Episode 007| The Dawn a Century Ago

Kaiyuan Year 1010 · Jan 1 · 04:38 · CV-1A · Saint Dora north-perimeter airspace

CV-1A had been flying 38 minutes.

Lika sat staring blankly at the record below his left eye.

[4] Kaiyuan Year 932 · 11 · 25 · 23:58:11
 · Frozen Northern Reach S-17-R
 · Observer resync
 · Executor: L.K.S._Core
 · Sync target: unlogged

Kaiyuan Year 932 — 78 years ago.

He summed it up vaguely in his head with the notion of "a century ago" — after living more than a thousand years, 70 years and 100 years were much the same to him, scattered fragments that occasionally surfaced out of the same blur of fog.

The him of 78 years ago was called Allen Trist.

---

That was one of the aliases he'd used. He changed aliases roughly once every 40 to 60 years — he had no choice; live too long and someone you know is bound to notice "how are you still this young." So every half-generation he wiped the old identity file and applied for a fresh passport, fresh job, fresh birthplace, fresh accent, building an ordinary man from scratch.

The identity Allen Trist had lasted 31 years.

The year it began — around Kaiyuan Year 901 — he'd passed the investigator's license at the Dawn Continent Observation Bureau. The Dawn Continent Observation Bureau was a cross-racial research institution founded after the Saint Dora government signed accords with the elven peoples of the Dawn; its headquarters sat in a small coastal town at Saint Dora's southern end, nearest the Ice-Shadow Trench. Bureau staff were among the few who held a legal cross-boundary transit permit — they could travel that "special channel" back and forth between Saint Dora and the Dawn, six times a year, opened on schedule.

In Kaiyuan Year 932, Allen Trist was seconded to the "Deep-Cold Zone."

---

He gently rubbed the space between his brows from the pilot's seat.

The Deep-Cold Zone.

That wasn't the Frozen Reach. The Frozen Reach was treaty-forbidden ground; no one could go — but the "edge" of the Frozen Reach — Saint Dora's southern tip plus the southern rim of the Ice-Shadow Trench plus that strip at the northernmost end of the Dawn Continent — was allowed. The Bureau called that region the "Deep-Cold Zone," meaning an observation area with an extreme-cold climate that was still within the bounds the treaty permitted.

Allen Trist spent seven months in the Deep-Cold Zone that year.

What he'd been sent to investigate was "Source-Stone aberration" — certain harvested Source Stones would spontaneously shift their spectra on the way back to Saint Dora, becoming unable to supply energy stably, finally turning black and crumbling. The Bureau suspected some kind of "sub-ice fluctuation" spilling out from the Frozen Reach was affecting the quantum stable state of the Source Stones.

He'd written a report. Short, 30 pages. The conclusion was "no clear physical mechanism found, but the aberration zone is inversely proportional in distance to a certain coordinate."

That coordinate —

Lika stopped rubbing his brows.

That coordinate was S-17-R.

---

Seventy-eight years ago he hadn't known S-17-R would later be named by Spectra a "no-data zone." Back then he'd merely written the coordinate into the report, labeled it "presumed aberration source point," handed the report in, and the matter ended. The Bureau took the report; no one followed up, no one re-checked. That same day he left the Bureau, changed to another alias, and went to do something else.

He didn't remember whether he'd found the coordinate strange in the moment of writing the report. He didn't remember whether the Bureau superior had questioned him when he handed it in. He didn't even remember whether he had personally gone to that coordinate at all — or only marked the position remotely with instruments.

But the record before his eyes now read:

Kaiyuan Year 932 · 11 · 25 · 23:58:11 · Frozen Northern Reach S-17-R · Observer resync · Executor: L.K.S._Core

November 25.

The day that year he handed in the report.

---

"That's not right," he said softly.

In the cockpit at 3,000 meters he looked at the record below his left eye, and his heartbeat began to run a little irregular.

The same day 78 years ago he handed in that report — the same coordinate — a thing called L.K.S._Core had done an "Observer resync."

L.K.S._Core hadn't been fixed by anyone back then. He'd only fixed this string at QuarktoLabs eight months ago. Eighty years ago at the Bureau he couldn't possibly have used this signature.

And yet this record was there.

And what's more —

The record's "sync target: unlogged."

---

Lika thought a moment.

That day 78 years ago — Allen Trist's last day of work — where was he?

He couldn't remember.

He remembered plenty of fragments. The report was handed in at 10:00 in the morning. The night before he quit he'd gone to a little bar near the Bureau to say goodbye to a colleague named Sheila; Sheila fell asleep on the table after three drinks and he'd walked her back to the dormitory himself. His last day on the job he'd sat at his desk maybe four hours sorting old folders, burning everything he couldn't take. But at the moment of 23:58, where was he —

Fog.

---

His memory held maybe a hundred of these "fog points." Each was a stretch of time he knew he'd been doing something in, yet of which he could recall no detail at all. He'd always put them down to "living too long" — a memory of more than a thousand years couldn't possibly stay clear at every minute. That was normal.

But tonight's fog point was a little different.

The fog point sat exactly on the timestamp of L.K.S._Core's fourth record.

He opened a new command.

> cross_reference --memory_gap "Allen Trist 932/11/25 23:58" --L.K.S._Core records
> --display matches

The system paused.

[match found: 1]
[record: Kaiyuan Year 932 · 11 · 25 · 23:58:11 · L.K.S._Core]

---

The timestamps aligned.

But this record could prove only one thing: at the moment of his fog point, there was an L.K.S._Core record at Frozen Northern Reach S-17-R. It couldn't prove who that was. It couldn't prove it was him.

It could prove only this: at that moment, someone had been there — using a signature that "he himself" wouldn't think up until eight months in the future.

And that moment fell exactly on a fog point inside Allen Trist's head.

---

CV-1A swayed faintly. Crossing an air current.

"Who the hell are you?" Lika asked softly.

The one he asked wasn't CV-1A. It was that "person" who used his name, who across the countless fog points of the past thousand-some years had quietly done things in every corner of the world and left 4,891 records.

That "person" didn't answer.

That "person" might be sitting right now inside some fog point in his own head, waiting for him to fly over to S-17-R and see the answer.

---

【Ch. 007 End · CV-1A Saint Dora north-perimeter airspace】