In the summer of 2044, Beijing was hot enough to be a giant steamer.
It wasn't the usual muggy, sauna-like heat of years past, but a naked, almost malicious roasting. The asphalt road shimmered with a dizzying oily sheen under the noon glare, and the air was thick with the acrid chemical smell of volatilizing bitumen.
Chen Xu stood at the end of the top-floor corridor of the Mingde Law Building at Renmin University. The back of his shirt was already soaked through with sweat, plastering to his spine, making his already overheated body feel even worse.
He lifted his wrist to check his watch. 2:15 PM. His mentor, Shen Qingyuan, had been inside for four full hours.
Today, everything felt wrong.
The entire floor had been cleared. All administrative staff had been sent home early for "line maintenance." Only Chen Xu, as Shen Qingyuan's sole doctoral student, was allowed to stay outside the cordon because he held a project application that required a signature today.
Chen Xu's gaze drifted past the corridor to the two tightly closed dark red wooden doors at the end. That was "Conference Room One," usually reserved for inspection teams at the ministerial level or above. At this moment, two men in military uniforms stood on either side of the doors. They wore no badges displaying any information, their waists bulged slightly, and air-tube earpieces hung from their ears. They stood straight as ramrods, like two lifeless sculptures, turning a blind eye to the suffocating heat around them.
For some reason, the term "Praetorian Guard" came to Chen Xu's mind.
What truly unsettled Chen Xu wasn't these two gatekeepers, but the others who were also barred from entering.
Squatting on the left side of the windowsill was a middle-aged man with messy hair, wearing a plaid shirt. He wore plastic slippers on his feet and his arms were locked tight around a reinforced laptop covered in heat-dissipation stickers. In the brief moment the man came out to use the restroom, Chen Xu had heard his hysterical, low roar into the phone: "...It's not an algorithm problem! It's energy consumption! If you don't hook that machine up to liquid nitrogen, it will burn through the floor in ten minutes! You have no idea how many teraflops of computing power that is..."
On the bench at the other end of the corridor sat an old man in a grey Sun Yat-sen suit. The old man kept his eyes closed, hands folded on his knees in a standard military sitting posture. Although Chen Xu didn't know him, his face seemed to have appeared in some news report about a national defense lecture on "hypersonic weapons."
A computer lunatic, a national defense strategist, and a professor of civil law reform. Three types of people, three completely unrelated individuals, gathered together without rhyme or reason.
The chirping of cicadas outside the window suddenly pitched up. Chen Xu felt an inexplicable palpitation. He subconsciously looked out the window. Through the UV-blocking glass, the sun hung in the pale sky. It looked no different than it had billions of years ago—still brilliant, generous, shining on all things. But on Chen Xu's retinas, that ball of light seemed excessively blinding this afternoon, so dazzling he dared not look directly at it.
2
Click.
The dark red wooden door finally cracked open. A draft of cold air mixed with the heavy smell of tobacco and a certain stale mustiness surged out from the gap, instantly diluting the heat in the corridor.
Shen Qingyuan walked out.
Chen Xu immediately went up to him: "Professor."
With just one look, Chen Xu froze. When they left in the morning, Shen Qingyuan had been spiritedly complaining about Beijing's traffic. But now, he looked as if he had aged ten years in just four hours. His white shirt, always ironed meticulously, had its collar pulled open, his tie was askew, and a thin layer of mist covered his glasses lenses.
What alarmed Chen Xu most was his teacher's eyes. It was a completely hollow stare, the sluggishness of reason not yet fully returning after witnessing some colossal disaster.
"Professor, the application..." Chen Xu tentatively held out the document in his hand.
Shen Qingyuan lowered his head, his gaze focusing on the thick stack of materials regarding the "Amendment to the Civil Code" in Chen Xu's hand. He stared at that title for a long time and said:
"Throw it away." Shen Qingyuan's voice was hoarse, as if his throat was filled with gravel.
"Huh?" Chen Xu thought he had misheard. "But this is what you led the team working on for half a year..."
"Throw it away." Shen Qingyuan looked up, took off his glasses, and slowly wiped them with a slightly dirty cloth. "Chen Xu, the world of the future may no longer need a 'Civil Code.' The days of sentimentally discussing 'property relations between people' are over."
Chen Xu's hand holding the document froze in mid-air. He had never seen his teacher show this kind of expression—neither sadness nor anger, but a bottomless despair.
"Professor, what exactly happened?" Chen Xu lowered his voice. "Is it war?" The soldiers in the corridor forced him to associate the situation with such a terrible scenario.
Shen Qingyuan did not answer. He turned and looked at the window at the end of the corridor. Downstairs, a group of graduates in academic gowns were throwing their mortarboards. Young smiling faces bloomed in the sunlight, the sound of camera shutters drowned out by the cicadas. It was the quintessential picture of an era of peace.
"If it were war, that would be fine," Shen Qingyuan muttered to himself. "Wars always have an end. Even a nuclear winter is only a hundred years."
He suddenly turned around, staring dead at his student. "Chen Xu, you are the student with the tightest logic I have ever taught. You are even a bit rigid; this is a flaw in academia, but today... it might be your only virtue."
The man in the black suit who had been standing by the door walked over. He held an unmarked kraft paper file bag and handed it to Shen Qingyuan.
Shen Qingyuan took the file bag, his movements heavy as if accepting an urn of ashes. He looked at Chen Xu, a trace of unbearable reluctance in his eyes.
"The people inside need a recorder. A recorder who can translate those insane ideas into rigorous legal statutes," Shen Qingyuan said. "You can refuse. The choice is still in your hands right now. Turn around, go downstairs, have a good meal, and go back to the dorm to sleep. Forget everything you saw today."
Chen Xu looked at his teacher. In that instant, the instinct of a law student allowed him to capture the key information. "If I go in, does that mean I can't come out?"
"Until the mission is complete, or until... that result arrives, you will no longer be Chen Xu, no longer a student of Renmin University." Shen Qingyuan pointed to the red seal on the file bag. "You will become a classified code name."
The air in the corridor seemed to solidify. The computer science Ph.D. in the plaid shirt had already been taken inside; before leaving, he was still muttering, "Its logic is perfect."
Chen Xu took a deep breath. He thought of the look in his teacher's eyes when he looked at the sun just now. The look of someone watching a bomb about to explode.
"I'll go in with you," Chen Xu said.
Shen Qingyuan was silent for two seconds, then nodded without a word of praise. At a time like this, dragging a young man into this abyss was, in itself, a form of cruelty.
3
The curtains in the conference room were drawn tight, letting in not a sliver of light. The long table in the center of the room was piled high with messy files and ashtrays. The air was turbid enough to suffocate.
Chen Xu's entry did not attract attention, or perhaps the people in the room simply didn't care anymore.
On the projection screen at the front of the conference room, there was no PowerPoint presentation, only a massive chart with red lines on a black background. In the center of the chart was a sphere, surrounded by densely packed annotations of various parameters. And at the very bottom of the chart, a line of jumping red countdown numbers appeared particularly piercing.
[Time to Helium Flash Window: Estimated 34 Years 11 Months 05 Days]
Helium Flash? The sudden onset of nuclear fusion in the core of a medium-mass star or on the surface of a white dwarf... why would...
"Sign him the NDA." A middle-aged man sitting at the head of the table spoke. His voice was soft but carried an unquestionable pressure.
A document was pushed in front of Chen Xu. The header wasn't the common "Non-Disclosure Agreement," but a line of large, bold black characters: "United Government (Prep) Special Crisis Response Committee · Legal Advisory Group Conscription Order"
It seemed simple, like the premiere of a Marvel movie. Sign the NDA and you get to watch the blockbuster.
But Chen Xu knew very well that sign or not, he could no longer back out today.
Chen Xu picked up the pen. There was still much confusion in his heart, but he still signed his name. The moment the last stroke fell, he felt as if he had signed a deed of indenture, selling the rest of his life to an unknown fate.
"Welcome aboard." The middle-aged man took back the document and pointed to an empty chair in the corner. "Sit, young man. We don't have time for pleasantries. You'll have to find a way to understand the specifics later; we won't go over the meeting content again just for you. Please understand."
Chen Xu sat down. Directly in front of him sat a somewhat strange terminal. It didn't look like an ordinary computer; it had no graphical interface, only lines of green code scrolling madly on a black screen. The chassis emitted a low hum, like the breathing of some giant beast.
"What is this?" Chen Xu whispered to Shen Qingyuan beside him.
"550," Shen Qingyuan's voice carried a trace of strangeness. "A supercomputer. Or rather... our future colleague."
At this moment, the screen of that terminal suddenly flickered. The cursor stopped jumping.
A palm-sized screen rose from the desk in front of Chen Xu.
A line of white Chinese characters, without anyone operating the keyboard, was typed out word by word on the screen, directly facing Chen Xu:
[New user detected: Legal Advisory Group, Chen Xu.]
[System self-check complete.]
[Current Task: Calculate feasibility of the "Human Tinder Selection Act".]
[Question: If 3.5 billion people must be abandoned, please provide a legal interpretation consistent with the spirit of the human constitution.]
Chen Xu looked at the continuously blinking cursor on the screen. The chirping of cicadas outside the window filtered faintly through the thick walls, sounding like the screams of countless souls in a raging fire.
This year, Chen Xu was twenty-seven years old. In this originally unremarkable summer, he faced the world's ultimate nightmare for the first time. And the only weapons in his hand were a fountain pen and a legal code that was about to become invalid.