The Frozen-Bone Man

Zhang Yuchen, 22, works as a 996 programmer at an AI company. He wears his watch backwards, ties a woven bracelet around his wrist, keeps his charging cables in a small metal box, and sorts his socks into neat piles. He seems meticulous, but really, he’s just used to doing things that way. He looks about forty. Not because he’s old: something just went wrong during the thaw. The illness was cured, but it left furrows on his face that shouldn’t be there. He doesn’t care much. The code doesn’t care what he looks like, anyway. It’s 2040. AI has advanced a little faster than it has today, but daily life is still the same. Cram onto the subway, fix bugs, get chewed out by the manager, work until the early hours, ride a shared bike home, realize you forgot to turn off your computer, then go back. He gets along all right with his colleagues. Lao Wang, the security guard, is a decent guy. The pay is good, but nothing special. That night, he locked the company doors and rode off, only to remember halfway home that he’d left his computer on. He went back and found a lock on the ground, forced open. He called the police. He was supposed to wait for them. Then he heard a sound coming from the server room that shouldn’t have been there. The soundproof door was open, the AI hadn’t raised an alarm, and not one of the twelve security guards had woken up. “If they were here to steal graphics cards or memory sticks, I’d just run. But this is different.” He only wanted to take a look. At three in the morning, an exhausted wage slave whose brain had stopped working clutched a flashlight and headed downstairs, its fluorescent pointer blinking in the dark. He had no idea that what he was about to see was his own crime.