Tuesday, 8:50 a.m., a sheet of paper appeared on Su Man's desk.
Printed, A4, the Compliance Department's stamp in the top right corner. She pressed it under the A3 ledger, held it there three seconds, pulled it back out, smoothed it flat, laid it beside her keyboard.
> 【Notice of Arrears Settlement (Audit-Linked)】 > Upon review, the accounts listed below were confirmed in this year's audit as linked to you personally (L-0137), linkage type: actual proxy payer. Under Article 9 of the Employee Linked-Account Management Measures, an employee paying on a non-self account must use the quota in the employee's own name. Outstanding proxy-paid arrears under your name total: 23,476.80 yuan. > Settlement deadline: before 16:00, Wednesday, December 20, 2023. > Any portion unpaid past the deadline will be batch-transferred to the terminal queue and disposed of under queue rules.
Below that, seven lines. Bill number, name, account age, arrears.
Zhenghai, four years, 3,340.66. Wangying, nine years, 4,876.02. Ligui, six years, 3,558.46. Su, four years, 5,102.77. Gaolan, five years, 2,314.88. Zhangtian, seven years, 3,077.53. Chen**zhi, four years, 1,206.48.
The bottom line was the total, a period at the end.
Su Man read it through once, flipped her desk calendar to tomorrow, drew a vertical line in the 16:00 slot. Then she started making calls.
The first call went to the bank. Liang Cheng sat across from her, two rows of desks between them, close enough to hear the rhythm of her speech, not the words. Forty seconds, three sentences, hung up. The second call went to HR. That one ran longer.
"How many annual-leave days do I have left. ... Twelve. Cash them out. ... That's all I can cash this year? Fine."
When she hung up she filled in a form on the page. Ten minutes later a text arrived; she glanced at it, set the phone face down.
At 10:05 she opened the Filial Score page. The quota line held one figure: 6,800.00. She tapped activate, picked the term, 12 installments, 566.67 a month. Scrolled the agreement to the bottom, no pause in the scrolling, signed.
6,800.00 in.
At 10:30 she opened the credit-card app and applied for a temporary limit raise. The answer came by text. She read it and deleted it; in the few seconds before deletion, while the screen was still lit, Liang Cheng caught the first line: Comprehensive assessment not approved at this time.
She laid the phone face down on the desk, got up for a cup of water, stood by the cooler and drank it, came back and kept filling in the form.
Before noon she redeemed a fixed deposit from her phone bank. Three-year term, not yet mature, interest paid at the demand rate. 6,835.00 in.
Liang Cheng went down for lunch at noon and passed the noodle shop; the boss was peeling garlic. He ordered two bowls, one to go. Back at his desk, he set the bowl on the corner of Su Man's desk without a word.
She ate it at two in the afternoon. Eyes on the screen the whole time, chopsticks never stopping. A mouthful of soup left at the bottom; she lifted the bowl and drank it.
At three, the 4,200.00 from HR's cash-out came in.
She made a column on a sticky note: 6,835.00, 6,800.00, 4,200.00. A horizontal line under it, then the total: 17,835.00. Below that, another line: 23,476.80. In the gap between the two numbers she tapped her pen tip a few times, wrote no third number.
23,476.80 minus 17,835.00 equals 5,641.80. That number she didn't write. Liang Cheng did the subtraction for her from his own seat.
He opened his own phone bank. Balance 7,467.62. He looked at the figure a few seconds, closed it. Give it all and the gap closes; next Tuesday, AC-0417's occupancy fee of 105.00 has no source, the deferred-payment 6.00 has no source, rent of 2,400 waits on the fifteenth. He pulled the photocopy of his own repayment schedule out of his badge sleeve, looked at it, slid it back.
At four o'clock he walked to the edge of Su Man's desk and stopped.
"Su-jie."
"Go work," she said, eyes never leaving the screen.
"I—"
"That account under your name still isn't settled," she said. "By the rules, if you lend me money now, whether I take it or not, it's a violation. You forgot yesterday's sheet?"
He hadn't forgotten. Page two of the audit-triage sheet, her line—he'd seen it too: linked accounts, seven; risk rating, high.
He went back. Halfway there he pulled six installment-plan templates from the shared drive, formatted them one by one, sent them to her internal mailbox. The subject line he wrote: For Reference. When it was sent he deleted the sent record.
At 6:30 the floor was half emptied. Qi Yue's cart stood at the fire-exit door, the tape-wrapped wheel facing inward.
At seven, Su Man was still at her desk. Liang Cheng hadn't left either.
At 7:20 she said across two rows of desks: "Xiao Liang. Come check some numbers."
He went over. She turned the A3 ledger to its back; on the back, seven lines in pencil, the same seven from the notice, with two columns added: surviving family, recovery assessment.
"Zhenghai, the wife's alive, the son visits every month." She read. "Wangying, daughter out of town, cooperative. Ligui, son talks tough, signed one installment plan before. Gaolan, the old lady saves up herself, settles up at New Year. Zhangtian, the neighborhood committee handles him, he won't run. Chen*zhi—" she paused, "there's no one left in the Chen family. One nephew, wires money once a year."
Six lines read. She set the pencil down.
The seventh line she didn't read.
Liang Cheng looked at it. Su*, four years, 5,102.77. The surviving-family column was blank. The recovery-assessment column was blank too.
"These six," she said. "Tomorrow morning, settle five, paid in full. The Chen**zhi one goes on installments, fifty percent down. You work out the down payment for me."
Fifty percent of 1,206.48: 603.24. The five full payments came to 17,167.55, plus the down payment 603.24: 17,770.79. She had 17,835.00 in. 64.21 left over.
Liang Cheng wrote those figures on the back of the ledger and pushed it across. She read them through, underlined 64.21 in pencil.
"Tomorrow morning, print these six slips for me, in this order," she said. "Done before two in the afternoon—don't crowd it against four. The ones crowded against four go wrong."
"The seventh," he asked.
She dropped the pencil into the cup. "The seventh I'll handle myself."
"How."
"You'll know tomorrow." She rolled the ledger up, snapped the band around it. "Go home and sleep. You've got your own work tomorrow."
He walked to the fire-exit door and looked back. She hadn't turned on the desk lamp; she sat in the light of the screen, the thermos upside down on a tissue, the ring of water under it long dry, one mark left at the edge.
Wednesday, 8:30 a.m., the printer went first. Six slips; Liang Cheng ordered them as she'd said, the receipt lines blank, stacked them one by one on her desk.
At nine, Su Man started. Every settlement brought a text from the system; she folded that slip in half and pressed it under the thermos. By 10:40, five slips pressed in a stack. At 11:00, the Chen**zhi installment went through, down payment 603.24 debited, 12 installments, 50.27 a month.
> 【Settlement Confirmation】Account AC-3122-0714 (Zhenghai): current arrears 3,340.66 yuan settled in full. Thank you for your cooperation. > 【Settlement Confirmation】Account AC-2958-4406 (Wangying): current arrears 4,876.02 yuan settled in full. Thank you for your cooperation. > 【Settlement Confirmation】Account AC-3081-7735 (Ligui): current arrears 3,558.46 yuan settled in full. Thank you for your cooperation. > 【Settlement Confirmation】Account AC-3160-0229 (Gaolan): current arrears 2,314.88 yuan settled in full. Thank you for your cooperation. > 【Settlement Confirmation】Account AC-3019-5568 (Zhangtian): current arrears 3,077.53 yuan settled in full. Thank you for your cooperation. > 【Installment Accepted】Account AC-3347-0190 (Chen*zhi): installment plan accepted. Down payment 603.24 yuan; remainder in 12 installments of 50.27 yuan per month.
At noon Qi Yue came and checked the figures, crossed out six of the seven lines, penciled a question mark by the seventh, said nothing, wheeled the cart away.
At one in the afternoon, Su Man's phone rang. She checked the caller, picked up: the Zheng family's old lady. The voice on the other end was loud, the floor was quiet, everyone could hear the gist: asking whether the money had come out of Su Man's pocket, saying they'd pay it back, saying the son didn't know about it. Su Man said into the receiver: "The money—past noon, don't bring it up again. Keep your receipt somewhere safe." Hung up. After hanging up she wrote one word in today's calendar square—receipt—and drew a circle around it.
At 1:50, Wu Yan came upstairs with a maintenance slip. He set it on Liang Cheng's desk and stood there.
"B2's got a schedule today," he said. "From four in the afternoon, overwrite."
"Whose."
"The slip doesn't carry names, it carries nodes," Wu Yan said. "B2-07. Sector overwrite, completed within seventy-two hours. Nobody goes in; the machine runs itself." He tilted his head toward the floor below. "Those fans in that room turn all year round. One more disc deleted, they don't turn one revolution more."
He left.
At 3:40, Su Man stood up, clipped on her badge, and walked toward the small conference room. Qi Yue was already inside, laptop open.
The A4 taped to the door had been swapped for a new one: Linked-Account Business In Progress.
Liang Cheng didn't go over. He sat at his desk with a view of the room's upper half through the frosted glass. At a quarter to four, the door opened a crack; Qi Yue came out, took a black tablet off the cart, went back in.
At 4:02, the door opened.
Su Man came out with a receipt in her hand. She walked back to her desk, sat down, pressed the receipt under the thermos, stacked with the other six.
Nobody spoke. Twelve people in the terminal area; the keyboard noise stopped for a few seconds, then started again. The central air overhead kept turning, a low hum, gust by gust.
Liang Cheng later saw the format of that receipt, the template that flows out of the system—every cancellation anyone processes looks the same:
> 【Account Cancellation Application Receipt】 > Application type: cancellation initiated by linked party > Account: AC-2893-1104 (Su*) / Level 3 · Standard tier > Identity verification: linked party in person (mother-daughter; household-registration cancellation certificate 2019-12-04) > Account age: four years. Schedule remaining: 133 days. Arrears: 5,102.77 yuan (written off upon cancellation). > Unused points on this account: 3. Transfer to same-tier account / forfeit. Selection: forfeit. > Optional: farewell call (90 minutes, billed separately). Selection: not ordered. > Execution node: B2-07. Physical-sector overwrite, completed within 72 hours, irreversible. > Applicant signature: (electronic) > Filed at: 2023-12-20 15:47
According to people later in the workflow who saw it, at the signature line the tablet was handed over, she made two strokes, the same speed she signs expense reports. The tablet came back, Qi Yue checked the ID card, said "that's it," and that was the whole of it.
At four sharp, the deadline closed. Qi Yue's cart left the floor; the tape-wrapped wheel made no sound on the carpet, sounded twice on the hard floor at the elevator bank, and was in the elevator.
At 5:30, Su Man packed up. Thermos filled with water, cap screwed tight. She rolled the A3 ledger, snapped the band around it, slid it into the side of her bag. At the fire-exit door she stopped half a step, turned her head and said one line to Liang Cheng:
"Don't put today in the weekly report. Write it and it's wasted; it won't clear review."
She left.
Liang Cheng sat until six. First he messaged Liang Chuan: "Saturday, ten a.m., the usual time. Five minutes, not one second less." He sent it. Four days back in the thread, "five minutes of what" still sat at the bottom, nothing new beneath it.
Then he opened the department group. At 5:59, Su Man had posted one short line, and after it one emoji:
> Su Man: Handled. [smile]
The [smile] is the system's own—yellow round face, flat mouth. Anyone can send it, no download needed.
Twelve people in the group. Nobody answered under the message. Delivery receipts in a row: seven read.
He set the phone face down on the desk. The corridor PA announced routine maintenance on Tower B's air-conditioning tonight, cooling suspended after ten. Nobody in the terminal area looked up.
He thought of the noodle shop last month. That day her phone rang seven times, seven ringtones, the last one a child's voice, two words, one "Mama," one "Ay." When it finished she laid the phone face down on the table and said, eat your noodles.
Now, sitting at his desk, he ran that column of numbers for her one more time: 3,340.66, 4,876.02, 3,558.46, 2,314.88, 3,077.53, 1,206.48. The six came to 18,374.03; add 5,102.77, it equals 23,476.80. Not one item over, not one item short.
At the far end of the building, B2-07 started its seventy-two hours.