On the night of September 16, 2000, the scrapped display phone at the back of the counter, the one that couldn't get a signal, lit up. Someone was reading a script through the receiver, talking about events twenty-six years in the future. The number on the screen was 2026.
Zhou Hai was twenty and had only finished middle school. That day, his boss had just framed him for stealing a phone, leaving him 2,680 yuan in debt, equal to five and a half months' wages. His mother's cleaning job was in the boss's hands too. After that, every few days, the dead phone gave him three or five words: incomplete, late, growing ever less clear.
He couldn't say where those words came from. All he could say was: My cousin in Shenzhen told me. But he didn't even have his cousin's number.
