Friday, December 1.
At 11:20 in the morning Feng Tuo called him out in the group: care-case progress, 200 characters, before end of day.
Liang Cheng opened the input box. Last week's sentence he had copied out and deleted—"account communication initiated; family members emotionally stable." This week he typed anew:
One onsite deep visit conducted this week (11/21, 30 minutes); persona cooperative in session. One registered family inbound call this week (11/23, 00:47). Disposition plan submitted; deferred disposal selected.
He counted: a hundred-odd characters. He tacked one more line onto the end: will continue to follow up.
Sent. Feng Tuo replied "received."
Xiao Zhou leaned over the partition, printout pinched in his hand. "Cheng-ge, in a care case can you actually write 'persona cooperative'?"
"You can."
"I wrote 'client expressed understanding' and got it sent back." He shook the paper. "They said there have to be actions."
"Just write 'communication completed.'"
"Oh." Xiao Zhou ducked back, popped up again two seconds later. "So my client who's been cursing for six minutes—that counts as communication?"
"It counts."
At 2:10 in the afternoon he opened "call detail (full)"; the system asked for a Level 2 permission, and in the purpose dropdown he chose option two again.
Access log no.: AR-119051.
The loading bar ran three seconds. A full screen came up, eleven numbered rows.
| No. | Date | Caller | Type | Duration | Hung up by | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | 1 | Five years ago, Mar 17 | municipal hospice hospital (contracted institution) | institution verification call | 03:12 | caller | | 2 | Five years ago, Qingming | Liang Chuan (younger son) | family inbound call | 00:21 | persona | | 3 | Five years ago, Nov | platform | system calibration call | 00:00 | system | | 4 | Four years ago, Aug | platform | system calibration call | 00:00 | system | | 5 | Three years ago, Mid-Autumn | Liang Chuan (younger son) | family inbound call | 00:14 | persona | | 6 | Three years ago, Nov | platform | satisfaction callback (automated voice) | 00:00 | system (no answer) | | 7 | Two years ago, Jun | platform | satisfaction callback (automated voice) | 00:00 | system (no answer) | | 8 | Last year, Qingming | Liang Chuan (younger son) | family inbound call | 00:12 | persona | | 9 | Last year, Sep | unknown (number out of service) | external inbound call | 00:08 | caller | | 10 | This Monday, Nov 13 | Liang Cheng (executor) | executor voice session | 08:42 | caller | | 11 | This Thursday, Nov 23 | Liang Chuan (younger son) | family inbound call | 00:47 | caller |
Four summary lines below:
Total calls: 11 Total persona answer time: 13 min 36 s Of which: executor voice session 8 min 42 s; family inbound calls 1 min 34 s; other 3 min 20 s Account in existence: 1,826 days
He took the last two numbers to the calculator: 816 ÷ 1826.
Zero point four four seven.
That worked out to 0.45 seconds a day.
Rows 4 and 5 the system had dialed itself; the persona never answered, duration logged 00:00. Rows 6 and 7 were automated voice, played to "if convenient, please press one," and over there there was no one to press. Those two counted among the eleven too.
The number in row 9 he had tried dialing back once; the recording said out of service.
He opened the caller-number detail on row 2: registered family Liang Chuan, 139**** (on file at registration). Rows 5, 8, and 11—the same number. Four years without changing it. Below the number one line: "cumulative successful inbound calls: 4," the characters in blue.
Before closing it, he opened TL-0416 in passing. Guan**, Level 4 cold-storage tier. The call-detail column was empty, with one note hanging beneath: this tier includes no outbound permission; answered calls on record: 0. He gave the schedule column no second look.
Back on the account page, the weekly progress bar had reset to zero; the new calendar week counts from Monday:
[Family inbound calls this week: 00:00 / 05:00]
Last week's forty-seven seconds were gone once Sunday passed. No carry-over.
He dragged the page to half the screen; the other half held the introspection-cache search box.
"Xiao Cheng," 411 entries.
"Chuan Chuan," 96 entries.
"Money," 3 entries. Two vegetable prices, one electricity bill, all in the first year.
"Owe," 0 entries.
He copied the four numbers onto a sticky note, ran out of room, flipped the note over, and wrote beneath the line "1800×0." Small characters, crowded together.
The Oct 19 entry, where she wrote "there's less in the room today. The sofa in the front room is gone." That day a downgrade had been executed; the operation fee was twelve hundred.
The Jun 5 entry, where she wrote "I counted; this month they called four times." That month, family inbound calls: zero.
On November 21 in the kitchen she had said "your brother called, he said he was busy." After last Qingming, not one row in the log.
He had never said any of this to anyone, never joined it into a sentence in his head. He only kept the two pages open side by side and looked for a while.
On the persona-continuity page, at the very bottom, a line of blue text, very small: Notes on Persona Memory Bias (V4.2).
He clicked it.
[Persona Continuity Maintenance: Storage Optimization and Event Retention Policy] V4.2 3.2 Event retention weights When the storage quota runs short, the system purges events in ascending order of event weight. Weights are composed of: affect polarity (positive 1.00 / neutral 0.62 / negative 0.31) + linked-node weight + time-decay coefficient. Note 1: positive events have higher retention priority than neutral or negative events. Note 2: in accounts under continuously tightening quotas, the positive share of retained events rises monotonically with each round of purging. This behavior is expected and requires no intervention.
"This behavior is expected and requires no intervention."
He read it through and scrolled down.
Below was this account's data.
[Affect structure of retained events] Positive 86.4% Neutral 9.1% Negative 4.5% [Purge rounds] 3 (Level 1 / Level 2 / Level 3 downgrades) [Upload baseline] positive 41.2% / neutral 33.7% / negative 25.1%
Eighty-six point four.
In the year of upload, positive was 41.2 percent. Three rounds of deletion brought it to 86.4.
He set the two sets side by side. What got deleted wasn't half—it was three quarters of the so-so, and four fifths of the bad.
What was left was all good.
He switched back to the search box and typed one character: pain.
Seven entries. The earliest in April of the first year; the latest also in the first year. After those seven, not one.
Where that percentage came down to earth: seven instances of "pain," all in the first year, and clean ground after.
He typed another character: wait.
Thirty-one entries. He didn't open them.
He switched to the sidebar and filtered for cognitive smoothing. Forty-one rows; the trigger column read "perception fluctuation" down the line.
Downgrades delete events. Smoothing deletes the moment she notices something is gone. One strips things out; one holds down the motion of her looking down.
In the drift column, every post-disposal figure sat at zero-point-something.
The tea room sits at the end of the corridor. He went for water; Su Man was there, cup in hand at the window, watching the unloading below.
"Still here," she said.
"Waiting on a receipt."
She gave an "Mm." The van downstairs took two tries to back in; the rear doors opened on cardboard boxes.
"Su-jie," he said.
"Mm."
"When it deletes. Which part goes first."
Su Man shifted the cup to her other hand. "By weight."
"How's the weight figured."
"Whoever was good to her stays." She said it fast, the way you'd say something worn smooth around an office. "The fights go first, the debts go first, and what's left at the end is New Year's. The longer the account runs behind, the better the person in there remembers you. The whole thing runs backward."
"Runs backward."
"The less you pay, the more she misses you," Su Man said. "If you really want her to remember you, don't give a cent."
She drank some water and screwed the lid on.
"I've never said this to anyone else. Keep it to yourself."
She left right after, cup in hand, her steps steady.
Liang Cheng filled a full cup, didn't drink, set it on the counter. A layer of very small bubbles clung to the inside of the cup, climbing slowly.
Back at his desk: 4:07.
He opened the Filial Score line. Available credit 186,000.00, sixty installments, monthly payment 3,100.00. The gray "not for now" button still in the selected state. He left it and closed the page.
The yellow strip still hung on the plan page: pending submission. Today was Friday.
He chose C, deferred disposal. Saved. The page spun two seconds; the strip turned green and the words changed too: submitted, pending review.
A term line popped up: 3,100.00 × 60. He looked at it two seconds and closed it.
Then he opened internal messaging and looked up He Yu. Two characters in the search box; one person came up, title VP of Product, avatar a gray-background ID photo. The number of messages he had ever sent this person: zero.
He typed:
He-zong, this is Liang Cheng from terminal disposition. A business question: for a Level 3 tier account's already-deleted memory items, is there a restoration channel? The restoration voucher only covers the last seven days; I'm asking about three years and more. Sorry to bother you.
Sent. Status: delivered. Unread.
He closed the window.
11:40 at night, he sat at the folding table in his rented room, laptop open, brightness at its lowest.
On the table, half a bottle of water, an empty bowl, chopsticks soaking unwashed in it.
What he was making was next month's repayment plan. December's, itemized to the end of the month.
Balance 3,357.62.
Student loan 2,180.00, debited on the 15th. After that, 1,177.62 left.
Rent 2,400.00, debited on the 15th.
Two numbers landing on the same day. He looked a long time, dragged the rent cell forward to the 14th, left the loan where it was—the loan couldn't be moved; the bank debits it.
The 14th held one more item, the account's billing date; that day the pending 1.20 would merge into the 41,446.50.
He filled downward:
Transport, overtime subway trains, 220 a month. Food. No breakfast; lunch downstairs from the office, seventeen yuan for a bowl of noodles, nineteen with an egg. Twenty-two days, 418. Dinner cooked himself or the convenience store. Phone, 88. Wedding gift for a coworker, 200. (Note: can be declined, but declining looks bad.) Winter jacket, 329. (Note: last year's zipper is broken.)
At the last row, the balance below was negative. Minus 378.38.
He dragged the sheet back—the copy carried over from November—changed a few numbers, ran it again. Still negative.
Midway he stopped and worked something else out: 41,446.50 ÷ 15.
2,763 days.
Seven years of occupancy fees equals the whole amount now owed. He wrote that line at the bottom of the sheet, then deleted it.
A vehicle passed outside, the water-sprinkler kind they run at night, playing music, audible from one intersection to the next.
Past three, he opened the entry from last Qingming.
[00:00.0] Inbound call connected; persona answer delay 1.8 s [00:01.8] Persona: Hello? [00:04.5] Caller: Ma, the signal's bad here— [00:09.0] Caller: —hanging up. [00:12.0] Caller hung up; call ended [00:12.1] Persona: All right. (This sentence was not transmitted)
Twelve seconds. After the hang-up, that "All right" exists in the system log, tagged "this sentence was not transmitted."
He looked at that line a long time. Closed it.
4:50 in the morning, the sky started to gray.
He built the sheet a third time. This pass he deleted the "wedding gift 200" line and the "winter jacket 329" line.
Then he added one line at the bottom:
AC-0417 occupancy fee 105.00 (12/04–12/10)
He had checked first. Occupancy fees can be paid by proxy; no make-up payment route needed. The popup said it plainly:
[Notice: paying the queue occupancy fee by proxy does not halt the schedule countdown, and does not change the terminal-disposal date.]
Does not change.
He read that line three times and clicked confirm.
Seven days, one hundred five yuan. Fifteen a day, which is seven more days for her in that queue—no earlier, no later.
The sheet was done. The balance line: positive, 45.62.
He saved it. Filename: 还款计划_1202.xlsx.
Saved, he picked up his phone and checked. The message to He Yu still read delivered, unread. He set the phone on the corner of the table, face down.
He left the computer on, pushed the chair back, sat a while. The sheet was on the screen, row after row: rent, loan, subway, noodles, one hundred five.
Daylight. The roll-down shutter downstairs rattled up—the breakfast shop.