelobes and leave one clean slow line. Then bit synchronization. Master Lu didn't know synchronization; he knew other things. He said slow tape is the hardest to serve — with fast tape, a break is a break; slow tape sticks, and one stick takes a whole patch with it. As he said it his hand made the motion on the desk: two fingers pressed together, drawn slowly across.
The sync word we found by trying. For two days we guessed the format against the noise; on the third morning Master Lu came in, coat still on, stood in front of the screen a while, and said: you're looking for the leader — the leader sits at the top of the minute. Old tape, he said, every reel the same: the first minute always carries a mark. We re-cut the data aligned to whole minutes, and there the sync word sat — sixteen bits, not one of them damaged. Four hundred–odd days, bit errors under one in a thousand.
Two days of decoding brought out a repeating block structure. Each block: the sync word in front, two counts behind — the long one thirty-two bits, the short one sixteen.
We checked the long one against Layer 2's frame numbers; they lined up. Whichever frame had gone out, that was the frame it had logged. After day 188 the frame numbers stopped, and it stopped with them. Both stopped on the same number.
The short one never moved. Sixteen bits, one fixed number.
Five two two eight six.
Master Lu took a pencil and worked the conversion out on paper. Run that number backward against the days already transmitted, to the very bottom, and it landed on one day. He wrote the date down and slid it across.
August 1. Nineteen thirty-six.
I ran it once and got what he got. I ran it again from the anchor at the other end, and got the same. The window's right edge was less than ten years from today; the starting point was one hundred three years back. The two lines didn't touch. Both lines were true.
Master Lu set the pencil down and said: my old master used to say, before the first reel there's always a stretch of leader. The tape begins at the leader, not at the sound.
I didn't pick it up. I pinned the two pages together and wrote a number in the footer.
On day 243 Ye Zhen came up with things to hand over. With no pictures coming in, her archive had no intake, and she had copied the "Backfill" column out into a table, line by line: who filled, filled in which month, how many entries. The column stood at thirty-one lines now, she said.
I said, one month.
She said, thirty-nine days. She said she hadn't dared write the number down at first — afraid that once written, it would stop. Now it was written, and it hadn't stopped.
She left the table and went. At the door she said: the gray car is half buried; nobody's swept the snow; the plate can't be seen either. She said it the way she read out page numbers.
I went through the table. Thirty-one lines, four columns each: names hidden behind numbers; month of the backfill; number of entries; who handled it. In the last column, some lines carried a shop's name, some a private person. The heaviest line held nine entries. In the lower right corner she had stamped it — the archive's deaccession stamp, a retired stamp used for the occasion, set in the corner, over no text. One line across the header: this table does not enter the pool.
Adebayo was working another problem these days. On a sheet of paper he had drawn three boxes across the middle and written 1987, 2008; the third box he left empty. He kept the sheet under his keyboard — when anyone passed he lifted it for a look, then pressed it back down.
I asked what he was calculating.
He said, not arithmetic, not geometric — neither progression fits. He said: look at the years on these two keys. The interval keeps getting shorter.
I said, the third one hasn't come.
He said, not coming isn't the same as not existing. He wasn't looking at me as he said it; he was looking out the window. Out there, snow had covered the painted "slow" on the steel plate; one corner of the character still showed.
Day 246, no frame. The step up as always.
At ten in the morning the pool bulletin updated. One of the outside stations had decoded the repeating sample segment inside the companion signal and matched it against an old off-air recording held in their national archive. The bulletin gave parameters only: line frequency four thousand five hundred hertz, twenty-five frames a second, one hundred eighty lines to the frame.
In the conference room they played the comparison audio. Master Lu sat in the front row. The speaker gave nothing at first; then a very narrow sound came up, like a wire pulled straight. A few seconds, a stop, then again.
After the second pass Master Lu said: forty-five hundred. He said: one hundred eighty lines, mechanical scanning — the thing spins like dough being kneaded. He said: that August. Berlin. The games.
Someone asked what it meant.
He said: the first time the human race ever sent moving pictures by electricity.
He said it and stopped. The wire-straight sound played through once more. Nobody in the conference room picked it up. At the far end of the table Zhou Yansheng turned the volume knob to zero.
Xiao Gao pinned a printed slip to his list, item forty-seven. One line on it: 1936 · 8 · 1 · Berlin.
The meeting didn't break up right away. The speaker had gone quiet; people stayed seated. Someone asked Master Lu whether that tape still existed.
Master Lu said it did. Whoever's thing it is, that's who keeps it, he said. Copied twice, he said; the master has a flaw, at the eighth second — one pop. He'd heard it. Just that once, and the rest clean.
Someone asked what happens at the eighth second.
Master Lu said he didn't know. A flaw is a flaw, he said. It carries no content.
Adebayo drew the sheet out from under his keyboard, spread it on the table, and looked at the third empty box. He said nothing and pressed the paper back down.
At the door of the meeting Shen Yi was standing. He said: upstairs is asking whether the broadcasting continues.
I said, I don't know.
He said, I don't know either. With that he glanced at the letter in his hand. Top right corner, a reference number; under the number, blank space; the issue field was empty.
I was collecting the conference room's cups; Zhou Yansheng hadn't left. He stood at the window, the one crooked slat of the blinds still crooked in the middle. He said: believe it or not, someone online has already laid that August out as a calendar, day by day, with narration underneath.
I said, I haven't seen it.
He said, neither have I. He said, someone told me.
He turned, picked up the last cup from the table for me, and set it in the tray. He said: we used to be afraid it was saying too much. Now it's stopped saying. Which is better — you tell me.
I said, I don't know.
He said, mm. He said, I'm practicing that too.
He went out first. The corridor light answered with a click and came on; his footsteps reached the stairhead and faded down.
Home that night, Nian asleep. I pulled open the middle drawer of the writing desk; the notebook was there. I turned to the first page: seven items, one through seven. I closed it and put it back.
At the institute the next morning the duty log lay open; in yesterday's square stood my writing and Tong's stamp. My writing on the left, his stamp on the right. Today's square was still empty. Whoever comes first, writes first.