The countdown in the lower left corner hit 00:50:00, and a stack of paper slapped down on Zhou Yinian's desk.
The paper was still warm from the printer, the staple crooked in the top left corner. The first page was a table numbered 1 to 50, one app name per row.
Wen Yining stood by the desk, another stack of review drafts in her hand.
"Fifty senior apps, all available for download right now. I want to see a comparison report at nine tomorrow morning."
She got it all out in one breath, without a pause.
Zhou had just set his thermos down. "Ms. Wen, is there a format you want?"
"Figure it out."
She turned and walked off. Her ponytail swung around the corner of the aisle, and she was already back in her seat diagonally ahead. Her keyboard started up as if she'd never left her seat.
Zhou looked down at the table.
He'd spent the whole day finishing his employee profile and reading three product docs. He'd added hot water to his goji berries twice. Nobody had said a single word to him.
So this was what "Stay late tonight" had been about. The other new hires had gotten a set of meeting minutes or a reconciliation spreadsheet at most, something to fix up tonight and send her. His was the only one with fifty apps and a nine a.m. deadline.
He flipped through. Elder Edition, Large Text, Care Mode, plaza dance lessons, blood pressure check-ins, one-tap ride hailing. Each name was more caring than the last. The fifty rows ran onto the second page and took up half of it.
He did the math in his head.
Download an app, register, tap through the main features, take screenshots, uninstall. Even working fast, that was ten minutes each. Fifty apps meant five hundred minutes. Over eight hours.
And that was before writing the report. At his usual speed, this was an all-nighter.
In the lower left corner, the little box of numbers ticked quietly down.
00:48:37.
Over eight hours on one side. Forty-eight minutes on the other.
Zhou flipped back to the first page and stared at the first row for a long time. He unscrewed his thermos and took a sip.
The water had gone cold.
At 5:25, the typing across the team hadn't thinned out at all.
At the desk across from him, someone peeled the lid off a takeout container, and the smell of spicy hot pot drifted over. Farther in, someone lined up a third cup of coffee under their monitor, and someone in headphones was on a call, saying, "I'll fix this tonight and send it to you." He looked around. Not a single person was packing up.
The chair caster on his left creaked.
His neighbor pulled one side of his headphones off. He glanced first at the back of Wen Yining's head, diagonally ahead, then at the thermos on Zhou's desk, and only then leaned over. He was the same guy who'd caught Zhou talking to thin air that morning and put his headphones on without a word.
"Hey, man. I'm Song Xiaobei. Same intern batch as you."
"Zhou Yinian."
Song Xiaobei dropped his voice a notch. "Don't leave on day one. Seriously."
Then he pulled back and put his headphones on again, like someone who'd just passed a note.
Zhou glanced at the countdown.
00:04:51.
A line of small text popped up beside the box.
[Time to pack up now, Elder Zhou. Don't leave your thermos behind.]
He was going to be up all night either way. Staying up at the office was for show. Staying up at home, at least he could do it lying down.
He folded the printout in half and stuffed it into his backpack.
00:00:05.
Zhou screwed the lid of his thermos on all the way, then gave it an extra half turn.
He stood up. His chair rolled back, the casters dragging a long noise across the floor.
"It's time. I'm clocking out."
No louder than saying hi to the person at the next desk.
The desk on his left went quiet first. Song Xiaobei's hands hovered over his keyboard without striking a single key.
This reproduction was taken from the author's official page without consent, and readers support the writer by reading the chapter there.
Then the person across the way with the takeout. A slice of lotus root hung in midair between their chopsticks, broth dripping off it one drop at a time.
Farther in, the one on the call got as far as "I'll fix this tonight" and stopped.
Only one keyboard was still going.
Diagonally ahead, Wen Yining didn't look up. Her fingers didn't pause once. The light from her screen was on her face.
"People who leave on time don't last a month on my team."
A whole row of heads swung toward Zhou at once.
Zhou shouldered his backpack, slid his thermos into the side pocket, and pressed on it through the fabric. There was nothing in what she'd said to argue with, and nothing to apologize for.
"I'll take the work home. You'll have it at nine tomorrow morning."
Wen Yining's typing stopped for a moment.
Very briefly. Like hitting a wrong key, backspacing, and carrying on.
She didn't say anything else.
Zhou waited two seconds. Once he was sure nothing more was coming, he bent down and pushed his chair in under the desk.
That was when he saw Song Xiaobei's phone.
Song Xiaobei had it hidden under the edge of the desk, screen lit. He'd just started a new note, and a few words were typed in the title line: The Sayings of Bro Zhou.
Below that was a single line.
It's time. I'm clocking out. (Said it right to Ms. Wen's face. He's definitely got connections.)
Zhou stared at the words Bro Zhou.
They'd known each other for less than five minutes.
Song Xiaobei felt him looking. His hand jerked, and he flipped the phone face down on his thigh. When he looked up again, he squeezed out an extremely sincere smile for Zhou.
Zhou didn't ask.
He nodded to the row of heads and turned toward the elevators.
Only when he stepped off the product team's stretch of carpet did the keyboards behind him start up again, a click here, a click there.
The lobby was less than half as full as it had been that morning. The revolving door turned lazily. Across from the turnstiles, the LED screen was still scrolling, one line after another.
Zhou tapped his badge.
The reader beeped.
The turnstile gates folded open, and a ding sounded in his ears right along with it. It was the same chime as that morning, the one that calls your number at a community clinic.
[Ding! Task complete: First Day of Retirement]
[Retirees don't work overtime. That's the spirit!]
[Reward issued: Wisdom — Senior User Insight (Beginner)]
The panel folded away. He didn't feel any different. Nothing new seemed to have turned up in his head either.
But when he looked down, his eyes landed on the turnstile.
Taped beside the badge reader was a notice: "Hold your badge near the sensor. Proceed after the beep." One line of small, light gray text, stuck at waist height. When he'd squeezed through here that morning, he hadn't noticed it at all.
Now he spotted it at a glance. And once he'd spotted it, it was a strain to read. The text was too small, too pale, and too low. Anyone with a bad back would have to bend down to make it out.
He took two steps, then looked back.
Still a strain.
Standing by the revolving door, he kept his voice down. "Thanks. But I'll say it one more time. I'm really only twenty-two."
[Elder Zhou, you're so young at heart!]
[You worked hard today. Remember to soak your feet when you get home.]
He pushed through the revolving door.
There were no seats on the subway. He stood for forty minutes hugging his backpack, and at 6:10 he walked in the door of his rented room.
It was a single room, just big enough for a bed and a desk. On the windowsill sat a pothos his grandma had insisted he take.
He made a pot of goji tea, opened his laptop, and propped his phone up on a stand on the desk. He spread the folded printout flat and pinned one corner down with his thermos.
App number 1.
Download, open. First came a five-second splash ad. The Skip button in the top right corner was the size of a grain of rice. He tapped at it twice and missed both times.
By the time he hit it, the ad was over.
Right after that, a big box popped up in the middle of the screen: "Allow access to your location?" The two buttons below it were the same size and the same color.
Zhou's finger pulled back.
He couldn't have said why. For a second he just didn't know which one to press, and he was afraid something would go wrong if he pressed the wrong one.
He knew that move well. It was exactly what his grandma did when she held up her phone and squinted at it. She'd hold it at arm's length, bring it in close, push it away again, and finally shove it into his hand. "You look. What does it want me to do now?"
He typed a line into his document and kept going.
On the home page, he looked for the back button. It took him a while to find it, tucked away in the top left corner: a thin gray arrow almost the same color as the background.
Another line.
Uninstall. App number 2.
He found he didn't need to tap through every feature after all. In the first thirty seconds after he opened an app, he could tell where someone would get stuck and what would happen when they did. It was like an old person was sitting beside him, reaching for the screen ahead of him. All he had to do was follow that hand. Watch where it paused, where it pulled back, and where it gave up tapping altogether.
He got faster as he went. Before long he was doing one app in a little over two minutes, typing notes as he tested.
App number 11 was a plaza dance tutorial. The second it opened, it started blasting music at full volume. Zhou jumped, and his phone nearly fell off its stand.
He scrambled for the pause button. It was in the middle of the video, only showed up when you tapped the screen, and vanished again two seconds later.
He wrote that one down and laughed to himself when he was done.
At seven-thirty, his phone started buzzing on the desk.
One word on the screen: Mom.
The moment he picked up, she launched right in. "You off work yet? Are you tired?"
"Ages ago. I left on time."
"On time?"
"On time."
The line went quiet for a moment. Somewhere nearby, there was a cough.
Soft, like it came from half a room away.
"Don't stay up."
It was his dad's voice. Just that, and then nothing more from that end of the line.
"You hear that? Your dad says don't stay up." His mom's voice relaxed all at once. "Leaving on time is good. That's how the first day should go. Have you eaten?"
Zhou said he had, though he hadn't. After he hung up, he sat looking at the pot of goji tea for a while. Then he got up, cooked a pack of instant noodles, and brought it back to the desk to eat while he worked on app number 23.
At 9:28 he hit save.
Seven pages.
He renamed the file "Senior App Competitive Comparison Report_Zhou Yinian," checked the opening once more, and emailed it to his work address. He could print it as soon as he got in tomorrow.
By 9:29 he'd brushed his teeth and was in bed.
[Ding! Today's early-to-bed check-in: success]
[Constitution: "Early to Bed" (habit forming)]
[Tomorrow's Task Preview: Morning exercise at 6:00 AM tomorrow. Location: the park nearest you]
[Early to bed and early to rise keeps you healthy, Elder Zhou. Good night.]
He didn't even know where the nearest park was.
Zhou moved his alarm from 6:30 to 5:30, set his phone face down beside his pillow, and pulled the light cord.
The room went dark.
In the lower left corner of his vision, the little box of numbers lit up again and began ticking down, one at a time.
Morning exercise in: 08:30:00.