Thursday, 8:40 a.m., Xiao Zhou's voice arrived first.
"Ge, look at this."
He held his phone out sideways. On the screen, a screenshot: the department group, and at the bottom that one short line and the yellow face—Handled. [smile] Whoever took it had blurred out the avatars but left the group name. Beneath the screenshot, one line of text: An Afterlife Cloud employee deleted her own daughter.
The tag sat at number nineteen. #EmployeeDeletedHerOwnDaughtersDigitalPersona. Twenty-one million reads.
At 9:30 the tag had climbed to seventh. 127,000 discussions.
At 9:50, two men in work jackets came upstairs and walked straight to Su Man's desk. Three people standing, under a minute of talk. Su Man slid the pen from her desk calendar back into the cup, took her own phone, and went downstairs with them. The tea on her desk was still steaming.
All morning nobody touched that desk. The tea went cold; a film formed over the mouth of the cup.
The content farms caught up. A local account posted: An Employee Kept Seven "Digital Dead" for Seven Years, Then Deleted the Last One With Her Own Hands. Three photos: the company's front gate, a re-shot of her badge photo, and that blurred group screenshot. A hundred thousand reposts in half an hour. Another account ran a shorter headline: She Deleted Her Own Daughter. That one spread slower, but by noon it had caught up too.
When Xiao Zhou handed the phone over, his finger hovered above the repost button. "Ge, repost or not."
"Did you read the notice."
"Yeah." He took the phone back, didn't repost, didn't close the page either. Ten minutes later Liang Cheng heard him muttering at his desk: "'Digital funeral home'—who came up with that name. Brutal."
Someone in the private group posted a screenshot of the screenshot, captioned: waiting for the follow-up. A row of "waiting" came after it. Liang Cheng was in that group too. He said nothing and set the group to muted.
At ten, the intranet popped up a notice from PR:
> 【Notice on External Public Opinion】 > All staff: today certain online information has appeared concerning matters under legal review at this company; the information includes unverified screenshots. All staff are forbidden to repost, comment on, or screenshot this material, or to post about it on personal social accounts. The internal line will be issued uniformly by the PR Department. All external inquiries are to be transferred to 400-820-1194.
At 10:20 Feng Tuo held a short meeting, five minutes. He read from a script, then looked up and added one line of his own: "Keep at the work in hand. The audit wraps today."
When it broke up, nobody spoke. In the corridor two men walked side by side; one said "last time we trended was the launch event," the other didn't answer.
At 10:55 Feng Tuo stopped by Liang Cheng's desk, voice pressed low.
"That care pilot of yours—pause it for now," he said. "No weekly report this week."
Liang Cheng said fine. Feng Tuo took two steps away, came back. "You're in her group. Legal wants to talk to you this afternoon, two o'clock, the small conference room again. Say what you know, nothing extra."
At twelve sharp, the company issued its statement. Liang Cheng scrolled onto it inside a delivery app's waiting page, blue background, white text, the official account.
> 【Statement】 > We have taken note of certain online information. Upon verification: our employee Su* (employee ID L-0137), during her tenure, long-term used the employee-linked discount in violation of regulations, paying fees on multiple non-self accounts for personal purposes, involving seven accounts. This conduct violates the Employee Linked-Account Management Measures and the integrity clauses. The company terminated her labor contract on December 21 and reserves the right to seek recovery. > Our company remains committed to providing users digital-life services with dignity. The disposal of the accounts concerned was all carried out in accordance with laws and regulations.
Under the statement, forty thousand comments in one hour.
The pinned one had 198,000 likes:
"Delete it. The living get to have their own life too."
Liang Cheng scrolled through the top-rated, one by one:
"A few hundred a month to keep one piece of data alive. What ordinary person can afford that? This company is the one honestly making money off the dead."
"I did the math—seven accounts, almost ten thousand a year. Big sister's rich." (Reply: she's just a collections agent, how high can the pay be. Reply to the reply: then where'd the money come from?)
"I kept my ma's going until this June. Couldn't keep it up anymore. Don't yell at me." Twenty thousand likes on that one, two thousand replies; Liang Cheng didn't scroll further.
"Isn't the point that she deleted her own daughter? Kept her seven years, then deleted her herself. For what?"
"For dignity. That's what this company teaches in training. I interviewed for a position there; they had me memorize 'a good ending' as a script line."
"My uncle by marriage got this too. First year the whole family paid on time, second year only my aunt paid, third year my aunt passed too, and the account's still hanging there—no idea who's getting charged."
"Someone upthread asked where the money came from. Her salary. Twelve years on the job—is saving seven thousand a year so hard?"
At 12:40 the tag rose to third. Second was a celebrity divorce, first the cold snap.
Two o'clock sharp, the small conference room. The A4 on the door had been swapped for: Interview In Progress.
The ones who came were a man from Legal and a woman from PR, one laptop each. On the table lay a printed copy of the triage sheet, Liang Cheng's row highlighted in marker.
Legal asked slowly. "On December 20 at 15:47, when Su Man filed the cancellation application, where were you."
"My desk."
"Did you see her operate."
"No. The door was closed."
"The 'Handled' in the group—when did you see it."
"It went out at 5:59. I saw it a little after six."
"Where did the screenshot come from," the woman from PR asked. "Twelve people in the department group, and the screenshot keeps the group name. Did you send it anywhere."
"No."
"You signed the triage sheet." Legal turned a page. "Linked account AC-0417 under your name, risk rating high. During the audit, did you receive any outside inquiry about this account."
"No."
The woman typed on her open laptop, the screen's blue light on her face. She typed a while, stopped, asked: "How many years have you worked with Su Man."
"Seven."
"Did she ever mention those seven accounts to you."
Liang Cheng looked at the photocopy on the table. "She mentioned she had accounts under her name. Never whose."
That sentence was inside the compliance line. The woman said fine, typed the last line, printed out a transcript, and had him initial every page. The pen was the same split-nibbed one, frayed at the tip.
He signed and came out, 2:30. The window at the end of the corridor was open a crack; the wind had lifted one corner of the evacuation map.
At three, the reversal came.
An account two years old posted a long piece: I'm Someone She Trained. A Few Words. The post said that the day before the cancellation, Su Man had settled in full the arrears on six of the seven accounts, one of them on installments, fifty percent down, fifty yuan a month. The post ended with one line: "She cleared the books for six first, then deleted her own daughter. And you call that embezzlement?"
Two hundred thousand reposts in half an hour. The wind under the tag shifted.
"Wait. Settled six first, then deleted her own daughter? What logic is that?"
"The logic is those six still had someone looking after them. Her daughter had no one left."
"And the company statement? Is the statement still up?"
The statement was still up. Up to four o'clock—not deleted, not updated.
At 4:20 the long post was gone. The page said: This content is unavailable due to a violation. The accounts that had reposted it began deleting, one by one. One didn't delete; it reposted its screenshot of the deletion and added a caption: guilty conscience.
At 4:30 the tag dropped to ninth. At five, out of the top ten.
At 5:30, Feng Tuo came out of the conference room with a reassignment sheet. The forty-three in-progress accounts under Su Man's name, reclaimed and redistributed. He stood under the whiteboard and read out the split: old accounts divided by district, four people. At the end, six had been added under Liang Cheng's name.
"Check the handover carefully. Don't inherit bad debt," Feng Tuo said. "Follow up as normal Monday."
Nobody answered. Xiao Zhou photographed the reassignment sheet, posted it to the private group with a fist-salute emoji. Nobody in this group saluted back; they all replied "received."
At six, the floor was half gone. Liang Cheng stayed and opened the six newly assigned accounts one by one—arrears, account age, last contact record. On three of the six, the phone-log notes were in Su Man's hand: Hard. Don't push. One note ran longer: Son's down south. The phone connects. Don't call in the morning—he sleeps in the morning.
He copied those six notes into his own workbench. Done copying, 6:40, shut down.
Downstairs, the guard booth at Tower B's entrance had changed shift. Two people from PR stood under the flagpole on their phones; one said "the official line can wait till tomorrow," the other said nothing, only nodded. Liang Cheng walked past them and badged into the subway.
At half past four, in the stretch when the tag dropped to ninth, Su Man's desk was cleared out.
She wasn't the one who cleared it. Two from admin came, one with a cardboard box, one with a sign-out sheet. Not much to take: a box of red pens, a stack of A3 paper, half a bottle of hand sanitizer, the thermos. The water in the thermos had gone cold; they poured it into the pantry sink, wiped the cup, and set it in the box. The box was taped shut and labeled: Awaiting Pickup, Tower B Front Desk, Floor 1.
The ledger wasn't there. She'd rolled it up and taken it home Tuesday night.
One red pen had dropped out and rolled under the partition. An admin crouched to reach it, missed twice, stood up, poked the pen out with the sign-out sheet, and put that in the box too. The two of them carried the box off.
The whole thing took four minutes. On the facing desk a phone rang—Xiao Zhou's—rang to the sixth ring, and cut.
At three, Wu Yan came up with a maintenance slip. In the status box at the bottom right of Liang Cheng's slip, one line of small print.
B2-07: overwrite completed, 2023-12-21 14:36.
"Yesterday's?" Liang Cheng asked.
"Mm." Wu Yan tucked the pen back behind his ear. "Seventy-two hours is the ceiling; usually it finishes in thirty-some. Once the disc seats back, the slot's open again."
"Open for who."
"For the next one," he said. "The slots in this building are a fixed number."
He left. Liang Cheng filed the maintenance slip and, in passing, refreshed AC-0417's page. Schedule remaining: 254. He looked once and closed it.
At 3:20, Qi Yue's cart appeared one last time. She delivered the receipt copy of the audit report to Feng Tuo's desk for signature. Signed for, she wheeled the cart to the elevators. Passing Liang Cheng's desk, she stopped a moment.
"Your mother's account," she said. "The review being returned doesn't affect your duties as executor. The procedures that are due still get run."
"Understood."
"That's all," she said. The cart went into the elevator. The tape-wrapped wheel faced outward; the doors closed, caught it once, bounced open, closed again.
At eight in the evening, the tag had dropped to eleventh. The cold snap was still first.
At nine, a new entry rose fast under the tag: "My cousin says there's another one in their group who kept paying his own mother's account. A collections agent, no less. Chew on that." Fifty-odd replies below, some asking for the employee ID, some cursing. When Liang Cheng scrolled onto it, it was on the fourth screen; two minutes of scrolling, and when he looked again it was gone. The account was still there; the homepage had been wiped.
He refreshed a few times in a row. The tag, eleventh, held, didn't move again.
Liang Cheng was at home. The takeout had barely been touched. He opened the top-rated comment again—"Delete it. The living get to have their own life too"—198,000 and still climbing.
He opened the likes list.
The list runs newest first, avatars in a grid, cell after cell down. Some avatars were landscapes, some cats, some the default gray silhouette. He scrolled, cell by cell.
On the third screen, he stopped.
One avatar. Blue sky, a corrugated tin roof, half a signboard. He'd seen this avatar—last month, when he'd pulled up Liang Chuan's Moments, the poster of the pinned entry "talked with Ma a while" had this exact one. After the nickname came two characters: Liang Chuan's name.
Liked at: today, 11:47.
Eleven forty-seven in the morning. The statement went out at noon; the tag hit third at 12:40. Which is to say, back when the comment wasn't pinned yet, when it was still a few hundred likes, Liang Chuan had found it, and liked it.
Liang Cheng backed out and opened their chat thread. At the bottom, what he'd sent Tuesday: Saturday, ten a.m., the usual time. Five minutes, not one second less.
Read. No reply.
He scrolled up. The "five minutes of what," forty-some minutes later. Above that, a transfer, 3,600, returned.
He typed a line: Saw the news.
Stared at it a while, deleted it character by character. Typed again: Still on for Saturday.
Send.
The phone lay on the table, screen up. He closed the takeout box and put it in the fridge. The kitchen light is sound-activated; the moment he stopped moving, it went out. He stood in the dark and heard the fridge compressor kick on.
At 10:16, the phone buzzed once.
Not Liang Chuan. The trending feed's push: the official account had posted a second item—Thank you for your oversight; the service never stops. The image was a satisfaction curve, 96.4% marked at the top right. In one corner of the image, a line of gray type, very small: Source: user-optional experience ratings.
He thought of the two hollow stars. He'd tapped the X twice.
Under the push, the second one already had twenty thousand likes. He didn't look again. The chat thread stayed open. Liang Chuan's column: still read, no reply.