The last bus got him home eleven thirty the night before. He tossed his badge into the drawer, lay down, woke once at two, once at four. The alarm was set for nine thirty; he was awake at eight and lay listening to the radiator. The December repayment plan was taped to the fridge door, rows running down, the last row in smaller writing than the rest. He got up, boiled water, ate nothing, and sat until nine fifty-six.
Saturday morning, nine fifty-six, Liang Cheng sat on the edge of the bed, the account-disposition page open on the work terminal. The status bar read one word: idle.
At ten oh six the status jumped to "in call." Under it hung a timer, 00:01, 00:02, ticking through the seconds. He didn't move; he watched the number run. There was water sound in the radiator, in waves.
At ten eleven the timer passed 05:00. He clenched his fist once, let go.
The timer stopped at 05:12. The status reverted to idle. A new row in the call log: caller, Liang Chuan. Connected 05:12. Valid response 05:04. Hung up by: caller.
The minutes took over an hour to generate. At eleven twenty-six the ASR transcript posted. Same line of small print as always: only the persona-side audio track is recorded; the caller side is not captured; text is for the record only and is not valid as evidence.
He opened it.
> [00:12] Have you eaten. > > [00:34] That delivery porridge is no good, they cook it thin. Cook it yourself. Soak the rice the night before, bring it to a boil then low heat, twenty minutes, turn off the flame and let it sit, just right by morning. > > [01:05] Chuan Chuan, is it cold on your end. > > [01:38] If it's just cold, that's fine. Put on the long johns. Every winter when you were little you'd cough, cough all winter, and in the end it was me steaming you pears with rock sugar—one round of that and you'd be fine half a month. > > [02:11] Just put them on. > > [02:40] Don't chase after-New-Year work; wages are hard to collect after the new year. > > [02:58] The money at home... > > [03:10] Nothing, just asking. Two star anise is enough in a stew, any more turns it bitter. Don't let the child stay up late. > > [04:15] And your brother. > > [04:37] Oh. Him—being busy is a good thing. > > [05:08] Ah, go on, go, something on the stove.
The caller side was blank the whole way down. He went through it line by line and could guess Liang Chuan's end from the gaps: put them on. It's fine. There's work after the new year. He's busy. One place he couldn't guess. At [02:58], "the money at home..." stopped halfway, and twelve seconds passed before the next line. What Liang Chuan said in those twelve seconds, or whether he said nothing, was a gray block on the page labeled: caller side not captured.
He read the page three times. The third time he stopped at [05:08]. She didn't hang up first. The hung-up-by field read: caller. She waited for him to hang up before the line went dead. What she wrote in her diary on November 30—Next time he calls, I won't hang up first. I'll wait for him to hang up—she had done it.
He knew that half sentence at [02:58]. December 8, in the kitchen, she had asked him, the money at home, is it tight. That time he'd caught the question away with the script; he could recite the six lines of itemized detail and hadn't read one of them out. This time the caller side wasn't recorded. Whether Liang Chuan answered, what he answered, was a gray block on the page.
Below the call log a summary line scrolled out: this week's surviving-family calls total 05:04, target met, downgrade schedule deferred 7 days. Days left on the schedule: 246.
A text came in, from Liang Chuan: called. hung up.
He sent back: Mm.
A minute later, another: she says for porridge you soak the rice the night before.
He didn't reply to that one.
At ten forty the email arrived. The sender wasn't Liang Cheng's team lead but the HR Shared Services Center, an address that would never write back.
Subject: [Notice] Suspension for Review (72 hours)
> Liang Cheng (employee no. L-0284): > > Pursuant to Chapter 11 of the Employee Handbook and Article 5.3 of the Disposition Authority Management Measures, you are placed under suspension for review, 72 hours in total (2023-12-23 10:30 to 2023-12-26 10:30), for the following: > > 1. Deep visits on December 8 and December 15: registered purpose inconsistent with the minutes' content (minutes DA-R-0417-002/003, 3 instances of off-script statements); > 2. December 11 refusal to execute cognitive smoothing, one demerit on record (VT-2023-1187), with a written warning already on file (December 18); > 3. Information circulating online involves accounts linked to this employee's work orders; verification in progress. > > During suspension: disposition authority frozen (including work-order operations, account access, deep visits, payment authorization); building access reduced to Tower B floor 1; pay issued at 60% of base salary. Please remain reachable before December 26, 10:30; the review findings will be notified separately.
There was no link under item three. He scrolled back up, found the seven words "accounts linked to this employee's work orders," counted them. Seven.
He'd been waiting for item three since the night before. That Thursday rumor post—"their team has another one, paying his own mother's account, and a debt collector at that"—the poster's account page emptied, the post deleted, screenshots still circulating. Friday afternoon someone forwarded the screenshot into the company group, withdrew it, forwarded it again a minute later, didn't withdraw it. He'd seen it, said nothing. Feng Tuo's assistant came into the group ten minutes later with two lines of official wording asking people not to discuss. The wording ran about as long as the post.
Attached below the email was an enclosure list. Item seven: Accounts in Handling Handover Form, six of them. Friday he had just copied Su Man's notes from that sheet of paper into the workbench, and the remarks column held the words verbatim: hard. don't lean on him. son in the south, phone goes through, don't call mornings, mornings he sleeps.
The handover form's disposition column read: to be managed by the team lead during suspension.
He messaged his lead: the one in the handover notes with the son in the south—no calls in the morning, he sleeps. The reply came back "got it"; half a minute later, another: look after yourself first.
At eleven, the icons on the work terminal all went gray. He tapped through them one by one: account disposition, gray. Deep visit, gray. Introspection cache, gray. Payment authorization, gray. He tried to pull up his own seven years of operation records for a look—the audit-trail page was gray too. The last thing he opened was the sticky note in the badge sleeve, paper, offline, still legible. He slid the note out, looked at it, slid it back. Six lines on it: the fifth, K-11 09:52:11; the sixth, "high risk."
He read the email twice and marked it seen. A receipt page popped up; the receipt recipient was that same address that would never write back.
The words "high risk" he had seen Friday in the last row of the screening sheet, blue-black ink, the characters riding the gridlines. This morning's email didn't have them. He paged back and forth twice. Not there.
The three off-script statements he could count without opening the minutes. First: "can this score be used for someone else"—he had answered "it can transfer"; the script had no such exchange. Second: eight li for stitching shoe soles, one fen for spinning tassels, the work-point translation—both sentences went into the recording. Third: the rehearsal; the words "you play Chuan Chuan" landed on page 21 of the transcript. Friday, Legal had had him confirm the record; those three were already printed on paper and he had signed each one "true." Nobody called it a problem then. Today's email called it item one.
He had printed the handover form Friday night and brought it home; three A4 pages. At noon he spread them on the desk and went through them again. Zheng*hai, 3,340.66, installment 14, monthly 186, due on the 14th. Aunt Shao, installments 300, recovery probability 78—Su Man had said it was written high, she'd write sixty. Li Gui, son in the south, phone goes through, don't call mornings, mornings he sleeps. Wang Mouying, daughter abroad, goes by email, slow to reply isn't refusal to pay. With a pencil he numbered the points that needed handing off in the page margins, up to six. At the sixth he stopped. These six accounts were the ones Su Man had trained on; Su Man had taught him, don't listen to what they say, listen to their bills. He was suspended now; the bills would go unheard for a while.
He folded the three pages and slid them inside the cover of the wall calendar behind the door. If his access came back Monday, hand them over in person. If it didn't, the paper would be here—whoever took over would read it.
In the afternoon he went to the supermarket. A bag of baby bok choy, six eggs, a bag of rice. In the checkout line the two people ahead were talking about the trending story; one said the woman was pitiable, one said pitiable my foot, the company's payout had already covered her losses. The scanner at the register wouldn't read; the bag of rice took two passes to go through. He carried the bags out; the wind bit the plastic handles into his fingers, two white grooves.
Xiao Zhou sent a message: Ge, that thing they're saying in the group—it's got nothing to do with you, right. Half a minute later: forget I asked. Liang Cheng sent back a period. The other side showed typing, typed for a long time, and nothing came. He scrolled the thread up; the previous message still sat at the end of November, asking about the microwave registration form.
Three o'clock, Tower B floor 1. His card still opened the first floor. Su Man's cardboard box was stacked by the front desk, label facing out: awaiting pickup. He stood a moment. The receptionist knew him; she asked, picking it up for someone? Their own ID card required. He said no, and walked.
An A4 sheet was taped to the noticeboard by the elevators, four corners of clear tape, headed Statement on Recent False Information Online, dated Wednesday. In the lower right corner someone had traced a question mark in pen, traced it twice. He stood and read it through, two minutes. Line by line it matched the accounts he'd checked; not one line mentioned AC-0417, and not one mentioned a person.
Three thirty, he sat on the steps of the convenience store downstairs and opened the Afterlife Cloud app on his phone. The account-events page of the executor subscription.
Account: AC-0417. The status field had changed.
Yesterday it was a yellow ground; today, one line of red: structural change in progress (unattended · downgrade assessment underway). He tapped into the details; a gray-ground note came up:
> As the disposition officer's authority is frozen, this account has entered unattended status. Per Persona Continuity Maintenance Policy V4.2 §5.1, unattended status reaching 6 hours triggers a downgrade assessment; upon assessment approval the downgrade executes; downgrades are irreversible.
He read the 6-hours line again. Frozen at ten thirty. He did the arithmetic: half past four in the afternoon.
He messaged his lead: can a temporary disposition officer be assigned. Ten-odd minutes later, the reply: asked; the process has no such item; during suspension the account hangs on the system. What hanging on the system meant, he knew. The system doesn't sit with her. The system only assesses.
At four twenty-nine he stood and walked home. Halfway there the phone buzzed.
A push. From the system, a small gray-bordered box, identical to the hundreds he had read aloud for other people over five years:
> [Afterlife Cloud] Account AC-0417 downgrade complete (Level 3 → Level 2). Items deleted in this downgrade: second son · Liang Chuan; husband · funeral. Storage remaining: stove scene (compressed), base voice, call module. You may sign in to the family end to view the change notice.
He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. A car honked behind him; he stepped to the side.
Second son · Liang Chuan. Husband · funeral.
He tapped into the change notice. In the pending-deletion list, the orange ground was gone from the row PENDING-0417-01; the status had gone from "pending deletion" to "deleted," deletion time 16:32:47. Node weight 0.31. Last data update: Mid-Autumn three years ago, 00:14. Below it one more line, small: husband · funeral (217 linked memories, weight 0.31, deleted).
217. He counted the figure out once. 217 days, 217 entries. He couldn't find any arithmetic in it; probably there was none.
At four thirty-six, the second push:
> [Afterlife Cloud] Account AC-0417 downgrade complete (Level 2 → Level 1). Items deleted in this downgrade: scene module · kitchen; taste associations; event index, last three years. Storage remaining: base voice, call module, single scene (default). You may sign in to the family end to view the change notice.
The kitchen was gone. The pot on the stove, the aluminum kettle for boiling water, the white tiles with yellow grout, the note on the fridge—is the gas off. The utility bills gone soft with oil. The old knife scars on the cutting board. He had been thinking that next time he went in, he'd tell her about those 47 payments of 180. No need to think about this month's quota now; one visit left on the quota, and he couldn't go in—authority frozen until half past ten on the 26th.
Was the note on cigarette-pack paper still there. Three lines, under the fridge magnet, next to "is the gas off." Whether the fridge counted as kitchen or as her, the terms didn't say. He paged through the change notice three times; among the deleted items there was no line for the note. No such line could mean it wasn't deleted, or it wasn't worth deleting.
What a Level 3 archive keeps once the kitchen is gone he could recite from the terms: base voice, call module, single scene. The single scene defaults to the bedroom. He had never once been inside that bedroom.
At night he turned the electricity bill over and added a line on the back. The other side held the 47 payments copied down Thursday night. He added: 12/23 16:32 deleted Chuan Chuan. 16:36 deleted the kitchen.
Done, he capped the pen and did no more arithmetic.
At eight thirty he couldn't lie still; he sat up and ran through the hashtag again. #EmployeeDeletesDaughtersDigitalPersona# had dropped from 3rd to 11th; further down it was 17. Something else had taken the top slot. The official push with the 96.4% was still on the home page, likes frozen at yesterday's count. The reversal post was unfindable; screenshots of its deletion still circulating, a few new accounts among the forwards. One comment said, heard their team has another one, paying his own mother's account. Someone below asked who; nobody answered.
There was another long screenshot, newly forwarded; somebody had dug up the Basic tier price list—one eighty a month—and below it people were doing the math: six yuan a day, won't even put out six yuan a day. He'd seen that arithmetic before; someone on the team had done it last month. He hadn't taken it up then. He didn't take it up now.
He put the phone face down.
At nine, Liang Chuan sent a message: a screenshot, the push on his own name at the family end, identical to the one Liang Cheng had received, framed in red: deleted: second son · Liang Chuan.
Below it, one line typed: what does this mean.
Liang Cheng stared at the line. He thought, then replied: the system deleted it. Downgrade. Never mind it.
Even as he sent it he deleted "never mind it" and changed it to: I'll handle it Monday.
Nothing came back from that end. After a while, the entrance to Liang Chuan's Moments lit with a red dot. He opened it; no new post—a new comment had appeared under the pinned one, the newest, tonight at nine twenty-one: if Ma were still here, seeing this would break her heart.
The commenter's avatar was Liang Chuan's own.
He pressed and held on the comment; the input box came up, cursor blinking. He typed three words, deleted them, backed out. The red dot still burned.
At nine forty the phone buzzed again. Not a push this time; the team lead: tomorrow, Zheng*hai on the handover form stays frozen, touch nothing else. Keep your phone on. A minute later: 72 hours. Don't go wandering.
He sent back: all right.
Everything viewable in the Afterlife Cloud app, he had viewed. The points page was still there, balance 6. The repair-voucher row still priced at 200, icon unchanged. He looked at the two numbers a while and backed out.
The quote was the PDF he'd saved the day of the B2 machine room. Disc pull 2,400, rebuild 4,800, calibration 1,400, total 8,600. Below it, one line of preconditions: no outstanding balance on the account. He ran the outstanding figure through his head: 41,507.70. The two together: 50,107.70. On the disc was the her of five years ago—stove still there, funeral not deleted, Chuan Chuan hanging on the pending-deletion list, untouched; nobody missing. The her off the disc had taken two cuts this afternoon, and what remained was a bedroom he had never entered.
The application page required the executor's signature. This executor couldn't open so much as a work order until half past ten on the morning of the 26th.
He closed the PDF, took no screenshot.
He laid the phone face down on the desk. Firecrackers outside; not the new year—a restaurant downstairs opening. The sound came in waves.
He remembered an unanswered message and opened the work terminal—gray, no way in. It was the December 1 message he'd sent He Yu, asking about the restoration channel; it had shown delivered ever since. That wasn't what he wanted to ask. What he wanted to ask was whether the deleted things still existed anywhere in K-11. K-11 was the snapshot of five years ago, March 14, 09:52:11. The kitchen was still there then. The funeral hadn't happened. Chuan Chuan still hung on the pending-deletion list, undeleted.
In that snapshot, nobody is missing.
He took the badge out of the drawer, turned it over, and below the sixth line of the sticky note added a seventh: It's all in the snapshot. Added, he slipped the badge back into the drawer, turned off the light, lay down.
At eleven, the phone lit once more in the dark. He didn't look. He had the red line of the push memorized, and reciting it he found he always paused at the semicolon between "second son · Liang Chuan" and "husband · funeral," as if the semicolon were a place to draw breath.
He couldn't sleep; he got up and put the rice on to soak. Soak the rice the night before, bring it to a boil then low heat, twenty minutes, turn off the flame and let it sit.
That was what she'd taught Liang Chuan that morning.