Monday morning, 8:40. Zhou had just set his thermos down by the base of his monitor when a ding sounded in his ear.
[Elder Zhou, you haven't won a single game yet this week!]
[Games: 0 won, 5 lost | 4 days left]
[Losing at chess won't hurt your health. Sulking about it will! Don't take it to heart, Elder Zhou!]
Two of the five losses were from yesterday.
Both times, Old Gu had hummed that line, and both times the tune had wandered off on man.
The box in the lower left corner wouldn't move, so he just didn't look at it.
Wen Yining had asked for the full plan last Thursday. He'd finished revising the last two pages that morning, before he left the house. The moment the tai chi reached its closing moves, he'd headed home. He hadn't gone anywhere near the stone tables.
At 8:45, he sent the plan to Wen Yining's inbox.
The ponytail diagonally ahead didn't move. Ten minutes went by, and nothing came back from that direction either.
The department meeting was at 9:30.
Full-time staff sat around the long table in the conference room. The interns had a row of extra chairs along the wall. Zhou took the one next to Song Xiaobei and rested his thermos on his knee.
Standing by the projector was the same HR coordinator from his first day, talking as fast as ever. She clicked to the next slide, and big letters filled the screen: Full-Time Offers.
"Let me walk you all through how full-time offers work for interns. The internship is three months. At the end, there's a final presentation, plus a score from the department. There are ten of you in this cohort. In past years, about three got offers. How many this year isn't decided yet. It depends on how you all do."
She paused, then clicked again.
"Also, the Chengshan Golden Years redesign review at the end of the month. How you do on the user research will count toward your internship evaluation."
The row of chairs along the wall went quiet all at once.
Song Xiaobei had his hands on his knees and was counting on his fingers. He stopped at three, then started over from the beginning.
Two seats down from him, someone had a pen cap in their mouth. Then they caught themselves, pulled it out fast, and wiped it on their sleeve.
Ten people. About three.
Zhou looked down at the thermos on his knee. Of all the interns in this room, his was the only name on the research for the end-of-month review.
"One more personnel change." The HR coordinator clicked to the last slide. "Lu Heng from Data Ops. The redesign project is short-handed, so as of today he's on loan to the product team."
Someone stood up at the end of the table by the door. White shirt, sleeves rolled to the forearm. He gave the long table one nod.
"Hi, everyone. I'm Lu Heng. I was in Data Ops before. From here on, I'll be working on the redesign with all of you."
Then he sat back down. The whole thing took under five seconds.
Song Xiaobei leaned in and dropped his voice until it was nothing but breath. "Master's from a top school. The data team thinks he's gold."
Zhou looked at the face.
So that was what the period looked like.
When they got back from the meeting, the person across the way had already picked up their keyboard and moved one desk farther in. The desk across from Zhou sat empty.
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Lu Heng wasn't far behind, pushing a cardboard box.
Out of the box came a monitor stand, and then three monitors.
He tightened the screws and went straight to the cables, cinching the zip ties one by one and snipping the tails off flush with a pair of scissors. Ten minutes or so, and the three monitors stood in front of Zhou like a wall.
The middle one lit up first. The screensaver was a line chart.
Song Xiaobei poked half his head out from behind the partition. He looked at the wall, then at the thermos on Zhou's desk. Then he ducked back down and didn't say a thing.
Lu Heng didn't sit down right away. He picked up a notebook and went around the partition to the desk diagonally ahead.
"Ms. Wen."
Wen Yining glanced up from her screen.
"The senior user research for the redesign. I saw on the schedule that the method hasn't been decided yet." Lu Heng laid the notebook open on the corner of her desk. "I did two years of user research in grad school. Survey design, sampling, response dashboards. I've run the whole process. I'd be glad to take this on."
He turned a page. An outline was already written out on it.
"To get the sample size up, one person can't cover it during the day. I've got plenty of time in the evenings."
At that, he looked back over his shoulder at Zhou.
It was a short look, like he was checking a cell in a spreadsheet.
Every word was reasonable. There wasn't a thing in it to pick at.
Wen Yining didn't answer Lu Heng. She swung her chair around to face the aisle.
"Zhou Yinian."
He got up and went over, his thermos still in his fist.
"The research is Zhou Yinian's." She said that to Lu Heng first, then turned to Zhou. "Zhou Yinian. If you can't handle it, say so now. I'll give it to Lu Heng."
Somewhere behind him, a keyboard stopped.
Giving it up was the easy option. Lu Heng wanted it, and Wen Yining herself had offered Zhou the way out. One nod, and he'd go on leaving at 5:30 without making an enemy of anyone.
But no full-time offer meant going back to his hometown. His mom would fire off three questions in one breath on the phone, and his dad would cough once in the background and say nothing.
Zhou screwed the lid of his thermos on tight.
"I've got it."
Wen Yining didn't nod, and she didn't look at him. She turned to Lu Heng.
"Lu Heng, if you want it, do your own. Both go on the table at the review."
Lu Heng closed his notebook. His face didn't change much.
"Sure. Then I'll do it my way."
Wen Yining had already turned back around. Her keyboard started up again.
She hadn't said one word about the plan he'd emailed that morning.
Lu Heng went back to the desk across from Zhou's. Before he sat down, he adjusted the angle of each of his three monitors. Zhou went back to his desk too. Through the gaps in the wall, all he could see was half of Lu Heng's forehead.
Zhou was in line at the hot water dispenser, waiting to refill. Lu Heng was leaning against the windowsill with a coffee, three or four people from the team gathered around him.
"She's really letting him do it?" someone asked, stirring a bowl of instant noodles with a plastic spoon.
"Ms. Wen's call. Both go on the table. It's fair." Lu Heng blew on his coffee and smiled. "If he passes the review, the whole team drinks on me for a month."
The one with the noodles tapped the spoon against the rim of the bowl. "Drinks like what? Milk tea or coffee?"
Someone else already had their phone out. "I'll start a group chat."
At some point Song Xiaobei had squeezed his way into the doorway. He was holding his phone at chest height, his thumb flying over his notes app.
"Okay. I'm writing that down."
The whole break room burst out laughing. Someone whistled toward the windowsill.
His thermos was full. Zhou screwed the lid on and edged sideways out through the crowd.
A little after two, the leftmost of the three monitors across from him changed.
Dark blue background, a big 0 in the center. Below it stretched a progress bar, already split into five colors by age group. Every segment was still empty. In the top right corner was a line of white text: Goal: 500 responses in one week.
It really did look good.
Zhou looked down at his own screen. The document on it was the plan he'd sent that morning. It didn't have a single piece of data in it yet.
5:30.
He shut down his computer, tucked his thermos into the side pocket of his backpack, and stood up.
"It's time. I'm clocking out."
Behind the wall, the typing stopped. Lu Heng looked up from between two of the monitors, glanced at the watch on his wrist, then at Zhou, and went still for a second.
Then he looked back down, and the typing picked up again, faster than before.
The ponytail diagonally ahead didn't move.
9:25 that night. Zhou had just finished soaking his feet when his phone started buzzing nonstop on the edge of the bed.
Song Xiaobei: [Image]
It was a screenshot of the dashboard Lu Heng had posted in the product team's work chat. The progress bar had crept forward a little, and the number in the center had changed: Live for 3 hours. 86 responses collected.
Song Xiaobei: Bro Zhou!!!
Song Xiaobei: 86 in three hours!!!!
Song Xiaobei: at this rate he'll have 500 in two days
Zhou tapped the screenshot open, zoomed in, and looked at the number for a while.
He typed back three words: Get some sleep.
A ding sounded in his ear.
[It's 9:30, Elder Zhou! Put the phone down. See you at the park at six tomorrow morning!]
He turned his phone face down beside his pillow and pulled the light cord.
Before it went face down, the last thing lit on the screen was that 86.