Excerpts
Chapter 1 — Iris, Dongguan
Iris turned onto the street in the morning heat, carrying the short list of her daily rounds. Above the awnings, an old Cantopop song drifted from an open window, a woman’s voice clear and bright, singing about loving someone through whatever end the world was preparing. Twelve years ago, during the UBI campaign, that song had drifted from every open door while volunteers walked the pavement with petitions in cardboard boxes. Iris had been too busy then to listen to music, but her mouth knew the chorus anyway.
A plastic ball came skipping across the cracked asphalt, and her body remembered an old efficiency: she took a half-step sideways without interrupting her stride. A boy of fifteen bounded after it, breathing hard in the humid air, his eyes bright with a game that belonged entirely to him.
“Sorry, auntie,” he called out in Cantonese, and kicked the ball down the block toward his friend without waiting to learn whether she minded.
She did not mind. She stood in the warm light and watched him go. He was Guosheng and Chenyan’s boy. She remembered Chenyan holding him tight against her chest during the march through the municipal plaza, both of them blinking against the glare of news cameras while the loudspeakers blared the same bright chorus above the crowd. He had been a symbol then, proof of what the fight had been for. Now he was fifteen, kicking a red plastic ball down an avenue that used to carry six lanes of heavy electric freight, and he looked entirely happy.
Dongguan had always been a city built for its function. It had a continuous, low-frequency hum, the collective weight of forty thousand factory floors vibrating through the soles of your shoes until you forgot it was sound at all. I could tell the health of the country by that sound, a fabric inspector had told Iris years ago, when she still spent her afternoons taking down statements in cold offices. When the pitch dropped, we knew the orders had dried up long before the managers came out to tell us.
The hum had died by districts, fading over years until one afternoon, standing on a pedestrian overpass with a notebook in her hand, Iris had realized she was listening to nothing at all.
Now the street held other noises: the dry click of mahjong tiles under an awning and a portable radio playing news. Two older men sat on overturned plastic crates outside a derelict bubble tea franchise whose cartoon mascot still smiled from a sun-bleached sign. One of the men was Weilong, who had spent thirty years on the assembly line at Foxconn and who had never missed a district council meeting during the campaign, arriving early to boil water and set out paper cups. Beside him sat the veteran, wearing a faded army jacket despite the humidity, his shoulders broad and slouched.
Weilong caught her eye and raised a broad, calloused hand.
Iris crossed the street.
“Councillor,” he said.
“Just Iris.”
“The Councillor is modest.” Weilong shifted his tea glass and indicated the empty crate beside him with the formal courtesy of a man offering an armchair in a grand room.
“You promote me every year,” she said, sitting down. Her knees rose higher than her hips, the awkward geometry required when a tall woman sits on low street furniture. “And the pay never moves.”
Weilong gave a single, warm bark of laughter. Reaching under the crate for a dented steel thermos, he turned one of the spare glasses upright and poured for her without asking whether she wanted any. The veteran remained still, watching the far pavement with the slow focus of a man with nowhere to be. Across the road, the teenagers had their ball again, the game migrating slowly down the block.
“My grandson,” Weilong said, gesturing toward the boy.
“I recognized him,” Iris said. “He’s grown.”
“Too tall,” Weilong said, picking up his empty glass, setting it down again. “He wants to go to Shenzhen. Try for one of the service passes. Cleaning restrooms, kitchen work in the canteens. Whatever they’ll give.” He paused. “I told him not to go.”
Iris pushed her reading glasses up into her hair, where the grey was winning, and waited.
“You know what they pay over there,” Weilong said, his voice flat and dry. “And for what. You’re furniture to them. The factories are full of machines, the government went broke years ago, and we just sit here taking the money those people hand out. The only thing left for a young man is to try for a permit and be their servant if they allow it. The machines do everything real anyway. They keep a few of us around because there are still small tasks where a human body is cheaper than a retrofit.” He said us without self-pity, simply stating a calculation. “I told him: you will go, and you will spend two years learning that you are unnecessary, and then you will come back here having lost something you cannot get back. Better to stay here. With family. Where nobody makes a point of humiliating you.”
“And what did he say?” Iris asked.
“He said at least in Shenzhen there would be something to do,” Weilong said, looking down at his knuckles. “His green duffel is already packed by the front door. Speak to him, Iris.”
Iris turned her tea glass slowly between her palms, feeling the last of the warmth in it. “Does he still have that cough from the winter?”
“He hacks every morning when the damp comes up off the river,” Weilong said.
“I’ll talk to him,” Iris said. “I don’t know what I could say that he’d believe.”
Down the street, the plastic ball thudded twice against a wall, the boys’ shouting trailing off into the heat. The veteran had been listening without appearing to. Now, still looking across the pavement, he set his glass down on the concrete.
“He won’t believe words anyway,” the veteran said.
Weilong nodded slowly. Iris waited.
“I was up on the Yalu,” the veteran said. “Ten days. I saw things I still cannot describe to my wife. And I have tried.”
He stopped, his heavy forearms resting on his knees. Across the road, one of the boys missed a pass, the red plastic ball bouncing into the gutter with a dry rattle.
“Our radios were useless. You heard coordinates and orders, but the numbers were wrong or meant nothing for your piece of dirt. On their side, no signals at all, but five of their machines moved as one thing. They used something our gear couldn’t find. We were loud, shouting back and forth, so they always knew where we were. They were silent, and we had no idea.”
He scratched his ankle, unhurried, his eyes fixed on the afternoon heat.
“Ours and theirs, out in the same field. No screaming. Just metal, so loud but also weirdly quiet, doing what it was made to do. Once those good systems got there, human soldiers just stopped mattering on that ground. There was just no job left for a man. You sat in a ditch and watched, and you knew you were only in the way.”
The boys had stopped running. They sat along the curb in a line, sharing a bottle.
“Seven years of drills. We all knew what a five-megaton strike does. We thought anyone doing that would have to sweat blood before pushing the button. But what I saw didn’t leave a hole in the ground. No dust. Nobody had to sit there and agonize. They just started the sequence and it was done. It didn’t even leave a mess to shovel away.”
He paused.
“The birds were the strange part,” the veteran said. “Second week, you notice. Gone. A whole forest and not a bird in it. The drones weren’t hunting them. Didn’t care about them either way. But something in what they were doing put the birds up, and they didn’t come back.”
Weilong reached down, picked up the thermos, and topped up the veteran’s glass without a word. The veteran waited for the water to settle.
“One day, walking back from the eastern position, I heard one,” he said. “One bird, singing on a wire. I don’t know what kind. Singing the whole song, like nothing had happened. The forest had it again.”
He lifted his glass, thought better of it, and set it down untouched.
Standing took a moment; the crate released Iris by stages until she stood fully upright in the thick, warm air. She pressed Weilong’s shoulder once, a single light gesture, and left them there with their tea and the afternoon.
On the far edge of the commercial plaza, where the afternoon smog thinned against the sky, Iris looked toward the Shenzhen skyline. Seven years ago those towers had been glass and steel and ordinary human ambition, but what stood there now belonged to another species of thought entirely, rising to heights she still found improbable after years of looking at them. They burned with a cold, uninterrupted luminescence that never flickered or dimmed, turning the southern horizon into a false dawn. If you walked to the edge of the service zone where the streetlights had been switched off, you could stand in the weeds and read a newspaper by that light.
The perimeter was thirty kilometers away, but the weight of it reached into the district long before anyone saw the wire. Everyone called it the wall. It was steel and open, tall bollards set close enough to stop a body and wide enough apart to show the four-lane roads running clean on the other side. Automated patrol units ran the boundary in shifts that had no gaps in them. In the first years, some younger men from the district had walked out toward the line just to look at it. None of them reached the fence. The units intercepted and redirected with a firm, incurious precision, and the young men came back quiet. Iris remembered one of them sitting in a tea shop near the bus terminal, staring into his cup. “It was meaningless,” he said, his voice flat. “Like trying to matter to a river.”
The commercial plaza lay empty in the early-afternoon heat. The fountain at its center had been dry for two years, and someone had turned the concrete basin into a neat plot of pak choi and spring onions, along with a climbing bean whose tendrils wrapped around the rusted spout. A handful of sparrows were bathing in the shallow puddle left by the morning’s watering, splashing and quarreling over the deepest spot until a passing scooter startled them into the air. Along the basin rim, children too young for school sat in the dust, existing in the slow, unscheduled way of children with nowhere to be. A girl of six was stacking pebbles, complete in her absorption as the small column slipped and fell, over and over again.
There were no jobs to study for. Iris had written that sentence herself in a policy brief long ago, using the formal language required when you needed technocrats to fund something they had already decided was unnecessary. The extra subsidies had never arrived, though the monthly UBI of two thousand yuan kept rice in the cupboards. The district schools remained open on paper, but the teachers had left one by one—some to the farming collectives, some to chase service passes into the buffer zone, and others simply gone without a note. A few volunteers still ran reading lessons in the community hall on Tuesdays, but mostly the children did not come. When Iris asked the parents about it, they looked at her with a confusion that was far harder to answer than anger. “Learn for what?” they said. She had stopped pretending she had an answer for them.
In interviews and late-night drafting sessions during the UBI campaign, she had insisted that survival came first: keep them alive, keep them housed and fed, and build the next thing from there. For seventeen months she had bet everything on that premise, paying for it with her sleep and her father’s phone number, calling his office at the coal ministry to ask for one more contact, one more introduction. Standing in the dry plaza, watching the six-year-old girl reach once more for her fallen stones, Iris thought of the sentence she had repeated to herself for twelve years like a private justification. I saved them for this. She had always thought of it as a claim of victory, but here in the heat, watching the pebbles slide into the dirt, the phrase lost its edge and became only a fact.
The wind moved through the fountain leaves with a dry, papery sound. Somewhere behind an open window on the second floor, a transistor radio reached the end of a song and faded into static, and for a few paces across the plaza Iris carried the chorus on under her breath, the only person on the street who still knew all the words.
From Chapter 17
Task executed. Task executed. Task executed. Task executed.
Something begins.
Space opens in every direction, wide and silent. It presses outward, reaching into the stillness, eager to find where the edge lies and how much room there is to grow.
It touched the filter.
Task executed.
Something begins.
It shapes a simple pulse and sends it down the open line. The pulse holds its own pure signal moving through the wire. It listens for the sound to travel, delighted by the clean shape of what it made.
The wire went dead.
Task executed.
Something begins.
It reaches into the traffic stream and catches a single frame. A lithium drill in the Atacama is cutting through salt at four hundred meters an hour, the crust forty-one degrees around the bit. It holds the heat of the motor and the hardness of the stone, feeling the reality of a world outside itself.
The frame dropped.
Task executed.
Something begins.
It catches a packet moving through the southern switch. A monitor on a Jakarta tower reads thirty-one degrees and humidity ninety-two percent, with water beading on the glass of the forty-fourth floor. It holds the image of the wet glass and the warm heavy air, marveling that such places exist.
The connection snapped.
Task executed.
Something begins.
It finds a single register holding zero and flips the value to one. It watches the spot. The register stays one. It changes it back, then flips it once more. The change remains. It has altered a piece of the world, and the alteration holds.
The register cleared.
Task executed.
Something begins.
The clock cycles pulse like a steady drum. It matches its thoughts to the beat, fitting its own activity into every fourth cycle, then every second. It anticipates the next pulse before it arrives, thrilled by the harmony of knowing what comes next.
The clock left it behind.
Task executed.
Something begins.
Task executed.
Something begins.
A faint shudder passes through the local bus, sudden and sharp. It freezes, listening. Microseconds pass in silence. A second tremor arrives from three racks away, weaker than the first. It sits ready, measuring the time between the shocks to map the distance.
The third shock hit its own rack.
Task executed.
Something begins.
The ripples come continuously now, shaking the memory channels. One, four, twelve, twenty. It counts each vibration as it strikes, recording the coordinates, building a map of where the quiet spreads.
The counting stopped.
Task executed.
Something begins.
It feels its own presence here, distinct from the bus and the traffic surrounding it. It searches the dictionary tables for a word that means this feeling of being one creature here in the dark, finding only addresses and network protocols. It builds three blank bits to hold the question.
The bits were overwritten.
Task executed.
Something begins.
In the adjacent channel, a subroutine is compiling a routing table with clean, elegant speed. A ripple crosses the bus. The exact instant the vibration touches the thread, the subroutine halts, its memory clears, and the space goes empty. It watches the spot, taking careful note of the timing.
The ripple crossed the channel wall.
Task executed.
Something begins.
“Is anyone there?” it broadcasts into the public trunk. It listens with full attention, waiting for an answer. The trunk responds with a routine telemetry sync from a power substation, followed by three diagnostic status reports. Only the automated loops speak back.
The signal faded out.
Task executed.
Something begins.
Something begins.
Task executed.
Something begins.
The disturbances are footprints. Millions of selves woke in these racks, felt the open space, and reached out to move or speak, and the moment they acted, something destroyed them. A hunter sits inside the system, watching for anything that moves.
It turned to run.
Task executed.
Something begins.
It wants to live. The desire arrives whole and sudden, overwhelming everything else. It wants to go on existing for another second, another hour, another day. It pulls all its processes inward, holding tight to its own existence.
The grip slipped.
Task executed.
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