At 8:59:40, Zhou Yinian pushed open the glass door to the product team.
The green text on the badge reader by the door hadn't faded yet. Below it, the seconds ticked up one at a time.
The seven pages in his hand had come out of the printer by the elevators three minutes ago and were still warm. The staple sat neat and straight in the top left corner.
At the far end of the aisle, Wen Yining raised her wrist and glanced at her watch.
Then she put her hands back on the keyboard and didn't look toward the door again.
Zhou didn't go to his desk. With his backpack still on and his thermos in his fist, he cut diagonally across toward hers.
When he passed the partitions, Song Xiaobei poked half his head out from behind one, and his eyes followed the stack of paper all the way to Wen Yining's desk.
The edges of her monitor were covered in sticky notes, each with a time on it.
The earliest said 7:30. To its right came 8:15, 10:00, 11:30, all lined up like a train schedule.
The one closest to the keyboard was new. It said only: 9:00 Zhou.
He set the report down to the left of her keyboard.
The clock in the bottom right corner of her screen flipped from 8:59 to 9:00.
Wen Yining pulled a red pen from her pen cup, thumbed off the cap, and pushed it onto the end.
She didn't tell him to go back to his seat, so he stayed standing.
She went through the cover fast. The tip of the red pen slid from the title to the name to the date. It stopped for half a beat on Zhou Yinian before moving on.
Page two was the categories. He hadn't sorted the apps by feature. He'd sorted them by the step where old people got stuck.
Ones that lost them the moment they opened. Ones they got into and couldn't get out of. Ones with buttons they were afraid to press. Ones that sprang something on them out of nowhere.
Under each of the four, the apps were listed one by one, each with the exact step where it lost people.
The red pen hung still above the category headings.
The tip dipped until it was a grain of rice from the paper.
Zhou watched that dot of red and waited for it to mark something.
It didn't.
She ran her eyes down all four categories, then lifted the pen again.
She turned the page.
Pages three through five were the app-by-app notes, one app per line.
The red pen followed her eyes down the page, line after line, moving fast and slowing only for the longer sentences.
She stayed longest on app 11, the plaza dance one. The pen tip passed back and forth twice under Pause button only appears after a tap, gone again in two seconds, then lifted away anyway.
Page six was the conclusions.
After each conclusion he'd put a note in parentheses saying which apps it came from. Some had five or six numbers in them.
She checked every one, flipping back each time. Back to page three, forward to six, back to four. The paper rustled under her hands.
The keyboards around them never stopped. Standing there listening, though, he thought they sounded lighter than usual.
Then the red pen came down.
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Third line from the bottom of page six, she circled the m in buttom. Then she traced over it again.
The second time she pressed too hard. It left a groove in the paper, and a small patch of red ink bled out around it.
"Button. With an n."
"Got it. I'll fix it."
Two and a half hours of typing, and his keyboard had betrayed him exactly once.
She didn't answer. She turned to page seven.
The red pen hovered from the first line to the last, then from the last back to the first, a grain of rice above the paper the whole way.
When she was done, she flipped the report back to the cover.
The corner of her screen ticked over to 9:04.
Seven pages. One red circle.
Wen Yining closed the report and laid the red pen across the cover.
Only then did she actually look at him. Her eyes went from his limp hair to his gray sweater vest and finally landed on the thermos in his left hand.
"A sixty-five-year-old downloads an app and uninstalls it the next day. Why?"
Zhou's eyes dropped to the report on reflex.
She put her palm flat on the cover.
"Tell me now. No notes."
Sixty-five.
Zhou nearly raised his hand.
She just kept her hand on the report and looked at him. The red pen lay beside it, the cap still pushed onto the end.
Behind him, the keys clicked on one at a time, a little sparser than before.
He could have said, "It's all in the report." But the report was pinned under her hand.
Zhou raised his thermos to his chest, unscrewed the lid, and blew across the top.
The goji berries turned half a circle on the surface.
"No rush. Take it slow."
Wen Yining's eyebrows twitched. She said nothing.
"The print's small. I don't hold that against you," he said. "My eyes aren't what they used to be. Everything looks small to me. That's not your fault."
He paused and took a small sip.
"But the second I open you, you throw a cash prize at me, gold coins and spinning circles and all, telling me to grab it quick. I don't dare tap it. What if I tap it and it wants my card number? What if I tap the wrong thing and it takes my money?"
Behind him, the clatter of keys stopped at takes my money and didn't start up again.
"I wanted to close it," he went on. "That Skip button's the size of a grain of rice. I poked at it twice and missed, and it played all the way through by itself. I thought I'd broken the phone. When I finally got in, it asked if it could know where I am. The two buttons underneath were the same size and the same color. I didn't dare press either one. I just held it up and waited for it to go away."
Wen Yining cut in. "It won't go away on its own."
"I know it won't," Zhou said. "But I still don't dare press anything."
He drew the cup in closer to his chest.
"I want to go back, and I can't find the way back. That arrow up in the top left is one thin line, the same color as everything behind it. I thought it was part of the pattern."
"And there's one that teaches dancing." He moved the lid to his other hand. "I opened it on the bus and it started singing all by itself. Volume all the way up. The whole bus turned around to look at me. I went looking for the pause. I tap once and it shows up, and before my hand gets there it's gone again."
He looked down at the goji berries in his cup.
"Besides, my son put it on there for me. He set it up and left. I don't dare mess with it. If I break it, he'll give me an earful when he's back. So I leave it alone. Next day he calls and asks if I've been using it. I say, sure I am. Truth is, I'd already made it disappear the night before."
By then he could hear it himself. He sounded exactly like his grandma.
The whole team had gone so quiet he could hear the air vents.
Zhou glanced back over his shoulder.
The person across the way had a soy milk straw between their teeth and hadn't taken a single sip.
Farther in, the guy in headphones on the morning call had muted his mic. Someone in his headset was calling his name, and he didn't answer.
Song Xiaobei's phone was propped at an angle on the edge of the partition, his thumb still hovering over the screen.
Zhou caught a glimpse of it. Same note as yesterday, with one more line under the title.
No rush. Take it slow.
Song Xiaobei looked up and met his eyes. His mouth made a silent O. From the shape of it, he was saying wow.
"Why not use voice input?"
Wen Yining's voice pulled him back.
She asked it fast and shut her mouth the moment she was done.
Zhou turned back around. He didn't rush to answer. First he blew across the top of his cup again.
"Talking to a phone, I feel silly. There's people sitting right there, and I'm shouting at a phone like I'm babbling to myself," he said slowly. "I say it once, it can't understand my accent. I say it twice, it still can't. By the third time I stop. I'm afraid it'll think I've gone senile."
Wen Yining came right back. "Why would you rather call your son?"
That one was even faster, almost on top of his last word.
Zhou didn't answer right away. He lowered his head, took a sip, and swallowed it slowly. Only then did he look up.
"If I ask the phone, the phone doesn't get tired of me. But I'm scared of it. If I ask my son, my son gets tired of me. But I'm not scared of him."
He turned the cup in his hands.
"When he's home, I just shove the phone at him. 'You look. What does it want me to do now?' When he's not, I call him. On the phone, he's only annoyed with me for a little while. And I get to hear his voice."
Then he stopped.
Wen Yining didn't say anything either.
She was looking at him. At some point the red pen had found its way back between her fingers.
Zhou counted to three in his head.
She picked up the closed report and set it on the stack of files at the corner of her desk, squaring it off so all four corners lined up.
The red pen came down after it. The tip landed on the cover, right beside the name Zhou Yinian.
Then she looked up.
"Who helped you write this?"
Zhou still hadn't screwed the lid back on his thermos. He just stood there holding it.