Qingming: A Man from the Future Lives Inside Me

While washing my car, I checked the dashcam footage and stumbled upon an explicit conversation between my wife and my boss inside the car: “We’ll divorce him once we’ve drained his savings.”

On Qingming Festival, clutching my phone full of damning messages, I drove to a cemetery on the outskirts of the city and headed up the hill behind it. I’d even brought a gas canister, but then a flash of blue light slammed into the roof of my car.

“Consciousness Entity 074 successfully bound. Carrier in critical condition detected. Forced takeover initiated!”

When I opened my eyes, there was a person from the future in a silver-gray uniform inside my mind. He called my suicide attempt “inefficient” and scolded me for being “irrational” about being cheated on. Yet when my ex-wife turned the tables and accused me of domestic violence, he helped me hack the surveillance cameras to find evidence. He swallowed an entire takeout meal, mistaking it for “future nutritional paste,” wrote a leave request in code and was taken for a lunatic by my boss, and even taught the old man downstairs to play chess, winning the pension he’d set aside for his property fees.

From then on, I lived a life of “my left hand fighting my right” and “calm one second, mechanically roasting people the next”