After work he doesn't go to his own place. Line 4 to Line 2, forty minutes, to the district where Liang Chuan lives.
He doesn't idle on the train. The order's attachments include the electronic contract, twenty-six pages. He pulls it up and reads from the top.
Page one carries the palliative ward's letterhead. The hospice, fifth floor, the consultation area at the end of the corridor. He remembers it. Plastic chairs in a row, a wall-mounted TV running a finance program on mute, the sales specialist's badge on a blue lanyard. Sign today and get three months of free storage—the pen was already in his hand as the saleswoman said it.
Payment method is page nine. Linked account: Zhou Sufen, ending 2217. He stares at those four digits for two seconds. His mother's pension passbook. The replacement one, issued after the textile factory went under.
Page seventeen is breach and disposal. The clauses print dense, two font sizes smaller than the body. He skims: thirty days past due enters grace period; ninety days past grace without settlement triggers tiered downgrade; downgrade sequence and scope at the system's evaluation; two hundred seventeen consecutive days in arrears and the account moves to the terminal disposition queue. Two hundred seventeen is printed into the contract, not calculated. Who decided it was one hundred seventeen plus one hundred, the contract doesn't say.
Payment failure notification contact: Liang Cheng.
He closes the contract and opens his own messages. The notification category is collapsed—a year and more since he last opened it. He scrolls back, past verification codes, past delivery notices, past membership expirations, back to October of last year.
The first one has a blue header and a cloud for an icon.
[Afterlife Cloud] Dear bereaved family member: this month's deduction from your relative's account failed. Basic tier monthly fee: 45.00 yuan. The linked account's balance is insufficient. Please top up within 30 days; service continues without interruption during the grace period. May love endure.
He scrolls down. The second, November.
[Afterlife Cloud] Your free grace period has 15 days remaining. Past due, the account will enter the downgrade process. Downgrade does not interrupt basic service.
The third, December.
[Afterlife Cloud] Your account has been downgraded to Level 2. Optimized: sensory memory library. You may settle and restore at any time. Restoration proceeds from the current archive.
The fourth, January. The fifth, February. The sixth, March. Each one shorter than the last. The last is April, gray icon, four lines:
[Afterlife Cloud] The account has entered the terminal disposition process, queue number TL-0417. Settle in full to exit the queue. After the broadcast period, overwrite will be executed. Irreversible. Press 1 for customer service.
Seven messages. Seven months. Every one of them had reached him. Every one lay in the collapsed folder, unread red dots stacked on red dots.
The train announces a transfer. He puts the phone back in his pocket and marks none of them read.
Outside the station is one of the new districts. Navigation walks him to the foot of a thirty-two-story tower. A row of shared bikes is parked below, rainwater pooled in the baskets. The elevator needs a card key. He calls Liang Chuan.
"Ge? There's frying sounds in the background. You're downstairs?"
"Come down and let me in."
"Just come on up, I'm frying fish."
"I'll wait."
Half a second of quiet up there. "Fine."
Liang Cheng stands below for eleven minutes. He counts. In a thirty-two-story building, fewer than half the ground-floor windows are lit. He half remembers this development—the year before last Liang Chuan dropped a listing link into the family group chat and asked what he thought. He replied "floor plan's decent." Later Liang Chuan really bought it, twenty percent down. The monthly payment he never asked about; he only knows that on the day the number came out, Liang Chuan posted a red envelope in the group captioned "a mortgage slave from here on," one yuan, eight people grabbed it.
Liang Chuan comes down in slippers, keys in hand, no jacket. Twenty-nine years old, and two white hairs at his temple already.
"Let's talk upstairs," Liang Chuan says. "Mosquitoes down here."
"Down here is fine." Liang Cheng says. "Ma's account. 217 days. Yesterday it entered the terminal queue. I'm the executor. Did you ever pay?"
Liang Chuan freezes for a beat. The freeze isn't performed—Liang Cheng can tell. Seven years of collections. The difference between a manufactured stall and a real one, he knows better than a polygraph.
"What account?"
"Ma's afterlife account. Basic tier, forty-five a month." Liang Cheng says. "It draws on Ma's pension passbook, ending 2217. The passbook's been empty seven months."
"Aren't you the one managing it?" Liang Chuan says. "You signed the contract."
"I signed the contract. And the money?"
"The money—" Liang Chuan works the keys in his fist. "Ge, what did Ma say back then? You said the account would sit under your name and I'd cover the money. Those first years I sent it every single year! Eight thousand a year, into Ma's card! Then my mortgage came through and I told you let it slide a while, and you said fine, you said you had a staff discount!"
"Did I say that?"
"You said it! Qingming or whenever it was—right outside Ma's old courtyard!" Liang Chuan's voice lifts, and a window slamming upstairs presses it back down. "You don't remember?"
Liang Cheng doesn't remember. He remembers talking about burning paper offerings at the old courtyard gate that day. About property fees. The money, genuinely not.
"How many years did you pay?" he asks.
"Three. Or four." Liang Chuan frowns. "It was cash. I deposited it into the passbook. Ge, you never checked the card either?"
"It's tied to auto-deduction." Liang Cheng says. "I assumed it was coming out."
"I assumed you were making it come out."
Liang Chuan laughs once, without beginning or end. Traffic noise washes over from the intersection, and he waits for it to pass before he speaks, level again: "Ge, one more. These five years—did you ever once call Ma?"
Liang Cheng doesn't answer. He looks down. The wind has knocked over one of the shared bikes. Its bell rings once against the pavement. Nobody rights it.
Liang Chuan nods, the way a man does on receiving an answer, and drops it. "Come on up," he says. "I kept the contract."
Liang Chuan's apartment is on the twenty-sixth floor, two bedrooms. On the entryway shoe rack, two pairs of slippers, both facing out. No main lights in the living room. On the coffee table a laptop, screen still lit—a game lobby. On the balcony an exercise bike, a towel over the handlebars, dust on the seat.
Liang Chuan drags a document wallet out of the study. Blue, corners worn white. Property deed, car invoice, social insurance statements—and at the bottom, a clear plastic sleeve. Inside, the stack of paper.
Liang Cheng doesn't reach for it right away. First he sees the glass top of the coffee table. Under it, a few photographs and an expired bus pass, and at the edge a small laminated card he can make out through the glass—his own high-school exam admission ticket, buzz cut, face dead asleep. When their mother's things were sorted, his brother kept one small box, said "Ge's stuff. I'll return it sooner or later." He never came for that box.
"I keep everything." Liang Chuan says. "What's left of Ma is right here."
The paper spreads across the coffee table. Liang Cheng goes page by page.
The consent form. Patient: Zhou Sufen, fifth floor, Palliative Ward 3. Under method of data collection, the box checked is "whole-brain scan at clinical pre-mortem stage." Guardian's signature: Liang Chuan. Dated March 11.
Liang Cheng's hand stops. "This page is your signature."
"I signed it the day they took Ma up to the fifth floor." Liang Chuan says. "The doctor said it was days away, asked whether we wanted the upload done, insurance would cover part of it. I said do it. The parts I couldn't decide on my own—those are what I came to you for."
The second document is the service contract. Party A: Afterlife Cloud. Party B: Liang Cheng. The tier confirmation slip is stapled to the last page, three tiers printed in a row: Platinum 399, Standard 129, Basic 45. In the Basic cell there's a checkmark in pencil, small, upper right corner of the box. Confirmed by: Liang Cheng.
Under the signature, one line of fine print: this tier includes three months of free storage; when the quota is exhausted the account converts to paid automatically; to change tiers, act within the free period.
"Whose pencil did that check?" Liang Chuan leans over to look.
"My pencil." Liang Cheng says.
He can reconstruct that day. The corridor, the chairs in a row, the sales specialist handing over the tablet: family only needs to sign, the tier can be upgraded anytime. He signed. The tier selection popped up, and in his pocket was one pencil—the one he'd noted his parking spot with. He checked the leftmost box, because the saleswoman said get it running first. Then he went to the pay machine and settled his parking. Five yuan an hour. He paid seventeen.
He checked the Basic box without hesitating. Hesitating takes time, and that day he had none.
"Three months free." Liang Chuan reads the fine print out loud. "And when it runs out?"
"It converts to paid automatically and draws on Ma's passbook." Liang Cheng says. "The passbook ran dry. That's now."
"Then those first three months were on the house, and my first thirty-six hundred was still sitting in the passbook." Liang Chuan laughs, ugly. "So the free months were free, and my money only started going from month four. Ge, work it out. How many months does thirty-six hundred buy?"
Liang Cheng doesn't need to work it out. Basic tier, 45 a month, 540 a year. "Six years."
"Then how was it empty in five?"
"Late fees. Downgrade fees. Queue occupancy." Liang Cheng says. "Principal is 315. The rest of the forty-one thousand is all fees."
Liang Chuan goes quiet. He sits on the arm of the sofa and stares at the tier confirmation slip for a long time. The laptop screen dims; the game lobby's background music plays on, loops three times, and he shuts it.
"All those things I post," he says suddenly. "You think it's for show."
He unlocks his phone and turns the screen to Liang Cheng. Screenshots. A chat window with Ma, green bubbles. "Happy Mother's Day." "Ma wants to celebrate too." His caption: Ma's still Ma. Location tag: Home.
Liang Cheng's professional reflex fires before the brother can. His eyes go to the bottom right of the screenshot. The call-duration field.
0'21".
Second screenshot. 0'14".
Third. 0'12". This one captioned: Ma's memory's getting better and better. She even remembers my grade-school deskmate.
"Once a year." Liang Chuan takes the phone back. "Once at Qingming, once on her birthday. Some years I miss Qingming and make it up on the birthday. Ge, it's not that I don't want to call. I get through and I don't know what to say. She picks up and asks if I've eaten, I say I've eaten, and then it's done. Twelve seconds is enough. One second more and I'd have to start lying."
"Five years. How many calls total?"
"...Three, I think." Liang Chuan says. "Under a minute all together."
Liang Cheng doesn't take that up. He waits for Liang Chuan to finish, and what he gets instead is Liang Chuan pulling the phone out again, fast, like a man racing some feeling to the evidence.
"Look, Ge." He scrolls the transfer history, finger moving quick. "It's not that I paid nothing."
The screen rolls. Transfers to the account ending 2217. Four in all: 3,600, 4,200, 4,800, 12,900. The last, largest, stops two years ago in December. Liang Chuan's finger stops there. He doesn't scroll further.
"Money got tight after that. I said let it slide two months." He turns the phone face down on his knee. "I figured the passbook had to still have something, enough to keep it going. And after that... I just assumed it was going. Everyone does it, Ge. When the alert never comes, you act like nothing happened."
Liang Cheng runs the numbers in his head. Thirty-six hundred, plus forty-two hundred, plus forty-eight hundred, plus twelve thousand nine hundred. Twenty-five thousand five hundred. Basic tier, 540 a year. Left alone, that money buys forty-seven years. But it doesn't get left alone. The moment the free period ends, the principal gets drawn first; when the principal runs out, the late fees start; late fees roll into downgrade fees; downgrade fees roll into queue occupancy. Money down a funnel, the mouth narrower and narrower. Four hundred ten thousand? No. Forty-one thousand three hundred eighty-six yuan and fifty fen. Seven years running this arithmetic, and the first time it lands on his own family.
"Three months free," he says. "Your first thirty-six hundred didn't go in until the eighth month."
"What's that mean?"
"It means there were five months where nobody paid anything, and Ma's account sat free." Liang Cheng says. "Those three months were a gift."
Liang Chuan hears it, or doesn't. He takes the stack of paper back from Liang Cheng, flips to the tier confirmation slip, and stares at the pencil check a long time.
"Who talked you into the cheapest one, back then?" he asks.
"Nobody talked me into it." Liang Cheng says. "I checked it myself."
He restacks the paper exactly as it was and slides it back into the plastic sleeve. At the consent form his hands stop again.
Bottom right of the page, outside the print area, one line in even smaller type, machine-stamped: data sealed March 14, 10:31.
The phone in his pocket buzzes. The bank—the monthly student-loan deduction reminder, identical to last week's. He doesn't look. He's thinking, all at once, of another bank message. Five years old. He never deleted it. An ETC toll deduction notice off the expressway, and in his memory its date is the same day as the date on this coffee table. The time field reads: 10:47.
Expressway exit to the fifth floor, Palliative Ward 3: he's looked it up on the map since. Nineteen kilometers.
"Ge." Liang Chuan sits down across from him, both hands braced on his knees. The fish pan is still on the stove, the oil gone cold. "I want to ask you something. Don't call me dramatic."
"Ask."
"When Ma went," Liang Chuan's voice drops half a register, "I was standing at the edge of the bed. The nurse pulled me outside to talk. Two minutes—I was gone two minutes, Ge. When I came back, she'd gone quiet." He looks up. "Did Ma say anything to you before the end? You said traffic had you stuck, but you did get there in the end—did you say anything to her?"
The line is still spread out on the coffee table. 10:31.
"I did," Liang Cheng says.