[ECHO ARCHIVE · LAYER 3 · 51.9% DECODED · KEY: LIVE SOUND FROM THE 2008 SUMMER OLYMPICS OPENING CEREMONY BROADCAST]
Day 291, 03:11:44, step 294. No frame.
I sent the word to the gatehouse. When Tong heard it he fished a new stamp out of his drawer, unfinished, two characters penciled on the stone: secondment. He said, have you thought about it—these six months, you've had more stamps than words. I said, I've thought about it. He said, and you still come. I said, I come.
On day 293 I went back to the institute. The temporary pass took three days to issue, faster than Shen Yi had said. Printed on A4, laminated, the photo taken on the spot the day it was made; I had my head lowered, and the picture came out tilted. The access card I used to have had a straight-on photo, straight enough to match every record there was. This tilted one matches only the me of now. At the gatehouse, Tong took the pass in and logged it, then turned the duty log around and showed me: it's all my writing since you left. Small; bear with it. Sixty-odd cells of small writing in a row, every one of them "no frame."
The residual segment's work is housed on basement level one, in a room newly opened next to the raw baseband library. A sign on the door: SC-11 Annex 3. Inside are two rows of machines—one row runs the companion signal; the other stands empty, saved for this.
The thing was hidden under the companion subcarrier. The first time we decoded the companion signal, we subtracted a layer off the bottom; we wrote the lift in the noise floor off as noise and subtracted it clean. This time we picked up what had been subtracted and spread it out, and underneath lay a sub-sideband, its power one nine-thousandth of the main carrier's, its rate 61.8 bits per second. It had lain there better than two hundred days, and I had subtracted it out with my own hands once. Master Lu said, no blame to you. He said: what's laid under a tape has never been looked at—whoever buys tape looks at what's on top first.
The sync word was twenty-three bits. Human links don't run twenty-three; we habitually use sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four—powers of two. Its frame length was two thousand one hundred eighty-seven symbols, and the base field of its error correction was 243. I pressed the calculator twice. Two thousand one hundred eighty-seven is three to the seventh power; 243 is three to the fifth; and twenty-three, however you break it apart, won't come apart into twos.
Xiao Gao watched me work the calculator. He said, "Multiples of three."
I said, "They count things three at a time."
The decoded stream went to Master Lu for a listen. He doesn't read spectra; he puts the headphones on and listens to what the symbol stream sounds like once it's moved into audio. Two listens, then he took the headphones off and said, "Triple time, with a five nested inside the beat." He said if a tape ran off-axis the sound would waver; this one didn't waver. When he finished he set the headphones down and wound the cord twice around, wound it neat.
The stream came apart into three sections. The first is a catalog: entries packed close, better than six thousand of them, each one a timestamp plus an event code. The event codes won't decode—no dictionary, no bilingual key—and we spent an afternoon staring at a column of gibberish. The second section is the sequence of timestamps, dense to sparse, then sparse to dense again. The third is the shortest and the strangest: two columns of numbers, one number on the left, one on the right, matched line by line down the page.
On day 301 SC met, all eleven tiles present. Item three of the agenda: name this residual segment. One tile proposed calling it "incoming letter"—by communications convention, something of unknown origin gets called a letter first. Zhou shook his head: a letter is written to a recipient; this has no recipient—it never meant itself for anyone to see. A tile asked what to call it, then. Zhou wrote a word in his notebook and held it up to the camera.
Specimen.
He said, "Call it 'specimen' for now. When we know what it is, we can change it."
After that we all called it the specimen. The name spread, and in spreading it quietly erased one thing—what the family before the specimen was like. What kind of people, living where, how they got through their days: nobody asked. Master Lu said, when a family moves, the newspaper lining the bottom of the boxes isn't left there for whoever collects the boxes. The tape box on our balcony has one lining its bottom too—a 1998 one, a piece cut from the center fold. I've never worked out which day's listings were cut away. This has nothing to do with the specimen. I thought it; that's all. I thought it.
The comparison of the two columns was assigned to me. The first section's catalog and the second section's timestamps went to the outside stations, to be done separately.
I squared each column up on its own first. The left column held thousands of timestamps, monotonically increasing, spaced as evenly as if drawn along a ruler. The right column was timestamps too, and increasing. I laid the two columns onto one chart.
They overlapped.
I enlarged the chart. Line-by-line comparison. Zero error. Thousands of lines, every line zero error. The left column and the right were two clocks, running on two different times, yet every event they pointed to sat at the same instant. I pulled another hundred lines to cross-check against the outside stations' independent solutions: zero again.
That afternoon more and more people came into the room, all drawn by the news, nobody talking. Xiao Gao had the two columns printed out and laid them on the floor, aligned, to be read; when he finished reading he was still squatting there and didn't get up.
Ye Zhen came late. She asked for the table of two columns and went through it with the point of a pencil, line by line; at the thirty-somethingth line she stopped and looked up and asked, what is the left column, what is the right column.
I said, "The left is what was written. The right is what was lived."
She asked nothing more. She bent her head and read the page to the end, slowly, and when she finished she said, "Not one line off."
Zhou came in last. He stood in front of the chart a long time, both hands in his overcoat pockets. While he looked, nobody in the room made a sound. At the end he took his hands out and pointed at the chart's final stretch, where the two columns had merged into one—the same timestamp, repeated to the end of the lines. He asked, and this part?
I said, in this last stretch, the left column and the right are the same number. Thousands of lines, all one number.
I asked the outside stations what the number converts to in their calendar. It wouldn't convert; there is no anchor. But the structure shows without an anchor. It is the tail end of a table. The tail end of a table with everyone on it.
Zhou put his hands back in his pockets. He said, "They walked it to the end, per the schedule."
With that he went out. The corridor's sound-activated light came up once. His footsteps sounded the way they always had, one step at a time, and nothing in the sound to tell there were pills hidden inside it.
On day 308 Shen Yi came to collect the copy. Logged, double signature, my name next to his. When everything was packed he stood at the door and asked one thing: upstairs is asking who this falls under.
I said, "I don't know."
He said, "My answer: the archive."
Ye Zhen was there that day. She made a sample page of the two columns, on A4, numbered in the top right corner: Spec-1. She said, "I'm filing this page next door to Not Imaged." I have seen her cabinet: the U index in a row of white, and pressed against it a new column, its label printed, just the one word—Specimen. Between the two columns, a gap one finger wide. I asked what the gap was for. She said, for the kind in between. I asked what kind was in between. She said, not known yet. The day it's known, this cell won't be empty.
That Saturday I took Nian for sweet-and-sour ribs. She ordered—by the book, dish first and quantity after: one ribs, one rice, one soup. She ate her ribs smallest first, and at the largest piece she paused, nudged it to the rim of the bowl, and said, "This one goes home with us." I asked why. She said, you save the biggest for last, and by then it's gone cold and won't taste right; better to take it home and warm it. The restaurant's television was on, playing the request slot; someone had ordered an old serial from thirty years back, and midway through, an actor flubbed a line and cracked himself up, and they hadn't cut it—the thing just played on. Nian looked up at it once and said, "Nobody moderates this either." Then she went back to her ribs.
On Sunday evening she played me the first page of the slow Grade 4 piece. When she finished she asked, this time can you hear what's good? I said, I can. She said, where? I said, "You kept the breaths. Where the breathing goes, you really breathed." She pulled the bench forward and said, "Teacher said that too." She said, "Then there's no need to play it again."
On the night of day 310 I was on shift. The step came up at 03:11:44, step 313, the curve lifting once, holding, settling back. I played the chart of the two columns through again, first line to last, two lines of handwriting walking side by side until they merged into one at the end. The second time through I watched only the left column. When the left column finished, the chart was finished; behind it lay the noise floor, a noise floor cleaner than zero, so clean it was as if the tape had simply ended there—and as if that family had simply lived to the end there. On this chart, the two were one thing.
The duty log lay open. I wrote: January 26, no frame. Words on the left. In the morning Tong came to stamp it—stamp on the right, the "frame" still missing its vertical stroke. When he finished he looked at it once and said, "Your writing has gotten small too." I said, "Cold weather." He said, "Mm. Cold weather."