Saturday, 10:06 a.m., a new line appeared in AC-0417's call log.
Caller: Liang Chuan. Duration 05:12. Persona valid answer 05:04. Hung up by: caller.
Below it a register entry generated itself: [Kinship Call Schedule Deferral] weekly cumulative threshold met; 7 days deducted from the downgrade schedule.
His own Saturday was empty. Morning, laundry; afternoon, the supermarket—a hand of bananas, a bag of dried noodles. On the way back he worked out once whether Liang Chuan had actually made that call; it wouldn't resolve, so he stopped working it. At eleven that night he looked at the phone: nothing from Liang Chuan. He laid it face down by the bed and slept.
Monday morning he opened the account page: 257 days left on the schedule. By straight count it should have been 264. The missing seven days were right there. The points ledger had grown a third line: inbound answer 05:04, Excellent, +3. Balance 6.
05:12. His brother had said the five minutes full out, twelve seconds over. He paused on those two numbers: the twelve extra seconds were margin, not waste. Hung up by: caller. She had waited for him to hang up first.
He stayed three seconds and backed out. He didn't pull the logs. All week he had touched no one's fields.
9:40, the intranet's top post changed.
[Compliance Special Audit Notice] Scope: all deep-visit records and disposal operations of the Terminal Disposal Department, 2023 Format: on-site interviews, in staff-number order Requirements: full cooperation; no accessing, exporting, or deleting records you have handled Auditor: Qi Yue (Compliance)
Below the notice, a line of small print: desks operate as usual during interviews; when your turn comes the system will pop a prompt. The popup was gray, silent, lit in the lower right corner of the screen; left unclicked for ten minutes it extinguished itself. In one morning, that row's lower right corners lit seven times in all.
What came was a woman of forty-odd, dark-gray coat, pulling a small cart with file boxes stacked in it. One of the cart's wheels was wrapped in tape; coming down the terminal row, it went one knock at a time.
She didn't do greetings. Arriving, she stood first beneath the whiteboard, copied down the number on it, then asked who was responsible for updating it. Wu Yan wasn't in; nobody answered. She made a note.
The interviews were held in the small conference room. An A4 sheet on the door: Interview in session. It went up in the morning and stayed past noon; nobody touched it; it stayed up through the lunch break too.
Xiao Zhou came out talkative. "Asked whether the quarterly-training sign-in was my own signature. It was my own—I was there that day, the session Jiang Li gave." He dropped his voice. "Asked me about the microwave sign-in sheet too. The audit minds even the microwave."
Nobody picked it up. In the afternoon the order went on; the popup lit, the one named rose, pushed the chair under the desk, and went. Not a move anyone made normally; today everyone made it.
His turn came at two.
The popup lit while he was checking the date on a receipt. He finished checking the line, saved it, then stood. Eleven steps from his desk to the small conference room; walking them, he heard his own footsteps between the third and the seventh, and nothing else went in.
The small conference room's table had been cleared down to three things: a laptop, a stack of printouts, a pen cup. Qi Yue sat behind the printouts; she read one item, struck one key. The stack was squared very neat, edge to edge, far neater than the paper on any other desk.
"November 21, December 8, December 15, 2023: three deep visits initiated by you. Three in thirty days." She read at no hurry. "Three sets of minutes; for visit purpose achieved, you selected 'no clear expression of intent obtained' on all three."
"Yes."
"The care pilot is not a disposal action. A visit with no disposal purpose is counted as non-essential." She lifted her eyes. "Two of your three went under the care-pilot heading."
"The pilot weekly report requires actions."
"The weekly report is for the living," she said. "An account doesn't need visiting."
She struck the key. Next item. The conference room's air conditioner ran one notch louder than outside; the cloth strip at the vent kept trembling, neither fast nor slow.
"Minutes DA-R-0417-003, three off-script statements. You explained the points rules and the redemption path to the persona. The clause you relied on."
"The executor's duty to inform."
"Which clause."
He had no answer. She didn't press; key, next item. That keystroke landed light—the words only had to get in.
"November 21, fourteenth minute of the session, persona statement: 'The one who came before was the same—poured him water and he wouldn't drink it.' No corresponding visit record in the system. Explain."
"Timeline drift. Common in Tier-3 personas."
"Persona-side statements are unverifiable." She keyed it in word for word.
"December 8: the system recommended executing cognitive smoothing; you canceled the submission. Demerit recorded the next day. Why did you cancel."
He looked at the top page of the printout stack, his staff number printed in the header. Under the staff number, small print that the print system adds on its own: print time 2023-12-18 13:52. Eight minutes before his interview began, this stack of paper was still warm.
"The demerit already took effect," he said.
Qi Yue lifted her eyes for the first time, looked at him one second. Then she lowered her head, finished keying the item, closed the laptop. Between closing the laptop and reading the next item there was no gap, as if both acts were drawn on the same breath.
"One on-the-spot warning: non-essential deep visit," she said. "Repeat it and disposal privileges are suspended. This item goes into the quarterly compliance score."
She turned the printout around and pushed it in front of him. The bottom line was the signature field. He signed. There was just the one pen in the cup, its nib split; the strokes of his name came out fringed. When he'd signed, he set the pen back in the cup, nib inward. The pen had been nib outward.
As he rose, she said: "Your mother's account. The Plan C review came out this morning."
"What result."
"Returned," she said. "Grounds: the disposing agent has unresolved violations pending."
On the way back to his desk the email arrived, the same two lines, copied to Feng Tuo. Returned. The stay was gone. From now on the schedule number walked on by itself, a day at a time, and nothing could stop it—except those five minutes a week.
The email was a template, signed by the system, with no reply button. He read the two lines twice. On the second pass, at the words "unresolved violations pending", someone pushed a file cart down the corridor; its wheels crossed the floor mat with two dull thumps. By the time the cart had passed, those words were still on the screen.
He closed the email and put his desk in order. There was nothing to put in order. Three pens, one cup, the plastic pothos. He lined the three pens up by length, then rearranged them by color; done, it looked about the same as before. One leaf of the plastic pothos had gathered dust; he wiped it with a tissue. Wiped, that one leaf was greener than the rest.
At four, Qi Yue's cart stopped beside Su Man's desk.
What he saw was Su Man. She sat, the A3 ledger open, red pen still pinched in her hand. Qi Yue read a name, she nodded once.
Zhenghai. Wangying. Ligui. Su. Gaolan. Zhangtian. Chen**zhi.
Seven. Identical to that year's push list, not one more.
At the fourth name Su Man paused. She didn't look up; she paged the ledger back one leaf, to a red circle on that page, nodded once, and paged forward again. Qi Yue waited for her, didn't hurry her.
When Qi Yue finished, she drew a slip from the file box and laid it on the ledger. He wasn't close; he caught only two numbers. Total arrears: 23,476.80. Remediation deadline: 48 hours—by 16:00, Wednesday, December 20. Any part unpaid at the deadline moves into the terminal queue in batch.
Su Man picked the slip up, looked at the front, looked at the back. The back was white. She set the slip back on the ledger, half an inch off from where Qi Yue had placed it, then moved it back that half inch.
"The oldest—how long has it been hanging." Qi Yue asked.
"Nine years," Su Man said. "Longer than you've worked."
Qi Yue let that pass. She turned the cart around; the tape on the wheel scraped the floor.
At half past five, Su Man went to the tea room. She stood at the sink ten minutes, scouring that thermos. The tea stain had built in the bottom for a dozen years and more; everyone knew it wouldn't come off.
He heard the water over there break off twice. The first break was the tap shut, an angle changed; the second ran longer—too long for scouring a cup. Then the water came back on, quieter than before.
When she came back, the cup was empty, upside down on a tissue to dry. The ring of tea stain in the bottom was gone. Passing his desk she didn't slow her step; a ring of water seeped out into the tissue, spreading slowly toward the edges.
He went over once. "Su-jie."
"What."
"If you need—"
"Your own mess isn't swept clean yet," she said, eyes on the ledger. "Go back to work."
He stood two seconds and went back. On the way he glanced at her desk: the A3 ledger open, the red pen laid in the gutter of the open page, cap on. A red pen with its cap on isn't what it is uncapped—that's how you lay it down when the work is done. But she was still revising.
A quarter to six, Qi Yue handed out the last round of sign-off sheets. Conflict-of-Interest Screening Form for Accounts in Handling—one each; check the entries under your own name, sign, return.
The order went by staff number too. By the time he got his, the people ahead had begun turning pages. The sound of turning pages ran from one end of the row to the other—twelve copies in all, and the twelve rhythms never once lined up.
His copy ran to two pages. The first: a blank form, an instructions box, the official seal. Box line one: "This form screens for conflicts of interest in the handling of accounts in process." Line two: "If the entries are correct, sign and return; if any entry is wrong, submit a written statement before 18:00 today." The second page: printed entries.
He read down line by line. Twelve people in the department, one line each. Column heads: name, staff number, related account, relation type, risk rating, remarks.
In the first rows the relation type was mostly "none", the risk rating "none" as well, remarks blank. One line's related account belonged to a father-in-law, rating low, remarks: reported. Another was a cousin's, rating medium. He counted: of the twelve lines, four counting his own had kin in them; eight were clean.
The last line of page two was him.
Name: Liang Cheng. Staff number: L-0284. Related account: AC-0417. Relation type: executor. Risk rating: high.
The remarks cell wasn't print. It was a scanned handwritten note, blue-black ink, the characters pressing on the cell lines:
High risk: related party on this agent's own tickets.
He read the line three times. No signature on the remark, no date; the strokes level, the entry strokes heavy. On the whole second page, this was the only handwritten cell. In twelve lines, everyone else's remarks were either blank or the printed "reported"; his alone had been set down by another person dipping ink. The force of the writer's hand carried through the back of the paper; even in the scan you could see the shadow the strokes had pressed out.
He signed and handed it back. Out of the small conference room, half the corridor lights were off—power-saving mode. Qi Yue's cart stood by the elevators, the taped wheel facing outward.
Back at his desk he dug the sticky note out of his badge sleeve. Five lines. At the bottom he added a sixth, two words:
High risk.
Folded, slid back in. The badge sleeve bulged a little more; at the turnstile there'd be one more press.
Going down, ten past six. At the stairwell he ran a sum: to four o'clock Wednesday afternoon, forty-five hours and fifty minutes.
He carried the sum two lines further. Su Man's side, the gap: twenty-three thousand. His own balance: seven thousand four. Twenty-three thousand less seven thousand four: sixteen thousand short. The equation meant nothing—that wasn't his account, and the money couldn't cross. He struck the two lines out. Struck out, the stairwell held exactly one usable number: five minutes a week. This week's five minutes were Liang Chuan's; next week's five minutes would have to be Liang Chuan's too. He took out the phone, opened his thread with Liang Chuan; the last line there was still "Five minutes of what." He typed one line: next Saturday, one more. Typed it, didn't send; locked the screen; went down.
Su Man's lamp was still on. Through the fire door he saw her sitting under it, red pen moving stroke by stroke down the A3 sheet; on the lines she was revising, the recovery probabilities were all being lifted.
One cell done, she capped the red pen, pulled the cap off again, revised the next cell.
He didn't go in; stood a while, then went down. In the stairwell he called up his own quarterly compliance score page. Two entries on it: one demerit, one hundred points deducted; one on-the-spot warning, entered into the score. The current rating underneath: C. Below that a line of gray: ratings below B forfeit terminal disposal privileges for the following quarter.
How many points lay between C and B, or how to make them up, the page didn't say. He read it once and backed out. This page and the sixth line on the sticky note said the same thing: every step from here on would have to be clean.
Wind had come up outside. He tucked the badge into his inside pocket and walked to the bus stop. The last bus was thin of passengers; he sat third from the back, the phone buzzed once in his pocket, he didn't look. His stop; off; six hundred steps; home.