[ECHO ARCHIVE · LAYER 3 · 51.9% DECODED · KEY: LIVE SOUND FROM THE 2008 SUMMER OLYMPICS OPENING CEREMONY BROADCAST]
Day 317, 03:11:44, step 320. No frame.
The day after the verification sheet went up, the pool's reply came back: the double September 17 frames, opened as a special review; original baseband re-pulled; checkout by two. On that page of the sign-out log the first line was mine and the second was Xiao Gao's. Tong pushed the book back for our signatures, counted after we'd signed, and said: two lines—that page will carry you to the end of the month. The second checkout was the two of us again, lines three and four written one beneath the other, and he said: you two have booked this page solid.
The baseband lives one floor underground, in a room whose door only closes if you shoulder it. The last thirty minutes of sampling before S-08 stopped receiving frames; the discs are read-only, and the handwriting on the labels is still Adebayo's, crooked. Xiao Gao's hand paused half a second at that label. Then he pushed the disc in and said nothing.
Three things sat in the window. The late-arriving block, already decoded. Before it, the raw stream of the normally ingested item. And after it—six minutes forty seconds past the late block—one block shorter still: twenty-one hundred symbols and change, 2.3 dB under the demodulation threshold at the time, so the machine had ignored it, and the people had too. It lay at the far end of the window, as if it had squeezed in before the window shut.
The first step of the review was not to decode it. It was comparison. Two Septembers 17, segment by segment.
The work fell to Ye Zhen and me. She pulled the ingested version at the archives; I set up against the late version at the institute. One screen each, reading the timecodes out by segment, and a red dot for anything that failed to match. The weather segment, read through both versions, did not produce one red dot. In sports we went through the score captions line by line: the same. The finance indexes matched to the second decimal place. Thirty-one items in the international segment, all identical. When we reached the local segment, the red dots began.
The first difference sat in item three of the local segment—the fifty-one seconds. Beyond that one, twelve more. One at the street corner: same timecode in both versions, one carrying an extra figure pushing a bicycle, the other not. The bus-rerouting caption: one version rerouting the 41, the other the 41 and the 78. The market item's shot ran a second and a half different between versions. In one community item the residents' committee's name was seven characters in one version and six in the other. And one at the school gate: the banner hung in front of the teaching building in one version, moved above the gatehouse in the other, the words on it unchanged. Twelve places, every one of them small—small enough that even someone watching both versions at the same time back then would have taken them for transmission jitter.
Comparison is dumb work. A little over half an hour of material on each side; we read timecodes for two days. By the second afternoon Ye Zhen's voice had gone hoarse, and she took to writing the timecodes out and holding the sheet up to the camera for me to read. The red dots were numbered one through thirteen, and at thirteen she set her pen down. "That's the lot. Any more and it stops looking like jitter. It starts looking like two scripts."
Ye Zhen copied the twelve red dots onto cards, one to a card. When they were copied she laid them out across the table—not by timecode; by place name. She has her own way of laying things out.
She studied the layout a while, then took six cards away and pushed seven across to me. "These seven. Every frame in them catches the same intersection."
"Which intersection?"
"Keyuan North Street. The one at your gate."
Three of the seven cards held the same figure. Long shots, all three. One: across the street, a person walking toward the institute gate, back to the camera, stride at its midpoint. One: the iron plate at the gate, someone standing at its edge, side face, blurred; the character painted on the plate covered by snow, one corner of it showing. One, in item five of the local segment: the camera sweeping across a parked car, half a figure riding in the car window, one streak of glare on the glass, and out of the glare the slope of a shoulder line still legible. Three shots, three angles, no face in any of them, and none of them close. Ye Zhen enlarged each of the three a size on her archive's enlarger, and when she'd finished: "All three are one person. The shoulders are the same. Walking, the left hand hardly swings." She clipped those three into a clip of their own.
"All three are in the ingested version," she said. "In the late version I went through it shot by shot. The person isn't there."
She set the three in a row beside the printout of the fifty-one-second item. Four sheets in line on the table. Then she took up the transcription page for item three of the local segment. Transcription is regulation: any entry the two frames disagree on gets copied out in full, and the transcriber signs and stamps it. Her stamp sat in the lower right corner, square and true. She read the voiceover through, word by word.
She read slower than the broadcast had. When she came to the name, she stopped.
There were only the two of us in the room. The machine room's door was shut; the corridor's sound-activated lights had gone out; nobody was passing. She flattened the page and pressed her hand on its corner, the way you press down a curled edge on something about to be filed. She didn't look up at me. She read the page to the end—how the obituary ran, how the life account ran, where the pauses fell, all of it. Then she turned the page face-down on top of the four sheets.
"It comes down to this one person," she said.
"Mm," I said.
"In one, the person is there; the person is gone; people come to see them off. In the other, the person is there too; the person doesn't come here anymore; so no one comes to see them off." She said, "Both are right. Both were written."
She gathered the cards, squared them, clipped them together. Once the clip was on she said she had always taken her sister's half of the photo frame for a rendering gone wrong. She didn't see it that way now. "It isn't painted wrong. It isn't painted yet. It's the same as this one of mine—it's in the squares laid out on the table, which one you—" She stopped there. Squares laid out on the table; the matter of which one you walk.
She didn't ask which one I meant to walk. She put the clip into the kraft envelope from her archive, wound the string three times, stood up, and sat back down.
"The transcription page—do you keep it, or do I?"
"I keep it."
"Good. Lock it away, then." She said, "Paper is cleaner at your place than in the pool."
As she tidied the table her eyes stopped once on her cabinet: the row of U indexes, the specimen column, the one-finger gap in the middle. "These two, I won't make cards for yet. They're not unrendered, and they're not specimens." She said it and shut the cabinet door and locked it.
On day 321 I took the discrepancy table up to Zhou. The table ran its twelve red dots, its seven intersection cards, its three figures, counted all the way down. He read it through his reading glasses, set it down, and asked: "Item three. You transcribed it in full."
"Per the regulations."
"How long has this item been with us?"
"Since day 179."
"Oh."
He got up for water, carried the cup in both hands, sat back down, drank once, and set the cup on the napkin folded beneath it. "I'll report the table myself. In the minutes, item three goes in as a content category, no names. The three figures go in as persons possibly related to the project." He said, "It's an ugly phrase. It holds."
When he'd finished he locked the table in his drawer. Then he stayed seated and looked at me across the desk for a while. "The matter with my hands doesn't touch the schedule. Neither does this. Carry on." He said, "That block down there that won't decode—it's yours now."
The day after the minutes went out, one of the eleven seats wrote back asking which person the possibly-related phrase covered, and whether it touched on permissions. The chair read the item out, then read the next one in. The next item was the routine report on the step sequence. That seat asked nothing further.
On day 322 Xiao Gao brought in a paper from outside, foreign-language, a column. He translated the title for me: "If We're All Acting It Out as Written." The author wrote books, sold well, and couldn't do math. The piece ran from the cardboard sign that civilization had held up all the way to both-readings-close, everything explained away. Xiao Gao read two passages and couldn't go on. "He even got the bit rate wrong."
Shen Yi came past, took it, read the title, read two passages, put it down. "Here comes the made-up version."
He wasn't looking at the paper when he said it. He was looking out the window: the compound wall, the street beyond it, traffic going by. "Count from today, that thing makes a front page every three days. Your table—if it reports slower than the column does, it's the column's footnote. Faster than the column, and it's the original text."
Those days, coming in through the institute gate, I passed the shop across the way. The lettering on its glass door had changed. Under the three lines about archive lookups, a new sheet of paper had gone up, one word on it: TRANSFER. Hung crooked, one corner curling, nothing pressed it down. Inside, the table still stood. The computer was gone.
Nian's school was out for winter break. She kept herself at home by day, and I left lunch in the pot. In the evenings I'd come back to homework spread across the whole table. One evening what lay spread out wasn't homework but a sheet of essay paper, the title printed across the top: My Ideal.
She asked me: "Ma, the teacher says we write what we want to do when we're grown."
"Write what you want."
"But what you do when you're grown—isn't all of it written already?"
Outside the window the snow had melted halfway and frozen again. I unwound my scarf, hung it over the chair back, thought a moment. "That's what other people wrote. You write what you want."
She made a small sound and bent to it. When she finished she turned the sheet face-down under her math notebook. "The teacher hasn't collected it yet. No looking." "Not looking." Clearing the table, she took that sheet out by itself and slid it into her account book. Rubber band wound twice around it.
On the night of day 323 I couldn't sleep. I got up and sat a while under the desk lamp, took a sheet of paper, and worked through the ages, one by one, of the people who would be present that September 17, 2079—and at Nian I stopped longest: forty-seven, an age I had watched plenty of others live into and had never once seen on her. When the arithmetic was done I turned the sheet over; the back was blank. I wrote nothing on the blank side, turned it back and read over the figured lines once more, folded the sheet over twice and set it under the band log. Two Septembers, one with me in it, one without, both written out neat and placed in their two squares, and neither square urging me anywhere—in that they had the same temper as the old ledgers on the bookshelf, decades of entries standing in their lines—and I was still standing in the seam between the two squares, a foot not set toward either side, the desk lamp nailing my shadow to the desk, the shadow not moving and me not moving, and downstairs a car went past, pressing one soft sound out of the snow.
The next day I burned the sheet. Over the kitchen's gas ring, the flame blue. The paper came apart at the crease as it burned, two halves, each finishing on its own.
On the night of day 324, work opened on the last block in the window. It sat 2.3 dB under the threshold, and the hard way to decode it was the dumb way: merge the same-window baseband from S-08 and S-23, cancel the two stations' local oscillator offset first, stretch the integration time to eight times its length, and re-lock the symbol clock. Locking the clock took forty-some minutes, and the moment it caught, the machine gave one short beep; the room held just the two of us, and neither of us said a thing. Xiao Gao minded one machine and I minded the other, both running the same block, outputs compared byte for byte. At one forty in the morning the sync word bit. At two twenty it was done.
One catalog entry. Four fields.
Frame number, ending in six. The ingested item ends in four, the late item in five; this one ranks sixth.
Date: September 17, 2079.
Length: 1,458 symbols. A length meant something hung off its end. The thing was there, packed tight.
The fourth field was the key. The column was blank.
I sent in every key I had on hand. The 1987 line: refused. The 0.9 seconds from 2008: refused. The ei from 2021: refused. Three keys, three attempts, the same return code every time—not an error code, an empty code. The machine wasn't telling me I was wrong. It was telling me there was nothing in the column for a key to meet.
Xiao Gao printed out the verification sheet his machine had run and set it beside mine; we went through them once, side by side. Two machines, two decodes, byte for byte identical. "Why don't we pull every key the pool has ever posted and run them one at a time." "Report it up first." "Fair enough. Anyway—" He didn't say what the anyway was going to be. He pinned the printout up.
I counted the fields twice. Four fields, three with numbers in them, one without.
Outside it was still dark. At 03:11:44 the step came up, step 327, the curve lifting, holding, settling back. The catalog entry stayed lit on the screen: frame number, date, length, set down one under another, down to the fourth column, where the white went on being white.
A blank is not a zero—I've said that once before. This column had a column, and nothing in the column. If there were a number, no number would be too big to divide, no number you couldn't throw keys at. With no number, there isn't even a way to be wrong.
I saved the entry to disk, signed off under the two-person rule, logged out, pushed the chair back under the desk. At the stairwell door the sound-activated light came on at my step. No one else was in the stairwell. I went down one floor at a time, and the lights went out behind me, section by section.