[ECHO ARCHIVE · LAYER 3 · 51.9% DECODED · KEY: LIVE SOUND FROM THE 2008 SUMMER OLYMPICS OPENING CEREMONY BROADCAST]
Day 248, 03:11:44, step 251. No frame.
Frost at night, thawing halfway by day; the paths in the yard ran a layer of ice over a layer of water. The boiler room's pipes were finally replaced and the heat came on—too much of it. A window in the conference room stood open a crack, and the cold from outside and the warm from inside fought in the gap until the glass grew a film of fog.
After the companion signal's counting block was decoded, one stretch remained that nobody touched. A small segment hung off the tail of the block structure, less than a tenth the length of the main block; we had taken it for padding. Padding shouldn't carry a sync word. This one did.
In those days upstairs began pressing about something else. No frame for a full month now, so they wanted a judgment: was the pause technical, or was it something else? The letter reached the institute with the signature field still empty and nothing at the bottom but an agency code. Zhou forwarded it to me and the orbit group with a note attached: write only what can be computed.
What could be computed, I wrote in two lines. Carrier present. Power steps continuing as before. Beyond that I couldn't produce anything. When Shen Yi came to collect it, he read the two lines twice and said, "This is it?" I said, "This is it." He folded the paper and said, "Upstairs can't wait on don't-know." I said, "Then they can wait a while." He gave me a look, didn't take it up, and left with the paper.
On day 250, Master Lu cut the tail segment out on its own. While he cut he said: don't throw away what hangs off the tail—what hangs off the tail is usually the label.
Cut free, it wanted alignment first. The same sync word, at a fixed position, once a minute, pressed against the tail end of the counting block. Not much content; decoded, it came to under forty bytes. Master Lu copied it onto paper and read it to me line by line.
Three catalog entries.
B-001, 1987, TV, CN.
B-002, 2008, OG, OPEN.
B-003, 2021, NET, CLIP.
The first two we knew. The key that caught Layer 1 up to Layer 2, and the one that caught Layer 2 up to Layer 3—those hint items had come, back then, from the lead-in sections of the frames; both were in the archive. The third had never come through. The frames had stopped at day 188; this one sat filed behind them and never had its turn.
Each catalog entry was followed by an audio fingerprint. B-003's ran 1.7 seconds.
Master Lu put the headphones on, listened once, took them off, and said, "Clean." He said: it never went through a broadcast chain, never went through a mixing desk—this sound came straight out of a compressed file.
I said, "Straight out of what?"
He said: sound on television passes through the machines, and anything that passes through machines carries their smell. This had none of it. He said: this is something off the internet.
The fingerprint went to the pool, and the stations set to matching it, each on its own. For the two days of waiting, the institute ran as usual. The old serial in the canteen played through to its finale, and the day after the finale the station started rerunning a different one. Somebody at the table said: same few shows, round and round. Nobody picked it up. In the gatehouse, Tong wiped down the seventh postcard yet again; the patch the snowmelt had bled into had dried all the way through and gone wrinkled.
That week Nian learned a song at school and sang it for me when she got home—two lines in, she lost the words and stopped. Her practicing had reached the lower half of page two of the new piece, one line of slurred notes she could never keep even. She played it four times; the fifth time it was even. She didn't say she had played it right. I asked, was it even? She said, "You could tell?"
I said, "It was even."
She said, "Then there's no need to play it again." She got down off the bench and reached for the tangerines on the windowsill.
She said, "Some people in my class say that TV show is over. Some say it isn't over, there's a second season."
I said, "Which TV show."
She said, "You know. The one with one episode a day."
I said, "Who says?"
She said, "The big kids say. The big kids know everything."
She peeled the tangerine and broke off half of it for me. It was sour. Neither of us said so.
Those two days, a newspaper out in the world did a thing: it reprinted the days of August 1936 one at a time, running each day's page from that year, shrunk to a quarter page, advertisements and all. The first day's issue sold out in half a day, and the reprints came out on yellower paper. Tong carried one in from the gatehouse and spread it on the table for people to look at. Lao Song studied it a while and said: people that year didn't know where to phone—all the ads were nothing but addresses. Nobody answered him, but everyone looked a little longer than they needed to.
In the archive room, Ye Zhen was writing cards for those sixty-one shops. On days when nothing new came in, she wrote cards—one to a shop, stiff paper, each copying out the entry count, the years, how the records thinned and thickened. When I stopped by to return a book she was writing the fortieth. She said, the cards don't go into the collection. The cards are just cards. She said, things in the collection sit waiting to be searched; cards stand out where people can see them. She clipped the finished stack in an iron clamp and stood it on the windowsill—a row of white.
At midday Adebayo took a phone call. It came while he was in the canteen; he carried his tray out to take it, standing in the corridor. When he came back he finished everything on the tray and didn't say what it was. That afternoon somebody saw him smoking in the stairwell. He never used to smoke. The pack sat on the windowsill until end of shift, better than half full, and he took it with him when he left.
Day 253, the match came back. S-08 had a network sound archive, a private one, a decade and more of background audio collected from short videos. It matched. The 1.7-second sample was one human voice, one drawn-out "ei." It had first appeared in March 2021, and in the two years after it was reused better than three hundred thousand times. Not one of the reusing videos had ever been on television.
The bulletin board posted the parameters only, no commentary. Under the parameters, the usual line of small print: the comparison sample will not be made public.
On the afternoon of day 256 the SC group met, eleven tiles as always. This time the agenda held a single item: put the three years onto one sheet of paper.
1936, 1987, 2008, 2021.
From the first year to the second: fifty-one years. From the second to the third: twenty-one. From the third to the fourth: thirteen.
I read the intervals out. When I finished I said: four points, three intervals—that doesn't make a pattern.
The chair asked, then what can be said.
I said, "A tendency."
On screen, somebody shuffled papers. One tile asked: the newest of these entries—how many years back from today?
I said, "Eighteen."
That tile asked nothing further. The chair read the minutes back, and at the word "tendency" he paused, and asked: so it gets written just like that. Nobody objected. That was how it went into the minutes.
Shen Yi had come in for the second half, and stood by the door. As he entered, the screen was turning to the B-003 page. He asked: the word "tendency"—can it go into the formal judgment?
I said, "No."
He said, then what does the judgment say?
I said, "Four years. Three intervals. Nothing else in it."
He said, "All right."
He stood at the door and said nothing more. Zhou sat at the middle of the long table, his tea in front of him, the cup full. Before adjournment he reached for it; the cup rocked in his hand, and a little water splashed onto the minutes—right onto the corner of the number 2021. He pressed it with his cuff, blew on the paper, and got up and left. Nobody said anything. The water dried into a faint ring.
Before the meeting broke up, Ye Zhen raised her hand. She wasn't SC; she sat in as an observer, off to the side. She said she had a question and didn't know who it was for, so she would just put it out.
She said: that sound—the "ei"—it collected it. She said: 1.7 seconds off the internet, and it kept it to this fineness. She said: then what about the things written on paper? Ledgers, cards, the accounts people keep in notebooks—does it collect those?
The chair said, that question is outside the agenda.
Ye Zhen said, "I know." She said, "I'm just leaving it here."
Nobody answered. She put her hand down and didn't look at the screen again.
After the meeting, on the stairs, Adebayo brought out the paper from under his keyboard. Three boxes: 1987, 2008, and in the third, this time, writing—2021. Written before the meeting; the strokes deep enough to feel from the back of the paper.
He said, "I called it."
I said, when did you write it?
He said, "Last night." He said: I thought about it all evening. The first two keys, twenty-one years apart; another twenty-one didn't fit, and half of twenty-one didn't fit either. He said: then I looked at your chart—closer and closer. He said: so I wrote 2021.
I said, "Nobody's betting with you."
He said, "I know." He said, "I'm the last one left placing bets."
He folded the paper into his shirt pocket. Two steps down he turned back and said: have you worked out which day the archive stops on?
I said, "September 26."
He said, "Right." He said: it collects things from eighteen years back, and the archive only runs forty days ahead. He said: if the pen had stopped, the gap wouldn't be this wide.
He said, "It isn't finished."
He said, "It's writing the sequel."
With that he went on down the stairs, the corridor lights going out behind him one by one. I stood where I was a while. Of the eleven tiles, one had a wall clock on the wall behind it—the one that runs six hours slow; before the meeting I had seen somebody change that clock's battery. New battery, still six hours slow.
That night was my shift. In the small hours I switched on the Red Lantern, turned to shortwave, and searched band by band. Out of the static, some stations played music, some chanted scripture, some had nothing at all.
On one band, a woman's voice was counting numbers. One, two, three. Not loud, perfectly even.
My father's band log lay open on the desk. I had read that old entry many times: Station unknown, female voice, counting numbers, stops at seven.
Four, five, six, seven.
It stopped. A few seconds later the station moved on to music, an accordion passage.
Under the old entry I wrote: December 3, same.
When I finished I turned the radio's volume down. I didn't switch it off. Outside, the ice melted and froze again, and the lower half of the pane had grown a coat of fuzz. I sat facing that fuzz a while, then completed the duty log's last line: Day 256, no frame. Steps climbing as before.
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