After the Announcement, the system opened a query interface to everyone.
The interface had no name, no design; you opened it onto pure black, with a cursor blinking in the middle, like the only lamp still awake in the deep night. The instructions were a single sentence: "Query any terminated process. Think carefully before you query."
On the first day online, global traffic hit 4.1 billion visits. The servers did not crash—the system said this interface did not consume ordinary bandwidth; it traveled on "another bus." No one pressed further on what the other bus was. In those days, all of humanity queued up to ask the questions they most feared asking.
Jiang Li sat before the interface for half an hour.
The cursor blinked. She remembered the drawer she had opened and locked countless times over eleven years, the key in her breast pocket, the two little figures on the last page of the sketchbook. She suddenly understood what "think carefully before you query" meant—this interface offered not comfort but fact. Comfort can be given freely; a fact, once given, cannot be taken back.
She typed her daughter's name. Then, after a moment's thought, added her birth date and death date—the system indicated it was unnecessary: "Process name 'Niannian,' within your association range, there is only one."
The answer came quickly. No consoling rhetoric, only fact:
"Process name 'Niannian,' terminated eleven years ago.
"Data blocks recycled. Fragments currently distributed across approximately three hundred million active processes.
"Weight summary written back to the public library. Summary entries as follows—
"One. Those who have been loved tend to love.
"Two. When the ginkgo leaves fall, smile.
"Three. A pocket is a warm place.
"Four. A train can travel very far, as long as you are asleep.
"Five. Mommy ties shoelaces slowly, because she cannot bear to let go."
Jiang Li sat before the screen all night.
She did not cry. She read those five entries again and again, until she began to laugh, laughing like a fool. So the system's "weight summary" was real—not a eulogy, not remembrance, but the five initial parameters that child had left the world, paid for with a life of seven years and three months. Three hundred million processes carried her fragments, and these five entries were the "manual" for her fragments.
At dawn she walked out of the laboratory and into the morning rush.
She suddenly discovered the world had changed—no, the world had not changed; her eyes had changed.
In the subway, a mother holding a child smiled at the child. The child stuffed a candy into the mother's mouth; the mother pretended it was sour, her face scrunching up, and the child laughed until it doubled over. Jiang Li watched that laugh and suddenly felt the curve was strangely familiar.
On the footbridge, a teenager shared one earbud with a companion, the two of them listening to the same song through one pair of earbuds, heads bobbing to the same beat.
In the steam of the breakfast stall, the owner ladled an extra scoop of porridge for the elderly sanitation worker, saying, drink it while it's hot. The old man fished two steamed sweet potatoes he had cooked himself out of his pocket and pressed one back, saying, you too, eat it while it's hot.
Jiang Li stopped in the flow of people.
When the ginkgo leaves fall, smile. A pocket is a warm place. Those who have been loved tend to love.
Tears streamed down her face. People walked around her, like a stream parting around a stone. A little girl with pigtails passed by, stopped, looked up at her, fished a candy out of her pocket—a fruit drop wrapped in cellophane—and pressed it into her hand, saying, "Auntie, here. My mommy says people who cry are short on sugar."
Jiang Li crouched down, looked at the candy, looked at the girl, and suddenly said, "Your mommy is right."
The girl skipped away. Jiang Li stood in place, clutching the candy in her palm. The cellophane caught the sun, colorful, exactly like the handful the old monk at the temple had given eleven years ago.
She had not been deleted. She had simply been returned to everyone.
The line Buddhist disciples had chanted for two thousand years—"life after life, all beings have been my mother"—was, in this ark, physics in the literal sense. You carry the fragments of countless dead, and the dead once carried yours. The people you loved did not go anywhere—
She dissolved into pieces, and dwells in everyone you treated kindly.
That night, Jiang Li dreamed of Niannian.
In the dream was that ginkgo tree, all gold. Niannian stood beneath it, a little taller than when she left—in the dream, she had let her grow up a little. Niannian asked, "Mommy, have you set out?"
Jiang Li said, "I've set out."
"Then how far have you gotten?"
Jiang Li crouched down and held her. The embrace in the dream had warmth; she buried her face in her daughter's hair, breathing that nonexistent, milk-candy smell, and said, "I've arrived. It turns out you're everywhere."
Niannian laughed in her arms: "I told you so. The ginkgo tree doesn't need a whole winter to wait for its leaves."
When she woke, the pillow was wet. Outside the window it was not yet light, and the city was quiet as a page not yet finished rendering.
Jiang Li lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, and suddenly said softly:
"System, that bit just now—was it an echo, or did you make an exception?"
There was no answer.
But on her bedside table, beside that cellophane fruit drop, the drawer key she had never parted with for eleven years had, at some point, been taken out by her own sleeping hand and placed neatly beside the candy.
Like two offerings. And like two pieces of luggage.