From American Internet Celebrity to God Among Men

”That was what her mother used to say to wake her up when she was a child. It roughly means, ’If you’re awake, get up; the sun is waiting for you.’”

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Team K’s anonymous journal folder had its first ”reader” at the end of the fifth year.

It wasn’t a person from the future one hundred and twenty-five years later. It was someone from the present.

A Young Analyst who had just joined the project team two years ago accidentally discovered the existence of this folder while working overtime. She asked a senior, who said, ”Oh, that? It’s voluntary, not mandatory, and nobody really reads it.”

”Can I read it?” she asked.

The senior thought for a moment. ”Theoretically... it’s for the people of 2150. But since it can be opened now, I suppose no one’s stopping you.”

She spent three nights reading through those three anonymous journal entries.

The first entry: 3:17 AM, raining, the coffee’s cold.

The second entry: It’s raining again today. Cold coffee really doesn’t taste good.

The third entry: I think I’m starting to understand, but it took five years.

On the night she finished the third entry, it was also raining outside. She sat at her computer, hesitated for a long time, and then created a new document.

She wrote the fourth journal entry.

”I don’t know if I should write here. This folder is for the people of 2150, but I want to write now.”

”I’ve finished reading the first three entries. The author of the first one should be retired by now. The author of the second might still be on the project, or maybe they’ve left. The author of the third said, ’it took five years.’ I don’t know who he is, but I want to tell him: I understood in just two years. Not because I’m smarter than him, but because I read the words he wrote. He saved me three years.”

”If someone in 2150 reads this entry, I want to tell you: I don’t know any of the people who wrote the first three. But on this rainy night, I feel like we are sitting in the same room. The coffee they brewed went cold, and mine has gone cold too.”

”Does this count as the ’Common Frequency’ you talk about?”

She didn’t sign her name. But she saved the document into that folder.

The next day, she sent an email to the project lead with only one sentence:

”More people should know about that anonymous journal folder.”

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Alex Su opened the Listening Map during a bout of insomnia in the early morning hours.

He clicked on the points of light one by one, from the very first to the most recently added. He heard the Korean-American Grandmother’s ”I heard it for the first time and cried” and ”I can’t hear very clearly now, but I still remember.” He heard the ice cream truck from the fourth-grade boy two years ago. He heard the sound of an oil pan that a mother had hesitated for a long time before uploading. He heard the recording from the younger sister: ”My brother isn’t recording anymore, so I’m going to record until high school.” He heard that White Gentleman—who, after receiving the call from the grandmother—had also uploaded a recording. It was a poem he recited himself, saying his mother used to read it to coax him to sleep, and he had just remembered it word by word from over seventy years of memory.

He heard Taylor.

It was something Taylor had secretly uploaded a few days ago without telling anyone. A very short a cappella vocal without any explanation. Only the title: ”Recounting Practice, Seventh Time.”

Alex Su recognized it. It was the system-generated ”dream”—the segment fused from his keyboard sounds, the grandmother’s sentence, Taylor’s own breathing, and that stranger girl’s door lock. Taylor had recounted it with her own voice.

He finished listening. Then he put on his headphones and listened to it again.

Outside the window, the city at four in the morning was very quiet. From the distance, a siren occasionally drifted in, indistinguishable whether it was a fire truck or an ambulance—long-short-long-short, long-short-long-short.

He suddenly remembered the fourth journal entry written by the Young Analyst: ”On this rainy night, I feel like we are sitting in the same room.”

He had that same feeling now.

Taylor was asleep in the bedroom. The Korean-American Grandmother was asleep in her own room. The woman who had written in her notebook for forty years, and the woman who had just learned to recount the system’s voice, and the man listening to the map at four in the morning, and the people who had ordered coffee but forgotten to drink it—

They were all sitting in the same room.

Sound connected them all.