Zhou Yinian got to Chengshan Tower at 8:40, twenty minutes earlier than the notice said.
He'd only ever had one rule for job hunting: he had to be able to leave on time. The offer from Chengshan Group's Silver Division listed a three-month internship and the hours "9:00 to 5:30." He read it over three times and signed on the spot.
So today's goal was a simple one. Check in, get his badge, and don't mess anything up on day one.
The lobby was even more packed than he'd expected. The revolving doors swallowed people one turn after another, dress shirts and hoodies and lanyards flapping against chests, all of it surging toward the employee turnstiles. The beeps of the badge readers ran together like a supermarket checkout during a sale.
Facing the turnstiles was a huge LED screen, gold text on red, scrolling fast.
"Warmest congratulations to Group founder Mr. Gu Chengshan on his honorable retirement."
The next line rolled up right behind it: "The Board will bring in an outside management team to drive the Group's full-scale transformation."
Two people ahead of him in line were muttering.
"Regime change."
"So what? Whoever takes over, it's still overtime."
Zhou clutched his thermos and shuffled half a step forward with the crowd. The gray sweater vest he had on was one his grandma had knitted. Wedged in among all the crisp dress shirts, he looked like somebody's relative dropping off lunch.
He had his head down, scrolling his phone for the onboarding notice, when the crowd beside him suddenly parted.
An old man was walking out against the current.
He wore a thin cotton undershirt washed almost white, the kind old men wear, its collar stretched loose. He carried a cloth bag in one hand and took his time. The whole lobby was pushing in. He was the only one heading out.
The old man stopped under the screen for a few seconds. He tipped his head back and watched "honorable retirement" scroll away and come back around. Only then did he turn and go.
The bag brushed the turnstile railing with a clatter. A wooden box of Chinese chess pieces slid halfway out, and one piece popped from under the loose lid and rolled across the floor, right up to Zhou's feet.
He bent down and picked it up.
It was the red General. Its edges were worn smooth and round, and it was still a little warm in his hand.
"Sir, you dropped this."
He straightened up to hand it over just as a wave of people pushed between them. All he saw was a big-knuckled hand reach over and take the piece, then pat the cloth bag twice. The clattering stopped.
"Lose your general, and the game's lost."
His voice was quiet, and it didn't sound like he was saying it to anyone in particular.
By the time Zhou got up on his toes to look for him again, the undershirt was already through the revolving door. A blink, and it had disappeared into the March wind.
"Dude. You scanning or what?" someone behind him said.
He hurried to scan his visitor code and squeezed through the turnstile.
HR, third floor.
The HR coordinator was a fast-talking young woman. She handed him an onboarding form and a pen and tapped the page three times. "Name, ID number, emergency contact. The bottom one's optional."
Zhou looked down.
Next to "Do you accept flexible work arrangements (including overtime)?" there was an empty box.
"What does optional mean?"
"It means it won't affect your hiring." She was already flipping through the next person's file. "Everyone checks it."
He glanced over. At the long table, four or five other new hires were filling theirs out, each one faster than the last, and every one of them had checked that box. One guy had checked it so hard his pen went through the paper.
Zhou's pen came down at the edge of the box and stopped.
What came to mind was a hospital corridor.
The smell of disinfectant. An extra bed at the end of the hall. His dad, an oxygen tube in his nose, holding a phone to his ear and keeping his voice low: "I'm so sorry, boss. It's my body letting me down. I held up the project."
The pen moved away from the box and came down on the next line.
"Done." He handed the form back.
The HR coordinator gave it a quick look. Her eyes stayed on the empty box for half a second. She looked up at him and opened her mouth, but in the end she didn't say anything. The stapler clicked shut.
This copy came from the author's official page without permission; the chapter published there supports the creator through readers.
Zhou unscrewed his thermos and took a sip.
The goji berries had steeped just right.
When the elevator doors opened on the seventeenth floor, the sound of keyboards hit him first.
The open-plan desks stretched farther than he could see. It was five minutes to nine, and nearly every seat was already taken. Someone had headphones on and was in a meeting. Someone had a second coffee on their desk. In the trash can, the empty paper cups were stacked into a tower.
The HR coordinator led him to a desk.
"Ms. Wen, this is the new intern for your product team. I just sent you his info."
The woman at the desk didn't look up. A nameplate was slotted into the partition: Wen Yining. Her left hand pinned down a stack of review drafts. With her right, she swiped the trackpad, opened a file, and looked at it for two seconds.
Just two seconds. Her eyes stayed fixed on one particular line near the bottom of the screen.
Zhou had a pretty good guess which line it was.
Then she looked up, from his sweater vest to his thermos, and from the thermos back to the vest.
"Who pulled strings for this one?"
The question was for HR. She asked it right in front of him.
The typing at the nearby desks faltered for a beat.
The HR coordinator's smile froze. "He came through the regular campus hiring process. The director signed off on it."
"The regular process." Wen Yining repeated it word for word and tapped a finger on the review drafts. "Someone who came through the regular process leaves the flexibility box blank?"
This time she was looking at Zhou.
Zhou thought about it and decided to tell the truth. "The form said it was optional."
Wen Yining didn't answer that. She closed the file and lifted her chin toward something diagonally ahead. Across the aisle sat an empty desk with nothing on it but a computer that hadn't been switched on.
"That's yours. Anything else, post it in the group chat."
With that, she turned back around, her fingers already rattling across the keyboard.
The HR coordinator gave Zhou a strained, good-luck-with-that smile and clicked away in her heels.
Zhou stood in the aisle holding his thermos, looking at the back of her head.
Not a hair out of place in her ponytail. A few sticky notes covered in times lined the edge of her monitor. The earliest one said 7:30.
The woman was probably a meeting machine.
The kind that never shut down.
Zhou sat down at his desk and switched on the computer.
The onboarding email said that on day one he should log in to the intranet and finish filling out his employee profile. He logged in with his default account. The homepage was a sea of blue. In the middle was a section called "Today's Personnel Changes," four entries in all:
000001 Gu** Retired
Chen** Transferred
Lin** Joined
Zhou Yinian Joined
The three names above his had all been masked with asterisks. His sat at the bottom in full, plain as day. Most likely nobody had gotten around to masking it yet.
He clicked on his entry.
Before the profile page could load, there was a ding in his ears. Bright and crisp, exactly like the chime that calls your number at a community clinic.
He thought it was the computer and reached for the volume key. Before his hand got there, a translucent panel unfolded out of thin air in front of the screen and blocked out the profile page completely.
[Ding! The Years of Ease Retirement Living Services System has created your file]
[Client: Zhou Yinian]
[Sex: Male]
[Age: 65]
[Status: Officially retired as of today]
Zhou stared at the third line for a full five seconds.
Sixty-five.
His student ID hadn't even expired. His photo on the national student database still had the face of a kid life hadn't gotten around to beating up yet.
Probably an intranet pop-up. Or some junk software that came bundled in during setup, just to mess with new hires.
He moved the mouse to the top right corner of the panel to find the X. There was no X. Esc didn't work either. The panel didn't budge.
He reached out and pressed the power button on the monitor.
The screen went dark.
The panel was still floating in midair, all four lines intact. If anything, one more line drifted up beneath them:
[Good call turning off the screen, Elder Zhou. Your eyes need a rest too.]
Another line followed right after, in a voice as warm as a neighborhood volunteer stopping by to take your blood pressure:
[Name: Yinian, as in "years of ease." Name checks out, file confirmed! Elder Zhou, you've worked hard most of your life. From today on, you just take it easy!]
Zhou stared at the exclamation mark for a long time without blinking.
He'd gone to bed at ten last night. His eyes had no business playing tricks on him, but he rubbed them anyway. When he opened them again, the exclamation mark was still there.
He looked left, then right. The guy at the next desk, another new hire from his batch, was locked in a struggle with a spreadsheet. Diagonally ahead, the back of Wen Yining's head hadn't moved an inch.
A panel this big was hanging in midair, and not one person glanced his way. Only he could see it.
He quietly turned the monitor back on. The profile page came back up, and the panel sat on top of it the same as before.
He scooted his chair in, ducked his head, and kept his voice down. "Um, you've made a mistake. I'm only twenty-two."
[Elder Zhou, you're so young at heart!]
It even came with a thumbs-up.
"Not at heart. On my ID." He dropped his voice even lower. "Born in 2003. You can look it up."
[Okay, okay, twenty-two it is. No need to argue over a number.]
[Elder Zhou, try not to get so worked up. Watch your blood pressure.]
[And less time on that phone. It's bad for your eyes.]
Zhou looked down. Sure enough, his right hand was holding his phone.
He set it face down on the desk and opened his mouth, but he couldn't come up with a single thing to say next.
If he kept explaining, even he would start to feel like a stubborn old man who wouldn't admit his age.
A chair caster creaked beside him. His neighbor turned to look at him, then at the screen in front of him, which had nobody on it. His expression did a lap between who is this guy talking to? and should I ask to switch seats? and in the end he put his headphones on without a word.
Zhou shut his mouth and hid half his face behind his thermos.
The panel gave him no time to recover. With a ding, it flipped to the next page.
[Today's Task Has Been Posted]
[First Day of Retirement: Leave your desk by 5:30 PM. Retirees don't work overtime.]
[Reward: Revealed upon completion]
[And if you don't make it, we'll have to put on a little show for you!]
The panel shrank back into the lower left corner of his vision and turned into a small box of numbers, ticking down one at a time.
08:24:51.
08:24:50.
He looked at the numbers, and his first thought, weirdly enough, was that this thing actually got him.
Leaving on time had been his plan all along. Nobody had to force him.
His phone buzzed on the desk.
He flipped it over. He'd been added to the Silver Division group chat. Four hundred-plus people, and the messages were flying by. He scrolled up a few messages. Someone had posted that morning: "Heard the new boss is brutal." Under it was a string of "+1"s.
Before that one had even scrolled out of sight, a new message popped up on top.
Wen Yining: @All new hires Stay late tonight.
No context. No word on what for.
A few seconds later, one of the new hires replied with a crying face.
Zhou glanced up at the desk diagonally ahead. The ponytail still hadn't moved. The typing hadn't stopped once.
He looked back down.
On his left, the countdown ticked: 08:23:07.
On his right, his phone screen was still lit with Wen Yining's message: Stay late tonight.
Zhou unscrewed the lid of his thermos and blew across the top.