The First Rift

At 03:17 in the small hours a gash opened in the sky over Taipei and was gone a few minutes later. Almost everyone was asleep; the few who were awake couldn't say clearly, the next day, what it was they had seen.

The line ran lower than the cloud layer, straighter than lightning, and was shaped like neither. It was on the sky itself, beginning at some altitude north of Taipei 101 and drawing a straight line south. Its length couldn't be judged. Its width was about the visual span of 2 knuckles held together. On both sides of the line was the orange-tinged grey-black of Taipei at 03:00; the colour of the line itself had no name to give it.

What the scene left behind was 3 frames in burst, one stretch of video, 3 more shot afterwards, plus one time-sync photo of the street corner on Songshou Road taken at 03:09 — 8 files in all. In the video the rift is gone at 1 minute 07 seconds; pulled back frame by frame at 60 frames a second, it is there on the sixty-seventh frame and already gone on the sixty-eighth, with nothing in between. Blown up to the pixel boundary, the compression layer is clean and the image doesn't break.

The cloud layer in the photographs was flatter than he remembered the scene being — flat in a way that wasn't natural. Using the metal glare off the spire of Taipei 101 as a fixed reference, laying the 03:09 frame over the 03:17 frame, 8 minutes apart, the clouds had not shifted. Stranger still, after a night had passed the "too flat" in that photograph had weakened by itself, while the file's modification time hadn't moved. Opened again at midday, it had gone a little more normal again.

The nearest living witness was in the convenience store 70 metres away. Around 03:19 the clerk set down the box he was restocking, and asked whether there had been anything outside the window a moment ago, his eyes drifted up and back first for about 2 seconds — that bearing being exactly where the rift had been — before he turned back and said, "Nope." The gaze was clean, no muscle tension, the rhythm of the reply the same as when he had been talking about the restocking. His eyes knew where to look. That stretch of memory wasn't in his head.

After daybreak the thing took up 180 characters on the local-news page, comments closed, no photograph attached. The witness in Banqiao who had nearly gone off his bike took the call and only said, "I didn't see anything," and then deleted his post.

That was the first overwrite trace to be recorded, and all of it starts here. From that day on, 03:17 in the small hours began coming back again and again.