Tales of the End of the Century

After leaving the backup camp, Bai Ye sat on the pile of rubble at the tunnel exit for a long time. Tie Niu squatted beside him, slowly carving a new scratch on the stone slab with the tip of his dagger, alongside the previous ones. Old Wei's mining area, the cooling tower in the old industrial area, the overseas transfer station, the old outpost, the backup camp—each scratch represented a door that had been pushed open. Now all these doors were open, but when Lan Susu was sorting out the supply list at the backup camp, she discovered another set of coordinates. It wasn't on any of the Aurora Project's transfer lists, nor was it within the delivery range of the White Dove supply orders. It was a few lines of half-faded pencil writing on the edge of Sergei's left-behind drawings, pointing to an abandoned old geological observation station nestled in the southwestern folds of the mountains.

"Sergei wrote this." Lan Susu pulled the drawing from the waterproof bag and laid it on her lap. The edges of the drawing had been soaked and dried, and the pencil marks were so faded they were almost illegible, but the last few words were still legible. One line contained the initial number of the observatory, and another line was annotated with the initials of several names that White Night had never seen on the list of subjects. Pointing to those lines, she said that Sergei had not marked the subjects, but the personnel left behind at the observatory. When Project Aurora was disbanded, this group of people were simply forgotten outside the organization, and there had been no contact records since. Their signals never appeared within White Dove's monitoring range, but Sergei had repeatedly traced their names on the edge of the drawing. He wasn't recording; he was marking—leaving a coordinate he didn't have time to personally verify.

Tie Niu sheathed his dagger and squatted down in front of the stone slab, examining the scratches. The observation station was hidden at the end of an ancient, long-dried-up riverbed, surrounded by fault cliffs and landslide debris. The only way to approach was a section of abandoned old water pipeline. He had seen the pipeline's number when he was deep in the mining area comparing old blueprints for Project Aurora; it used the same batch of engineering blueprints as the riveted steel gate of the backup camp. He said that this section of pipeline had collapsed once during the later stages of mining, but the collapsed section was short and the entrance could be cleared with crowbars and explosives.

Bai Ye stood up and placed the enamel mug on the stone slab. The chalk writing on the bottom of the mug had been washed away by the rain, but the strokes were still discernible. He reached into his pocket and touched the small round mirror; the outline of a bird on the tin back pressed against his fingertips. The man who had sat with his back to the door for many years at the backup camp didn't turn around as Bai Ye placed the pebbles one by one on the low table, but he heard a knock—the last three knocks, a long pause, then three more. The door was reserved for the faint frequencies scattered further away, each one corresponding to someone whose name he didn't yet know.

"How many people are there at the end of that pipe?" Tie Niu looked up.

"Sergei's drawings indicate at least two or more. The standard personnel configuration for the observation station is one technician, one observer, and possibly another field worker who strayed into this fold from the direction of the old industrial area. Their signal characteristics are different from the subjects—they weren't pushed out; no one has ever noticed them before." Lan Susu opened her notebook and pulled up several extremely weak anomalies captured by the oscilloscope in recent days. Yesterday morning, she captured another set of intermittent pulses, the azimuth of which overlapped with the observation station marked by Sergei. The frequency characteristics didn't resemble those of a single subject in the gap phase; it was more like two or more people taking turns guarding the same light.

Bai Ye slung his backpack back on, bent down, picked up a pebble from beside his feet, and put it in his pocket. It was left for them by the man who had turned his back to the door at the low table in the backup camp—the man couldn't speak, but he could still tap on the wall. He tapped the table seven times with his fingers, paused for a long time, then tapped again, his knuckles moving away from the direction of Old Wei's shelter, slightly tilting it half an inch to the southwest. The pebble, dipped in the remaining chalk dust at the bottom of the container, was held up to Bai Ye's eyes, examined for a long time in the light filtering in from the tunnel entrance. There was a newly drawn, shallow mark on the side of the pebble, the very direction the man with his back to the door had carved with his fingernail—pointing directly to the southwest of the mountains.

"He's giving us directions." He put the pebbles in his pocket and turned to walk towards the water pipeline. Tie Niu followed behind with his axe, while Lan Susu put her oscilloscope into her backpack. Three headlamps lit up one after another at the end of the old tunnel, their beams cutting into the long-accumulated pile of collapsed rubble at the pipeline entrance.

The water pipe was narrower than they had anticipated, so narrow that only one person could walk through it while bending over. Tie Niu led the way, using a crowbar to move loose gravel to both sides, while Bai Ye followed behind, his headlamp beam sweeping across the rusted pipe walls, revealing layers of peeling rust. Every so often, a tiny arrow was drawn on the pipe wall in chalk—not the kind of chalk Bai Ge used at the supply and marketing cooperative, but a thicker, rougher industrial crayon. These arrows had been drawn for over a decade, repeatedly wet and dried by the condensation in the pipe, their edges now blurred into a hazy white blotch.

"Sergei drew it. It's not a white dove." Bai Ye stopped and touched one of the arrows. The arrow pointed deep to the southwest. When Sergei marked the coordinates of the observatory, he never told anyone that he had walked through this pipeline.

They encountered a collapse midway through the pipeline. Falling rocks had dented a section of the pipe wall, the rubble almost pressing against the top, leaving only a very narrow gap at the bottom. Tie Niu used a crowbar to pry away several large rocks, minimizing the amount of explosives, and cleared a passage at the bottom of the collapsed section large enough for one person to crawl through. After crawling through, he crouched down on the other side and shone his headlamp into the gap between the rubble. He discovered that someone had painted a line of Russian text in white paint on the inner wall of that section of the pipeline, the handwriting exactly the same as the red ink writing Sergei had left on the back of the test subject list. Lan Susu followed him through, her headlamp shining on the white paint, studying it for a long time before looking at Bai Ye. It was the annotation from Phase Two that Sergei had repeatedly erased, but this time he hadn't erased it—he had drawn a complete arrow at the end of the pipeline, adding a sentence next to it in smaller print. Lan Susu diffused her headlamp and translated the sentence for him: "The door has been open for a long time. I just forgot to draw the arrow."

Bai Ye stood by the rubble pile from the landslide for a while. Then he bent down and continued walking along the pipe. At the end of the pipe was a rusted iron fence, slightly ajar, just wide enough for a person to squeeze through sideways. He squeezed through the fence and straightened up, the beam of his headlamp sweeping across—before him was a small observation station foyer. On the wall hung a temperature and humidity recorder that had long since ceased functioning. On the table sat an enamel mug with chalk writing on the bottom, blurred into a white blob. In the corner of the foyer were several wooden crates, filled with expired compressed biscuits and half a crate of unused industrial crayons. There were footprints on the ground, very fresh, not theirs.

He crouched down and measured the size of the footprints with his hand. Several sets of alternating deep and shallow imprints continued all the way to the half-open fire door on the other side of the foyer. Those whose toes were pressed harder than their heels hadn't left the observation station for long. Bai Ye stood up, picked up a half-used industrial crayon from the ground, and drew an arrow on the wall next to the fire door—not a precise engineering arrow like Sergei's, but exactly the same as the kind of thing Bai Ge had drawn on the cooling tower's exterior wall for years, neither a road sign nor a mark. The arrow pointed to Elm Gully. Someone had been waiting here for too long. Now there was no need to wait. He placed the crayon next to the enamel mug on the table and squeezed sideways through the crack in the door. Behind the door was an extremely narrow corridor, with a faint sliver of light shining through at the end, the same rhythm as Old Wei's knocking on the low table at the reserve camp: three knocks, a long pause, then three more knocks.