After I died, they cried in the live studio

Chapter 202 Playing on occasion
The watch hands pointed to three in the morning. This time, the second hand skipped the usual markings, drawing a galaxy-like arc between "3" and "4". Sang Shuwan took out a new roll of film from her trench coat pocket. It contained only one frame: the silhouettes of two girls standing by the developing solution, one handing a wrench to the other—it was a childhood they had never experienced, yet it was gradually developing in a genuine emotional resonance.

"Next stop?" Sang Jiyue shook the key in her hand. In the distant nebula, a point of light marked "Kodak-35" suddenly burst into a warm yellow light, much like the moment an old-fashioned projector lights up.

Sang Shuwan smiled, and as she stuffed the film into her pocket, her fingertips touched the newly engraved pattern on the brooch—the Morse code they had just written in the ruins of the darkroom: "Light has entered, ready to be projected."

Six months later, on the red carpet of the Golden Platinum Awards, Sang Shuwan wore a velvet gown inlaid with 16mm film remnants, and the star-shaped pendant around her neck was a repurposed old film canister left by her grandmother. Sang Jiyue followed in high heels, her gear ring on her ring finger made from a discarded projector part. The two seemed to whisper intimately in front of the cameras, but in reality, they were exchanging messages using lines only they understood—the conglomerate's spies planted within the "New Realist Cinema Movement" were hiding behind cameras around the corner of the red carpet.

“The focal length of camera number 3 is wrong.” Sang Shuwan turned around, arm in arm with her sister, and lightly tapped her sister’s waist three times with her fingertips—their agreed-upon “danger signal.” Sang Jiyue glanced at the control room and noticed that the staff member who should have been adjusting the equipment was fiddling with his phone, the blue light of the screen reflecting the logo of an entertainment company. The two of them simultaneously adjusted their smiles, using a sarcastic tone to blend in coded language, successfully diverting the informant’s attention to the false clue.

Midway through the awards ceremony, the large screen on stage suddenly went black. A commotion arose in the audience, but amidst the chaos, Sang Shuwan caught a glimpse of Sang Jiyue walking backstage, her fingertips swiftly tracing the edge of the screen—hidden there was a secret letter they had written with developing fluid. When the screen lit up again, it wasn't a montage of nominated films playing, but a secretly recorded conversation between a high-ranking executive of the conglomerate at the after-party: "Buy out all the film studios, leaving only our digital cinema on the market."

Amid screams, the Sang sisters had already slipped into the prop room. Sang Jiyue kicked aside a wooden crate piled high with old film reels, revealing a locked metal cabinet underneath: "The 'collaboration scripts' delivered last week, sure enough, contained a watch list." Sang Shuwan pulled out her ever-present film magnifying glass, and under the red light, the title pages of the scripts marked "key development" revealed horrifying annotations—each work was marked with the director's and actors' capitalist alignment.

“They want to monopolize the entire history of film.” Sang Shuwan’s voice was low, but her fingertips steadily pried open the lock with a paperclip. Sang Jiyue suddenly chuckled and pulled out a yellowed storyboard manuscript from the lining: “Remember the ‘light shutter’ that Grandma mentioned? She used it to get the first film on film approved.” The manuscript was spread out under the lamp, and the seemingly casual shot arrangement diagrams actually contained the contact codes of the Film Preservation Association from thirty years ago.

When the conglomerate's bodyguards kicked open the door, they found the two sisters standing back to back in the center of the film archive. Sang Shuwan was disassembling the latest digital master with scissors, while Sang Jiyue was throwing a lavender sachet into the shredder—it was their specially made jamming agent that could disable all digital surveillance equipment.

“The copy has already been sent to the black market film scanner.” Sang Shuwan’s fingernails still had film emulsion stuck to them. Sang Jiyue shook the old-fashioned exposure meter in her hand. “In three minutes, we’ll have to revamp all the film scanners in the building.” Before she finished speaking, hurried footsteps came from the corridor. Sang Jiyue suddenly stuffed the manuscript into her sister’s pocket and pulled a small film cutter from her skirt: “This time, I’ll distract them. You take the things and go first.”

"If I remember correctly, who locked me in the darkroom last time and went off to cause trouble?" Sang Shuwan snatched the knife and tucked it into her waistband, then casually stuffed her grandmother's star pendant into her sister's palm. "Take the secret passage. The third plank of the old projection room floor will rattle." Amidst the explosive noise, the two rushed off in different directions. Sang Jiyue's high heels tapped Morse code on the ground, revealing the escape route they had memorized in the darkroom when they were children.

Three months later, outside the International Independent Film Festival. The Sang sisters, wearing wide-brimmed hats, sat on the steps. Sang Jiyue opened a package she had just received—a brown paper bag containing several rolls of film wrapped in duct tape, signed "Anonymous Projectionist." Sang Shuwan projected the image onto her portable projector. In the flickering light and shadow, she saw the posthumous work of an old director, banned by corporations for twenty years. The edges of the film were covered with dense messages from viewers: "We bought your film at the flea market."

A burst of applause suddenly erupted in the film festival hall. Sang Shuwan looked up and saw that the film they had secretly replaced in the main competition section was playing a video they had secretly filmed with their cell phones—the red light in the darkroom, the film stretching in the developing solution, and the older sister's hand wrapping a band-aid around her younger sister's arm. Sang Jiyue suddenly pointed to a familiar figure flashing through the crowd. It was an investor who had appeared on the list of investors, and now he was taking notes on the graininess on the screen.

"Where to next?" Sang Jiyue kicked the suitcase beside her feet, which was filled with discarded film reels collected from film fans all over the world. Sang Shuwan took out her pocket watch and glanced at the time: 3:07 a.m.—the perfect time to work in the darkroom. She pinned a newly engraved film badge to her sister's lapel, the edge of which featured a twin star pattern pieced together from the scraps of film: "Let's go to the west. I heard there are still film developing shops there that haven't been acquired."

The setting sun cast long shadows of the two girls. Sang Jiyue suddenly remembered the roll of film that hadn't been developed before the explosion—two little girls holding magnifying glasses in the darkroom, chasing the light, their grandmother standing by the developing solution pool, smiling, and on the film rack behind them, countless unexposed rolls of film waiting for their own light.

“You know what?” Sang Shuwan suddenly spoke, stuffing the last roll of film into her trench coat pocket, “Every time we think we’re going to lose, we think about the ‘darkrooms’ we’ve hidden around the world—it could be the basement of an old bookstore, the ruins of a drive-in movie theater, or the attic of some movie fan.”

Sang Jiyue smiled, plucking a piece of developer crystal that had somehow gotten stuck in her hair. The distant clock tower struck four times, and they turned and walked into the street. As the streetlights lit up one by one, an old-fashioned television in a shop window suddenly flashed with static, then a frame of uncolored film appeared: two brooches floated in the developing solution pool, their running figures were reflected on the surface, and new light trails were growing at the edge of the film.

Sang Shuwan's fingertips traced the film badge in her trench coat pocket; the jagged edges of the twin star pattern tickled her palm—a mark they had etched the night before in the ruins of the drive-in theater with the gears of a rusty film camera. Sang Jiyue kicked aside a discarded digital movie hard drive at her feet; its metal casing rolled a silver-blue arc under the streetlight, mirroring the holographic billboards of the distant film studio, creating an absurd clash of light and shadow.

“A message from the photo lab owner in the west,” Sang Shuwan said, pressing her pocket watch close to her ear. The ticking of the old-fashioned mechanical movement mingled with the buzzing of encrypted radio waves. “The conglomerate’s new ‘Digital Restoration Master’ system can convert 35mm film into digital files with 0.1% error.” She looked up at the giant neon-lit “Tomorrow’s Cinema” poster, the smiling face of the movie star sliced ​​into countless pixels. “They want the audience to think that all old movies should grow into smooth plastic.”

Sang Jiyue suddenly stopped in front of an antique shop. On the lenses of old-fashioned projectors displayed in the window, a thin layer of developer crystals covered the surface—a coded mark used by darkroom workers to mark their hideouts. She dipped her fingertip in saliva and drew a film reel symbol on the glass. After two seconds, the shop window light suddenly turned a dark red, illuminating the stacks of tin film canisters on the back shelves. Each canister lid was printed with the "Kodak-35" logo they knew all too well.

"Welcome." A hoarse voice came from deep inside the shop. An old man wearing round-framed glasses pushed open the curtain, the red light of an old-fashioned enlarger flashing in the reflection of his lenses. "I've been waiting for you for a long time, Miss Sang." When he turned around, a film burn scar, the same one as his grandmother's, was revealed on the back of his neck—a medal left from the "film defense war" twenty years ago.

The basement was filled with the musty smell of acetate, and rows of film cabinets were faintly visible in the red light. The old man lifted a faded velvet cloth, revealing a disassembled prototype of the "Digital Restoration Master" machine, with half a roll of oxidizing film stuck between the gears: "They wanted to disguise this thing as nostalgia, but every pixel is gnawing at the soul of the film."

Sang Jiyue took out the film thickness gauge she carried with her and scanned the digital files left on the prototype: "These restoration parameters are not right." She pulled up the confidential documents of the consortium that she had intercepted three months ago at the Golden Platinum Awards, and her pupils suddenly contracted. "They are not restoring the film, they are extracting the audience's emotional data - the granularity of each frame corresponds to a certain emotional fluctuation frequency."

Sang Shuwan's fingertips suddenly stopped on a roll of film marked "1994." Inside the lid, her grandmother's handwriting was written in pencil: "The shutter isn't a machine; it's someone who believes in film." She turned to look at the old woman, who was handing a copy to Sang Jiyue. A note wrapped around the film read: "The black market is trading the original negatives of 'The Faded Age.' Buyer's code name is 'Mr. Gear.'"

“That was my grandmother’s last work before it was banned.” Sang Shuwan’s voice tightened. She remembered the file saying that the negative had been ground into silver halide powder by a conglomerate twenty years ago. “If they used AI to generate a fake ‘restored version’…”

“That would completely erase the true history.” Sang Jiyue stuffed the film into her tin box. The lavender sachet brushed against the film, leaving a barely noticeable purple mark—their specially made tamper-proof mark. The old man handed them two old-fashioned film camera keys, the key rings engraved with “light” and “shadow” respectively: “Tomorrow night at ten o’clock, at the abandoned Starlight Drive-In, a refrigerated truck will transport the negatives.”

On the highway late at night, the Sang sisters' old pickup truck rolled over piles of digital advertising remnants. Sang Shuwan gripped the steering wheel, her rearview mirror reflecting Sang Jiyue using a red pen to modify a stolen conglomerate transport route map. Where the pen tip traced, fluorescent ink revealed the darkroom association's coded communication. Suddenly, the car radio burst into shrill static, followed by clear Morse code—the same message being transmitted by underground photo labs across the country using old-fashioned radios: "Mr. Gear has arrived in the West."

In the ruins of the Starlight Drive-in Cinema, the sound of a refrigerated truck engine broke the silence. Sang Jiyue hid behind a popcorn machine, watching the man in a top hat carry a wooden crate out of the truck. Moonlight fell on the gear-shaped ring on his ring finger—the same one Sang Jiyue had, from the same abandoned server. Sang Shuwan, pretending to be a lost tourist, approached, her high heels shattering a digital disc on the ground with a crisp cracking sound.

“I’ve heard so much about you, Miss Sang.” The man lifted the lid of the wooden box, and the negative of “The Faded Era” gleamed with a mother-of-pearl luster under the moonlight. “As long as you join the ‘New Cinema Order,’ this roll of film and all the film resources in the world will be under your control.” Sang Jiyue noticed the chip tattoo showing on his cuff, the mark of a high-ranking member of the conglomerate.

"What are the conditions?" Sang Shuwan reached out to touch the film, but her fingertips quickly withdrew the moment they touched it—the film base was coated with a chemical agent that could corrode silver halide. The man chuckled, and the bodyguard behind him simultaneously raised a sprayer containing digital solution: "It's simple. Make all the fools who are still developing film believe that they are only protecting piles of moldy plastic."

Suddenly, Sang Jiyue tossed a lavender sachet into the air, the purple powder shimmering under the car headlights. Sang Shuwan seized the opportunity to kick over a wooden crate; the real negatives had already been switched, now slightly warm in her trench coat pocket, while scattered on the floor were merely blank film sheets they'd hastily produced overnight. The bodyguards' spray guns hissed in disappointment as they sprayed the blank sheets, the man's face contorting in the red light: "You think you can win? Tonight, every film shop in the entire West will—"

His words were interrupted by the distant sound of car horns. Hundreds upon hundreds of cars surged from all directions along the highway, their roofs carrying old-fashioned projectors, their headlights illuminating the giant screen in the center of the ruins. Sang Shuwan took out his pocket watch; the hands pointed to three in the morning, the magical hour of the darkroom. Sang Jiyue stood on the roof of a truck, pulled open her shirt collar, revealing a necklace pieced together from film reel fragments—gifts sent by film fans from all over the world.

"Want to see a real movie?" Her voice carried across the entire wilderness via the car radio. As the first beam of light shone on the screen, Sang Shuwan inserted the actual film negative into the projector. The image skipped three frames before finally settling: her grandmother standing in front of the darkroom in her youth, freshly developed film hanging on a drying rope behind her. As the wind blew, each frame reflected the astonished faces of the onlookers.

“This is the opening of ‘The Faded Age’.” Sang Shuwan’s voice mingled with the clicking of the film reel. The man finally saw clearly that the girl holding the clapperboard in the background looked exactly like the Sang sisters. Sang Jiyue shook the film thickness gauge in her hand. The instrument did not display numbers, but rather the dynamic, real waveform of silver halide particles.

When the conglomerate's pursuers arrived, they found the entire wasteland enveloped in the beams of projectors. Hundreds and thousands of makeshift screens displayed real images salvaged from darkrooms across the country: the crackling of burning film, the dripping of developing solution, and the whispered recordings of viewers in the theaters. The Sang sisters stood before the screens, their shadows stretched long by the light and shadow behind them, as if superimposed on the entire history of film.

“You’ve lost.” Sang Shuwan raised a camera at the bodyguards who had chased after them. In the lens, the man’s face was distorted into digital noise with anger. “Because the real movie is never on the screen, but in the heart of everyone who is willing to go into the darkroom for it.”

Sang Jiyue picked up the gear ring from the ground and threw it into the projector's waste film bin. In the distance, the eastern sky was turning a pale white, and car engines on the wasteland started one after another, each with newly received film gifts in its trunk. Sang Shuwan took out her pocket watch, and the second hand was actually turning backward—not time flowing backward, but a film era that had been deleted by the conglomerate was being re-developed in the memories of countless people.

"Next stop?" Sang Jiyue kicked aside the digital hard drive beside her, revealing an arrow written with developer fluid pointing to the more distant western mountains. Sang Shuwan hung her grandmother's star pendant on the projector lens, and the morning light shone through the pendant, casting countless dancing spots of light on the screen: "Go deep into the Rocky Mountains. I heard there's an old projectionist there who still insists on showing movies with nitric acid film."

As the truck started, the car radio emitted a noisy static sound, followed by a childish voice: "Sister, I found Grandpa's film camera in the attic!" Sang Jiyue smiled, took out a pen, and wrote a new code on the waste film bag: "Three rolls of Kodak Plus-X, coordinates: Starlight Route 66."

At the end of the highway, the sun was rising. Sang Shuwan looked at the ruins gradually shrinking in the rearview mirror. On the screen there, her grandmother's image was winking at the camera before turning and walking into the darkroom. The moment the door closed, the Sang sisters simultaneously heard the sound of film reel turning—not from any machine, but from millions of kilometers away, the click of film advancing as a child pressed the shutter for the first time.

It was a continuation of the old story, and the beginning of countless new ones. After all, in this digital age, there are always those willing to hold onto the red light of a darkroom, waiting for the next roll of film to meet its own light. As the truck bumped along the gravel road, Sang Shuwan suddenly slammed on the brakes. On the windshield, swarms of monarch butterflies were flitting across the cobalt blue Colorado sky, the phosphorescent powder on their wings refracting iridescent light in the residual heat of the projector—these were a variant of the darkroom carrier pigeon, each wing coated with a heat-developing silver halide coating.

Sang Jiyue pulled off her scarf and wrapped it around her hands, carefully picking up the butterfly that had landed on the steering wheel. As its wings unfolded, a series of scorched coordinates appeared, along with a warning written in silver nitrate: Nitric acid storage critically low; the incubator in Zone 7 has been hacked. As twilight soaked the wasteland, they found Old Tom in the ruins of an abandoned drive-in movie theater. The snow-white-haired projectionist was blocking the cellar door with his body, clutching twelve cans of 1920s nitric acid film, the bluish film base resembling flaming blue phosphorus under the moonlight.

“They wanted to convert these original copies of ‘Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat’ into a data stream.” Old Tom coughed up blood that splattered onto Sang Shuwan’s Doc Martens, and the newly implanted digital chip in the back of his neck was emitting blue smoke. “But nitrate tablets explode when heated. Look, I left them some souvenirs.” He raised his trembling hand and pointed into the distance, where several black SUVs belonging to the conglomerate were burning, their laser scanners on the roofs twisted into scrap metal.

Sang Jiyue was already kneeling before the stack of film, scanning each damp roll with a thickness gauge. Suddenly, the instrument beeped, and waveforms that didn't belong to silver halide particles appeared on the screen—someone had etched cipher text beneath the film emulsion layer. Sang Shuwan took out her grandmother's starlight pendant, using it as a focusing lens close to the projector lens. A thin beam of light sliced ​​through the darkroom: as the starlight passed through 37 gears, the door to Zone 7 would open for the real projectionist.

At three in the morning, snowflakes from the Rocky Mountains pelted the rusty projector. The Sand sisters stood at the entrance to the abandoned gold mine elevator, the twelve rays of light from their pendant perfectly embedded in the gear grooves in the stone wall. As the last gear turned, the rumble of gears meshing echoed from the depths of the mine, and warm yellow light, characteristic of old films from the 1930s, shone through the cracks in the stone wall.

The cellar was filled with thousands of incubators, each door adorned with fragments of clapperboards from different eras. Sang Shuwan's finger suddenly stopped in front of the box marked "1968"—it was a copy of her grandmother's last unreleased film, *Darkroom Rose*. As she touched the combination lock, her grandmother's distinctive iris-shaped fingerprint suddenly appeared on the lid, instantly turning Sang Jiyue's thickness gauge a deep red—the alarm color of developer mixed with blood.

Old Tom stumbled open the iron gate, his digital bodyguards approaching with the crisp sound of nitric acid tablets on their feet. The binary code flickering on their retinas swept across the film cabinets, causing the incubators to burst into blue flames wherever they went. "Put the film into the projector!" Sang Shuwan pulled open the hem of her shirt and wrapped the reel of "Darkroom Rose" in pure cotton cloth. When the first frame was projected onto the gold mine rock wall, a miracle occurred: the film textures eroded by the conglomerate's virus regrowed silver halide particles in the beam of light, and the quartz crystals on the rock wall resonated, refracting hundreds of overlapping images—a young grandmother developing film in the darkroom, a projectionist adjusting the film gate under a kerosene lamp in the 1920s, and a little girl seeing the reflection of a film projector turning for the first time in the attic.

Sang Jiyue tossed the nitric acid film into the air, and suddenly water droplets dripped from the stalactites at the top of the mine—a developing solution trap set by Old Tom beforehand. The liquid, mixed with mineral dust, poured onto the burning film, and the rising smoke condensed into a coded cloud pattern in the beam of light. Sang Shuwan grabbed the camera and filmed against the light. In the viewfinder, the digital bodyguard's laser gun refracted a rainbow spectrum in the smoke, each spectrum corresponding to the number of a reel of film that had been salvaged.

"Look at this!" Old Tom ripped off the bleeding chip and slammed it into the projector's waste film bin. The instant the chip short-circuited, all the locks on the temperature control chambers lit up green simultaneously. Taking advantage of the moment, Sang Jiyue embedded the starlight pendant into the central control panel. Twelve beams of light suddenly converged to form the countdown subtitles of an old-fashioned movie: **3, 2, 1—** The entire gold mine began to tremble, and a huge slogan written in developing fluid appeared on the stone wall: The real projector is always in the rhythm of a heartbeat.

When the conglomerate's pursuers broke through the last stone gate, they saw the Sand sisters standing under an archway made of film, and old Tom using burning nitrate to ignite the gunpowder fuse on the rock wall—not for destruction, but to allow those images swallowed by numbers to be developed into eternal fossils in the rock strata in the most intense way.

As the truck roared down the winding mountain road, the gold mine in the rearview mirror was exploding. Amidst the towering flames, countless film fragments rose like phoenix feathers, each frame reflecting the smiling faces of viewers from different eras. Sang Shuwan pulled out her pocket watch; the second hand was still ticking backward, but this time a fragment of burning nitrate film drifted into the dial. Gradually, the metal surface revealed the next coded message: Yellowstone National Park West Gate, bring three boxes of acetate film base, watch out for grizzly bears—they've recently learned to use their paws to press the shutter.

Sang Jiyue suddenly laughed, rolling down the window to let the Rocky Mountain wind and snow rush into the car. In the distance, under the starry sky, countless points of light converged along the highway: those were the film guardians who had received the butterfly beacon; their truck trunks were filled with Kodak Tri-X, Fuji Neopan, and homemade developing solutions in jam jars. As the first rays of sunlight brushed past the projector antenna on the roof, the car radio crackled to life again, followed by a boy with a Western accent shouting: "I found Grandpa's arc lamp in the barn! Location: End of Route 66!"
The highway stretched out in the morning light, like a blank film reel unfurling. Sang Shuwan hung her grandmother's pendant on the rearview mirror; starlight trailed behind the car as it bumped along, as if writing a flowing opening credits for all those who persevered. Meanwhile, a thousand miles away in New York, a hacker girl smiled at her computer screen—she had just cracked the conglomerate's cloud database, secretly converting countless deleted film metadata into the silver halide code on the wings of monarch butterflies.

This is a screening without end. When the last roll of film is developed in the darkroom, when the first digital camera begins to leak light, when a child picks up half a roll of faded film from the ruins, the story will begin anew in the developing solution. After all, in this era of pixel-driven proliferation, there are always people willing to wait until dawn under the red light of the darkroom for a single, flickering silver halide grain.

As the truck tires rolled over the gravel at the west entrance of Yellowstone National Park, Sang Shuwan suddenly smelled a mixture of developing solution and pine resin. In the passenger seat, Sang Jiyue was using tweezers to remove fragments of nitrate tablets from her pocket watch. Next to the newly developed code on the metal surface, several grizzly bear claw marks were clearly visible—traces of some kind of bioelectric imaging technology.

The story of "grizzly bears learning to press the shutter" is no joke. When they stopped in front of the abandoned cabin by Old Faithful Spring, through the frosted glass, they could see a brown bear slapping a modified brownie film camera with its paws. With each flash of the camera, a frame of film would pop out from the leather collar around its neck. The collar was embossed with faded letters: USFS 1972—the mark of the last film patrol team of the U.S. Forest Service.

A coughing sound came from deep within the cabin, where an old man wrapped in a raccoon skin blanket was stirring a developing solution tank with animal bones. He wore a 19th-century monocle in his left eye, the lens covered with a thin layer of silver halide crystals: "They're smarter than digital cameras; they know how to use pine needles to block the infrared scan on the lens." The old man wiped the film camera with deerskin, revealing the film amendment clause of the Wildlife Conservation Act engraved on the inside of the camera body. "Three years ago, the conglomerate cut off the digital signal to the reserve, and these old guys learned to shoot film on their own."

Sang Shuwan noticed hundreds of metal boxes piled up in the corner, labeled "Grizzly Valley Film No. 37" and "Moonlight Trails of a Moose Herd." When she picked up a roll of film that smelled of moss, the thickness gauge suddenly showed unusually strong silver halide fluctuations—it wasn't a normal record of animal activity, but some kind of regular light and shadow coding.

“Look at this.” The old man sprinkled some rock salt into the developing solution, then scooped out a roll of freshly developed film and hung it on the drying rope. Moonlight streamed through the holes in the wooden cabin, casting dancing spots of light on the film: in the picture, grizzly bears were pushing bottles containing film into the Yellowstone River with their paws, the current carrying the bottles to different tributaries, each cap engraved with tiny star patterns.

Sang Jiyue suddenly pointed to the edge of the film: there was a string of Morse code written in bear paw blood, which, when translated, was a variant of the D-76 developer formula. "They are building a new film transmission network." Her voice was filled with awe. "Using rivers as developer and animals as messengers, the conglomerate's satellites will never be able to scan this 'biological darkroom'."

At midnight, Old Faithful erupted precisely on time. The Sanders placed the acetate film base on a makeshift tripod, and the beams of light from the star-shaped pendant overlapped with the iridescent light in the geyser mist, creating a map of the film guardians of North America on the water curtain—from the aurora observatory in Alaska to the underground film cellars in Mexico, countless red dots as dense as silver halide grains.

“It’s time to give these little guys some gifts.” The old man opened the cellar, where neatly stacked jars of nitric acid film sealed with bear fat were placed. The top wooden box was labeled with an environmental documentary from the 1960s. “Back then, we used these films to record oil spills. Now it’s time for them to record nature’s backlash.”

As the first grizzly bear carrying a backpack full of new film entered the forest, the eastern sky was already tinged with amber. Sang Shuwan took out her camera, and through the lens, a series of plum blossom-shaped footprints were left on the snow by the bear's paws, each footprint containing a reflective silver halide grain—the product of the developing solution melting from their body heat and mixing with the snow water.

The car radio suddenly blared a piercing scream, then switched to a clear children's chorus: **This is the wind sweeping through the wheat fields, this is the light passing through the film—** That's the signal from the end of Route 66, where countless children are holding homemade pinhole cameras, pressing the shutter to capture the sunrise. Sang Jiyue noted the new coordinates on the waste film bag, and where the pen nib traced, a line of tiny words appeared in the film: When digital signals are interrupted, we are each other's antennas.

As the truck started moving again, a double rainbow appeared in the mist of Old Faithful. Sang Shuwan watched the cabin gradually disappear in the rearview mirror and saw the grizzly bears standing in a line on the hillside, each bear's forepaw resting on a film camera from a different era, forming a moving film totem in the morning sun. In their trunk, the newly received film gift was vibrating gently—an encrypted roll of film from a New York hacker girl, wrapped in monarch butterfly wings, containing blueprints for the ventilation ducts of a conglomerate's underground server.

Ahead on the highway, a faded road sign swayed in the wind. The words "Welcome to the Digital Forbidden Zone" had been sprayed with developing fluid, revealing an old slogan underneath: "Beware of light, it remembers everything." Sang Jiyue rolled down the window, letting the mountain breeze carrying the scent of pine needles rush into the car. Suddenly, she heard the clicking sound of film reel turning in the distance—not from any machine, but from the Yellowstone River's waves crashing against the rocks, as the film in those drifting bottles was naturally developing.

This is the migration of light and shadow, the war between silver halide and bit, the ripples stirred in time and space by every pressed shutter. As the Sanders' truck drove into the next wasteland, they knew that under the red light of a darkroom, a child was holding his breath, waiting for the first sliver of developing solution to flow over the film, and that was the beginning of all the stories.

As the truck entered Montana, the car radio suddenly picked up a Morse code message interspersed with cowbells. As Sang Jiyue deciphered the coordinates, Sang Shuwan swerved to avoid a deer crossing the road—its antlers were not adorned with vines, but with wreaths made of 35mm film, the film base vaguely showing gunfight scenes from 1950s Westerns.

“It’s the rancher’s signal.” Sang Shuwan pointed to the scattered lights in the distant valley, the edges of which had the dark corners characteristic of film—signal lights made from modified projector lenses. As they bumped into the ranch, hundreds of cows were marching in a line past a makeshift darkroom, each cow’s ear tag representing a magnified frame of film. Hidden in the haystacks swept by the cows’ tails were boxes of Kodak Vericolor film.

Old Jim, the rancher, wore a cowboy hat with a film burn scar visible under the brim. "The conglomerates say digital farming can increase milk production, but they don't know that." He patted the back of the cow beside him, whose belly was covered with complex mammary duct diagrams drawn with developing solution. "The grass the cows trod will remember the smell of the film. As soon as the digital monitors get close, the grass will wither."

Sang Jiyue squatted beside the milking machine and discovered that the metal parts were engraved with microfilm grooves—each time milk was milked, fresh milk would wash over the film hidden in the grooves, recording the health data of the cattle as the density of silver halide particles. "A bio-development system." Her fingertips were wet with warm milk, and the thickness gauge showed the amazing resonance between calcium and silver halide, "more accurate than any digital sensor."

Late at night, the pasture's barn transformed into a makeshift screening room. The Sang sisters mounted a starburst pendant on an old-fashioned slide projector, the beam passing through glass jars filled with milk and projecting flowing, milky images onto the barn walls—images of the grasslands changing on film, captured by herders during a sandstorm in the 1930s. As a tornado swept across the screen, a real howling wind suddenly sounded outside the window, and dozens of cows simultaneously turned around, using their bodies to block the holes in the barn. The film garlands on their bodies rustled in the wind, much like the vibrating soundtrack of an old film.

"It's time to send some 'fresh milk' to the film cellars in the east." Old Jim opened the cellar, inside which were neatly stacked film canisters sealed with frozen milk blocks, each block imprinted with a cow's hoof print. Sang Shuwan noticed a modified butter mixer in the corner, with undeveloped film wrapped around its mixing arms—it turned out that fresh milk was both a developer and a natural firewall against digital viruses.

At four in the morning, the first milk truck drove out of the ranch. The "Purely Handcrafted Dairy Products" label on the truck was rewritten by developer to: 10^12 silver halide sentinels per liter of milk. Sang Jiyue found a notebook stained with milk under the driver's seat, with the words written in cow's blood on the title page: When the cameras of the digital ranch went blind, our cows were photographing the Milky Way with dewdrops on their eyelashes.

Suddenly, a warning sign by the roadside flashed red; it was an siren made from a discarded film canister. Sang Shuwan slammed on the brakes and, through the windshield, saw the conglomerate's swarm of drones descending from the clouds. Laser beams beneath the drones swept across the grassland, instantly scorching the grass wherever they touched—but the instant the lasers touched the milk truck, all the beams suddenly refracted into a rainbow halo, breaking down into a spectrum like film being developed.

"It's milk fat!" Sang Jiyue grabbed her camera to film this bizarre scene. In the footage, the digital aiming systems of the drones completely malfunctioned in the milky white mist, and they all crashed into the scarecrow formation made of film cameras. Old Jim laughed and threw out his lasso, catching a crashed drone. After dismantling the casing, he revealed the optical fibers wrapped around it—those fibers were engraved with deleted film metadata, like grave goods of the digital age.

As the rising sun paints the Rocky Mountains crimson, the cows on the ranch begin their collective eastward march. On the grassland beneath their hooves, the milk spilled the previous night has developed into countless tiny arrows, pointing to the next film reel hidden in the glacier. Sang Shuwan pulls out her pocket watch and discovers the second hand has stopped reversing; a drop of milk has condensed on the dial, refracting the sunlight like a miniature projector beam.

The car radio crackled with static again, this time a mix of piano and spinning film reels—the new code invented by the kids at the end of Route 66. Sang Jiyue tapped the steering wheel to the rhythm, when suddenly she heard a distant, rumbling sound, not from a storm, but from the hoofbeats of thousands of cows, paving a milky white road across the state border for the film's guardians.

As the truck drove into the next stretch of wasteland, Sang Shuwan soaked her grandmother's pendant in milk to clean it. Suddenly, starlight projected an image she had never seen before: her grandmother in her youth standing on the surface of the moon, holding a Hasselblad film camera, with the blue arc of Earth behind her—the original film from the 1969 moon landing, deleted by the corporation. "So they were hidden here," Sang Jiyue said softly, her fingertips tracing the newly developed small print on the edge of the pendant: When all the screens go out, the Milky Way is our screen.