The Kaiyuan Era

This world counts its years by "Kaiyuan." Tax notices, flight permits, Spectra archives, observation reports—anything meant to be stored is headed with a Kaiyuan year, month and day. A clean, official timeline, and one that looks very safe.

There are rules for how it's written. Municipal and Spectra documents are always marked to the second, in the form "Kaiyuan Year 925, 11 March, 02:14:08," one space between year, month and day, colons between hours, minutes and seconds. The Dawn Continent Observation Bureau's investigation reports are stricter still: instrument readings must carry the sampling moment alongside them, and a discrepancy of 1 second sends the whole report back to be copied out again. People making a living in the city pay none of this any attention; they count days only to the month, and a maglev monthly pass is printed with only the year and month. The guardians at Jiangbao on the southern coast of the Badlands run on something else again—their journals don't record years, they record "generation number, year of tenure," counted down one generation to the next, and the count now stands at the thirteenth generation, 32 years in.

The serial's present day is Kaiyuan Year 1010. At 03:07 before dawn on 1 January of that year, an error message came up on a screen at the Information Research Substation No. 10 in Saint Tranya. The signature field held a string that had only been set down privately 8 months earlier and never published anywhere, while the timestamp was stamped Kaiyuan Year 925, 11 March—85 years before. That was how it came up inside a power-grid verification that was supposed to be foolproof.

The word "Kaiyuan" counts peace—the year the three races finished their war and signed the Peace Treaty is Kaiyuan Year 1. Anything before the treaty is archived under the Pre-Era. Open it up and mostly what remains is a few broken lines of song, with years that don't even line up. The stretch where the three races slaughtered each other on the frozen ground for 500 years has no complete chronology anywhere in the libraries of Saint Dora, the Badlands or the Dawn Continent. As for why the count restarted from that year, and what count was in use before, the body of the treaty doesn't say, and no copyist has ever filled it in.

The Kaiyuan count remembers only what it was permitted to remember. The days that were deleted out of the world it cannot mark down, not one of them.