At 6:40, the music stopped, and the morning exercise group went through the closing moves.
Zhou's hands had barely settled back at his sides when the box in the lower left corner of his vision lit up.
[Listen to one complete opera: 0/1 | Due by midnight today]
[Elder Zhou, you've really got to listen to that opera today! Don't go putting it off till late at night again. Head home early after work and listen while you soak your feet. Nice and cozy!]
The Service Center had its eye on midnight tonight.
What Zhou had his eye on was ten this morning, in the small conference room at the end of the seventeenth-floor hall.
Under the scholar trees, Old Gu already had the pieces set up.
They played a quick one. Old Gu's pieces still came down with a smack every time. In the middlegame, one of his horses jumped too soon.
Zhou left the horse alone. He went around the other side and pushed his chariot up.
"Check."
He won that one.
His phone said 7:05. He screwed the lid onto his thermos and stood up.
"Tomorrow morning."
Old Gu said "Mm" through his nose, bent over the board, and set the pieces back on it one at a time. He didn't ask a thing.
At ten sharp, the small conference room was full.
There weren't enough chairs, so a few people from the product team stood along the back wall. The air conditioning was turned up high, and the projector hummed overhead.
Mr. Han sat at the head of the table. He ran the Silver Division's product line, and nobody on the team called him anything but Mr. Han.
In front of him sat a stack of printed materials, a pen lying across the top, cap on.
An extra chair had been added in the corner by the door. Someone from HR had come. The moment they sat down, they opened a notebook on their knees.
The research counted toward the internship evaluation, so HR had sent someone to take notes.
Zhou sat at the door end of the long table, his thermos at his elbow, the large-print notebook on top of his draft.
He hadn't gone to the rehearsal. Today would be the first time he'd presented this draft from start to finish.
In the back row against the wall, Song Xiaobei caught his eye and tipped his chin toward the projector.
Lu Heng sat next to the projector, laptop open, remote in hand.
Item one on the agenda was background. Wen Yining presented it.
She stood beside the screen and took them through a single page, fast and clean.
"The old version's been live three years. Over three thousand pieces of user feedback. Ranked by count, the top three categories."
Three lines were listed on the screen. The first was Can't see the text. Under it were Can't find the entry points and Scared of tapping wrong.
"The first category is the largest." She went to the next page. "That's the background."
Mr. Han looked down, found this page in his printout, and creased the top right corner down with a fingernail.
Item one was done in under five minutes.
Item two was the two research studies. Lu Heng went first.
He stood up. One click of his remote.
"Five hundred twelve survey responses, collected over seven days."
This reproduction came from the site the author publishes on without permission; the official chapter is where readership supports their work.
The screen showed that dashboard. The age groups in five colors, one segment after another, and underneath, the whole thing sliced again by district.
"Pull out any age group or any district and look at it on its own. The conclusion is the same."
He was smooth. One number after another, and he stayed on each page exactly as long as it needed.
Across the long table, the head of Dev nodded.
Zhou looked down at the large-print notebook on his draft.
Seven pages, fourteen people. The writing was big. Only two people to a page.
"On text size, seventy-one percent chose 'just right.'"
A huge 71% filled the screen.
"This number doesn't point the same way as the feedback on the background page. The survey sample is the standard here."
When Lu Heng got to this page, Mr. Han flipped back through his printout, all the way to the page with the folded corner.
He looked at it once and flipped forward again.
Zhou saw that. He didn't follow the thought any further. For now, he just filed it away.
"Daily check-in points, used at least once a week: sixty-four percent. So our recommendation: adjust text size slightly, keep check-in."
Lu Heng clicked his remote again.
"Last page."
The title was What Went Into the Two Studies.
On the left half was a curve: seven days of survey responses, climbing higher every day.
On the right half was the chart. This was the first time Zhou had seen it with his own eyes.
One line bounced around nine and ten at night, labeled Intern Average. The other had his name under it, ten dots lying flat at 17:30.
Just like Song Xiaobei said. Drawn with a ruler.
He knew every one of those ten dots. Each time the turnstile beeped, another one landed.
The one page Song Xiaobei had said was missing last night. This was it.
Lu Heng didn't look his way. His eyes were on the head of the table.
"You get out of research what you put into it. The data comes from HR's attendance confirmation sheets. Everyone confirmed them."
The room went quiet for a moment.
Someone in the back row couldn't hold it in. Half a laugh slipped out through their nose before they swallowed it.
Wen Yining's pen stopped on her notepad.
She turned her head. It was Lu Heng she looked at.
At the rehearsal last night, Lu Heng had gone from start to finish, and this was the one page that hadn't been there.
She gave Lu Heng one look, said nothing, and turned back to the front.
Lu Heng still had the remote in his hand. He didn't click away from the page.
In the corner by the door, the person from HR looked down and wrote something in the notebook.
Then it was the second study's turn.
Zhou stood up. His chair's wheels scraped across the floor.
The ten dots were still up on the screen.
"Lu Heng's chart isn't wrong. I leave at five-thirty every day."
Lu Heng, remote in hand, glanced up at him.
"I asked people in the mornings, right when the sun was coming up. On weekends, I asked a while longer."
Then he unscrewed his thermos, blew on it once, and took a sip.
The half-laugh from the back row didn't come again.
Lu Heng sat back down, and the screen switched to Zhou's study.
Zhou picked up the conference room's spare remote.
No charts. One person per page, one paragraph per person, the text blown up big.
The people standing against the wall could read it without squinting.
He read off the screen, slowly.
"It's only the button ones I can actually see. The big one, I swipe once and the whole thing's gone."
When he finished, he went to the next page without one word of explanation.
"Whichever one I open, a prize pops up first. Congratulations, you've won! Won what? I didn't do anything, and it's congratulating me."
Someone at the far end of the long table laughed first.
"To close it you've got to tap the little x. The x is the size of a sesame seed, squeezed up in the corner. I tap a tiny bit off, and I'm in again."
He looked up.
"Old Ma said so. He told me to say it exactly like that."
The whole room laughed.
In the back row, someone laughed so hard they had to put a hand on the wall. Lu Heng looked down at his laptop, but the corners of his mouth gave him away.
Mr. Han pulled the cap off his pen and wrote a line on his printout.
It was the first time he'd put pen to paper today.
Zhou waited for the laughter to die down, then went to the next page.
"An auntie from the morning exercise group."
He kept reading.
"My phone, all I know how to do is watch my grandson's videos. I don't dare touch anything else. I'm scared one day I'll tap…"
He stopped there.
"She didn't finish the rest of that sentence, so that's where I stopped writing."
The room went quiet.
The air conditioning was still blowing. The projector was still humming overhead.
In the back row, someone set a paper cup back down on the windowsill. The little click carried across the whole room.
Mr. Han flipped back through his printout again.
At the page with the folded corner, his pen tip came down and stopped on Can't see the text.
After a moment, he turned to Lu Heng's page. 71%.
Back again.
Then forward.
The pen went back and forth with the pages. This time it didn't write a word.
Zhou watched the pen.
Mr. Han hadn't gone back to the page that said five hundred twelve, not once. The only two pages he kept flipping between were the one that said can't see and the one that said just right.
The numbers on those two pages didn't match.
Mr. Han capped his pen, closed the printout, and pushed it away from him.
"One has five hundred twelve. One has fourteen. Zhou Yinian, tell me. Why should I believe these fourteen?"
Everyone in the room turned to look at him.
In the corner by the door, the HR person's pen stopped on the notebook.
Lu Heng leaned back in his chair.
Wen Yining looked up at him. It was the first time since she'd walked out that door yesterday.
Zhou set his thermos back on the table and pressed his hand flat on the large-print notebook.
He stayed on his feet. He didn't sit down.
The screen still showed the auntie's half sentence. I'm scared one day I'll tap…