Chapter Five: Seventy-Two Blind Spots

The Linlan television tower had been silent for nine years, but it still received timing signals from every municipal camera. Xu opened a side door with an old maintenance credential. Server fans whispered in the dark. When Lin entered, his timer took five seconds to fall from 17:42:09 to 17:42:08. The tower was not watching him. Its control room stored public diagnostic streams: dropped-frame rates, clock drift, encoder states, no images. Xu overlaid the seventy-two coordinates. Ordinary faults occurred independently. These sites lost seven frames in the same second every day. “Not seven seconds,” she said. “Seven versions of one second.”