[ECHO ARCHIVE · LAYER 3 · 51.9% DECODED · KEY: LIVE SOUND FROM THE 2008 SUMMER OLYMPICS OPENING CEREMONY BROADCAST]
September 16.
The date had lain on the document for three months. I had copied it twice, the second copy smaller than the first. Now it had arrived.
At 03:11:44 the step came up as always. Step 547. The curve lifted, held, came back down. Tong wrote NO FRAME in the duty log, writing left, stamp right. When he'd finished he set the pen down. "This log fills a page today." Nobody picked it up. Nobody was reading the duty log today.
At eight, the last round of global clock sync. Down the coordination channel, English in twenty-odd accents reporting the same number, out to the last digit, all matched. Three months of joint calibration, and the rules had been trimmed and trimmed until three were left: the material is uniformly that frame from the archive case, 180 lines, twenty-five seconds; every station, transmitter, and screen starts within the same minute; and once it has played, what gets played is each one's own call. The third rule was argued into existence. One country wanted a unified silence to follow; it was voted down, the reason recorded in the minutes: what it wants is that frame. What comes after is not its to govern, and no one should be drawing up program schedules for all humankind again.
The material went out through me. The archive-case frame I checked out of the library with my own hands, two signatures, Xiao Gao's beside mine. The original doesn't leave; what leaves is a verified copy, the first four digits of its hash printed on every distribution sheet. The twenty-five seconds going out to the world: a forty-six-byte header, and not one byte of it could be off. Master Lu played the copy three times through, and after the third: "Good. The first time in history our tape goes out cleaner than what it took in."
The morning had nothing in it. Everyone was waiting for the afternoon. I sat in the duty room, took the blue plastic-covered notebook out of my bag, didn't open it, put it back. Nian went to school. At the door she asked, "Are you lot working late today?" "No overtime. I'll be back before evening." "Good, then. I haven't got much homework either." She changed shoes at the door, changed them, then retied the laces, tight, and left.
I went by the gatehouse once. The counter still hung on its window frame; the three piles of letters had long since merged into two. The postcards stood in the old place on the windowsill, the last postmark August 19. Tong wasn't in the room; the calendar lay open on the desk. On my way out I looked across the street: on the lookup shop's glass door, under TRANSFER, a new sheet had gone up reading FOR RENT, hung crooked too. Inside was empty; the table was still there, nothing on it. The gray car wasn't at the alley mouth. I didn't ask the gate guard; the guard had changed last month, someone young who wouldn't know the car. The door of the east room on the third floor stood open; passing it on my way upstairs to fetch something, I looked in: the table was gone, a paler patch left on the wall where it had stood, the cipher lock swapped for an ordinary lock. Locked.
At eleven Ye Zhen came. She had her white cards with her; she hadn't come to work. She laid them out in a row on the duty console. Sixty-one, with one square empty at the end—the place of the postcard that broke off. "Today I wanted it to see this." "It can't see cards." "I know." She squared the row a little straighter. "I just wanted to lay them out." When they were laid she sat a while. "What time is it?" "Four oh five." "Then I'll go back to the archive. We're open all day today. The director said the archive shouldn't be closed today, of all days." She capped her pen before she spoke at the door, and what she said was: "See you later."
At noon the canteen added a dish: cabbage with glass noodles again, nothing else. While I was being served, Lao Song asked which segment I'd be operating that afternoon. "I'm not operating. I'm just watching." "That's fine too." He carried his tray hunting for a seat, found one, sat, and didn't touch his chopsticks. He took his phone out of his pocket and set it face-up on the corner of the table. It was on, parked on the timer page. His mother-in-law's card was canceled as of last month; she had gone in the winter, quietly, and her name was in no version of the obituary column, not one. He ate only after the phone was placed.
We were halfway through when Xiao Gao's phone buzzed. He looked, and turned the screen around. Adebayo had sent a photo: a stretch of rooftop, slanted, dozens of antennas standing on it, every kind there was. One line beneath: "Job's done early today." Lao Song leaned in for a look. "Where's that?" "He didn't say." Xiao Gao sent back two words: "Let go." After a long while the reply came: a period. Just one period. Lao Song looked at Xiao Gao; Xiao Gao put the phone away. "Eat."
At one, everyone at their stations. My post was in front of Machine Six, Xiao Gao on my left, Tong on my right. Zhou sat in the back row; he sits in the back row now, he says the front is for the people who press the buttons. Shen Yi stood beside him. No command post at the institute today; the coordination committee's order had come down three days before, absolute: at 16:05 (08:05 UTC) the whole world starts together—no countdown call, no one first and no one last, the machines start themselves when the time arrives. Everything people could do was finished three months ago; this last motion, the machines would make for everyone. Zhou said, "That's right. That way nobody counts as the one leading."
At one fifty, the stations checked in. S-08 in, S-19 in, S-23 in, S-31 in. When S-31 was read out, the room went quiet for a beat. Shen Yi turned the page of the list. "All present." Nobody asked after S-31's old accounts, and he didn't offer. The kraft envelope that had lain pressed into the bottom shelf of his cabinet for over a year—he handed it over himself last month, the mouth of the bag sealed when he did, his signature and the date on the seal. From the day it was received to the day it was given up: upward of four hundred sixty days. That number did not come from him. It was computed off the incoming-outgoing register.
At two forty, the last verification. I pulled up the distribution sheet: forty-six bytes, the hash matched. The preview of those twenty-five seconds I didn't open. I had watched it a hundred times and more; from the hundred-and-first viewing there was nothing new to see: blurred lines, grayed whites, one arc of the stadium, the shadow of a raised arm. It came out of August 1, 1936, and spent one hundred four years on the road; it passed through magnetic tape twice, and a dubbing scarred the eighth second. The version going out today has no scar—the scar stayed on the master, and the master is in the storeroom; Master Lu said he's keeping it to listen to himself.
At three, the world made no sound you could hear from here. I learned later from the news what that moment looked like: in some cities the streets went still, in some nothing was any different and the restaurants brought the dishes out on time; some people carried radios up to rooftops; some kept watch by a hospital television; on windowsills everywhere stood old radios, many of them Red Lanterns, all switched on, and nobody could say what use it did. All of that came later. At the time, all I could see was my one room.
At three twenty, Master Lu came over from the audio group and stopped at the door without entering, hands empty. "My machines are all shut down. I left one open-reel deck running, idling." "What's it turning for?" "To hear the motor. If the motor sounds wrong, the tape can't be trusted—and today the whole world is tape. I have to keep an ear on it." He stood a while and went back.
At three forty, Zhou came back once from the rear, looked at our three screens, said nothing, and returned to his seat. The cup on his desk sat on its folded napkin, his two hands resting on either side of it, not holding it. Shen Yi stayed beside him, standing the way he stood the day he moved in, over a year ago now, hands behind his back.
At three fifty, I carried the verification sheets back to the rear. The whiteboard had been wiped. The whole schedule was gone, the three words "not yet filled" gone too, the chalk dust piled in the trough along the bottom. Where the table had been, Zhou had written one new line, the writing still small: September 16, 16:05, closed. No signature, no unit name. He saw me looking. "The schedule has run out." Both hands were on the table edge as he said it; he steadied himself before he straightened up.
At three fifty-five, Tong put on his reading glasses and turned the duty calendar to today. The circle he had drawn three months ago was still there. Inside the circle he added two words: "It's here."
At three fifty-eight, the last station on the coordination channel reported ready, and the channel went quiet. A full two minutes of it: nobody spoke, and nobody gave the word. The rule was that there was no word.
Four.
Machine Six's clock read 16:04:50, and I could hear my own watch. No one in the room spoke. The sound-activated light had gone out, and nobody stamped a foot. Dark. The screens' light lay on four faces.
Four oh five.
Start. Down the coordination channel twenty-odd stations reported the same word at once: "Send." Some thousands of stations, millions of base towers, hundreds of millions of screens, all playing the same frame in the same second—twenty-five seconds out of 1936. On Machine Six's monitor I tuned to the local anchor, and the picture came up: gray, coarse, line by line, the arc of the stadium slanting. I counted the seconds. Twenty-five seconds is no great length, but I knew the whole world was counting through that minute, and so it felt long. Past ten seconds, into the teens, the picture was still that arc, and nothing in it was going to change—nothing was supposed to change; what we sent out, that is what it received. Nian's school is three stops from here. I don't know whether the classrooms have screens; I never asked her whether school would be showing it today. There was no one to ask just now, and I didn't want to ask.
At the count of twenty-five, the picture cut away. The coordination channel went silent a beat, then the stations began reporting receipt, one after another, nearly two minutes of it. Shen Yi brought his hands out from behind his back and let them hang at his sides. It was the first time I had seen him stand with his hands hanging.
The twenty-five seconds were done. The local anchor cut back to the studio; the anchor sat, said nothing, waited two seconds, and said: "That frame has concluded its broadcast." That was the whole of it. Then the regular schedule resumed, the weather forecast. Tomorrow: cloudy, turning clear.
At 16:05:30, we began to receive.
The step was tomorrow's small-hours matter; it couldn't be checked on the spot. What could be checked was on the companion subcarrier. The carrier was there; power unchanged, frequency unchanged, all eleven stations of the link up. The change was in the count. The 32-bit frame counter—the figure frozen since day 188, nearly a year—moved. Not incrementing. Jumping back. Xiao Gao pulled the record and watched it frame by frame: three jumps, then still. He computed it once, computed it again. "Zero. It jumped back to zero. Counting from the beginning."
At 16:40 the catalog refreshed. Layer 2's column of 2079 had run out; paging past it turned up no new page. The first line had been replaced; the date field read: 1936, August 1. The status field, one word: scheduled. Xiao Gao paged forward once—tomorrow's slot, the one that had stood empty for over a year, was scheduled, and this was the line scheduled into it. Every slot after that stood empty, one to a day, waiting. Whether the step would come up at 03:11:44 tomorrow, and what the layer would hold—we would know at the time.
Tong pulled the duty log over. "What do we write in today's square?" "Write it as it is." He wrote: September 16, 16:05, simultaneous global broadcast. Beside it he set the stamp—the NO FRAME stamp, the frame character still missing its stroke. He looked at the line. "This stamp, I'm afraid, won't be needed after today." "We'll see when the time comes."
The extrapolation stream had stopped. At 17:20 the checked bulletin came up, two lines: entries in Layer 2 no longer increase; the signal passes into playback mode, from the first frame, one layer a day. Ye Zhen saw the two lines later. "Constant speed. Even handing the tapes back, it keeps constant speed." She was smiling as she said it; the smile lasted a moment and went. "How many years does that take to play?" Nobody picked it up. The arithmetic of playing back the whole human past—nobody worked it on the spot.
I got home at seven. Nian was at her homework, and after it her piano—the slow one, the one that leaves the breathing room. She played it through once, then asked: "Did they play that thing everywhere today?" "They did." "Our school played it too. The whole school watched from the field, on the big screen. You couldn't see much." "Could you make anything out?" "A shadow. It raised its hand. The teacher says that was the first person ever to be on television." "No. The first person on television is the one who pointed the camera at him." She thought about it. "Then the first one is the one that can't be seen." She said it flat, the way you say anything, and went to gather up the music.
Dinner was green beans and braised pork on a low flame; I kept the pot and went forty-some minutes without lifting the lid. Nian set the bowls and chopsticks, squaring the tips before she set them down. The TV stayed on through the meal. The local anchor reran the afternoon's frame three times—once with captions, twice with commentary, the commentary longer each round. Nian watched a while. "Better without all the talking." She got up and switched the TV off. The room went quiet, down to chopsticks against bowls.
I took out the terminal and connected. The playback-mode catalog sat on the first layer, first line: August 1, 1936, status scheduled, tomorrow's layer. Every line after it empty, one to a day, waiting for tomorrow, for the day after. Those twenty-five seconds being handed back—I had sent them once myself that afternoon, with my own hands. I didn't open them. I shut the terminal down, closed it, and looked at the lower right corner.
The date read: September 16.
One day more. Tomorrow was September 17. The frame still lay in the library; both versions of it lay there, and no new episode would ever come along to follow either one. As for which version counts—there would be no day of reconciling that, not ever. I didn't check. I put the terminal in my bag and buckled the bag. From the kitchen Nian was asking what was for breakfast tomorrow. "Green beans," I said.
Under the lamp, the Red Lantern sat on the low cabinet, switched off. Nian passed it on her way from the piano, reached out, and turned it on, tuned to 7.2 megahertz. A few sounds of static; no station. "Still no station." She listened a while. "Then we'll just leave it on." She didn't switch it off. The static was very quiet. It went on.