On 22 January 2026, in Level 4, a post asked for three things in one line: your city, your local time, and one emoji. The caption said only that players were distributed. 2,890 people answered.

This is the one post in the record where the audience described itself directly, so this paper is a census rather than an experiment. It reads the 2,890 lines for where people were, what time it was for them, and what they reached for when asked for a single symbol.

Where is the territory, and what time is it there? The feed shows the operation one number, a view count, with no geography attached. This post asked the geography to declare itself.

• Instruction: Comment: City : Local Time : One Emoji.
• Where: one Instagram reel, 22 January 2026. 2,890 top-level comments in the archive.
• Parsing the time: a clock pattern (hour and minutes, with or without am or pm, or a bare hour with am or pm) was read from each line and converted to a 24-hour clock. 2,769 lines, 96 percent, yielded a readable local time.
• Parsing the city: the text before the time, with punctuation stripped. 2,658 lines yielded a city. Cities were matched to countries with a hand-written list of about four hundred city and country names; 1,210 matched, 45 percent of the cities read, and the unmatched remainder is mostly smaller cities we did not list. Country shares are reported over matched lines and should be read as a floor on the spread, not a census.
• The emoji: the last emoji in the line, present in 2,219 lines.

The time distribution is the useful number for anyone running a feed. Because the audience is spread around the clock, every post lands in somebody's morning and somebody's midnight at once. The morning band is the biggest, which fits a post that went out in the Australian afternoon and reached South Asia and Europe in their forenoon, but no band is empty and the night band is 16 percent. There is no hour at which the territory is asleep.

The emoji column was meant as a flourish and came back as data. Given a free symbol, most people did not describe themselves; they described the weather and the light. In the northern hemisphere in January, that meant cold and dark. The single most used symbol in a global check-in was the night sky.

India first, by a wide margin, then a band of European countries, then the Americas and Australia. That is the shape of an English-language feed reached through Instagram's recommendation system rather than through a following, and the shape the later rounds were run on.

• The country list is a floor. Fewer than half of the cities read matched the list. Smaller cities and non-Latin spellings are under-counted, and India in particular is likely larger than 26 percent, since many Indian cities were written in forms the list did not catch.
• Self-reported, unverified. City and time are what people typed. Jokes and fictional places are in the data; Zielona Góra with its translation in brackets is real, others may not be.
• Who answered. People who comment on a check-in post are not the whole audience. The distribution is of those who chose to declare, at that hour, on that day.
• One post, one January. The weather in the emoji column is the weather of that week.

The same three-part line in July. If the emoji column flips from night and cold to sun and heat, the column is a thermometer and the check-in can be run as one twice a year.

The transmission this paper reads is one post. Its numbers on the platform, and what the comment archive holds of it, are below.

Level 4 is filed in the Chronicle as THE BASEMENT LOBBY, ⟡025, and THE PUBLIC LOBBY, ⟡026. The check-in itself has no entry of its own.

The instruction as it went out: the reel frame beside the caption, captured from the operation's own signed-in account. What the paper counts is the answer to exactly this.

Native captures of the comments this paper leans on, taken from the operation's own signed-in account on 31 Aug 2026. Handles and like counts are as they stood that day; the numbers in the paper are the round-time count.