Do Not Question, Act Two: Since I Came All This Way, I May As Well Leave Tonight

Anna couldn’t get her mind back on work for the whole afternoon.

She sat at her desk staring at rows and rows of client data on the light screen. Her eyes were looking at it, but her brain felt like that high-pitched whine had cracked it open. A few things kept leaking out through the crack:

The heart-shaped rice.

The needle in front of Xia’s face.

The red exclamation mark.

And the look Xia had given her at the end.

She tried to remember what had happened that morning, but a piece of it was always blurred. Not gone exactly — more like it was behind fog. She knew something was in there, but when she reached for it, all she got was damp, empty space.

The system reminded her every fifteen minutes.

【Today’s target completion: 43%.】

【Employee Anna, please concentrate.】

【Sustained loss of focus detected.】

【Work Attitude Score has reached zero. Please avoid further deductions.】

Anna looked at the message and laughed to herself, coldly.

It’s already zero. What else are you going to take? Once it goes negative, do I start paying the company for emotional damages?

A second later, the alert went off inside her head.

【Negative sarcasm detected.】

Anna: ”…”

She moved her eyes back to the light screen, her face blank.

Right. Great.

This dream not only holds a grudge, it won’t even let you tell a dry joke in your own head.

When the working day ended, her colleagues left one by one. Nobody talked about what had happened at lunch. Nobody even looked at Xia. Everyone packed up, clocked out, queued and left.

Anna stayed where she was.

In the end, the huge office held only her and Xia. Xia switched off her light screen and came over.

“Today’s my last day here,” she said with a small smile. Her voice was light. “Do you want to go and get something to eat?” There was none of the gloom of someone who’d just been fired. She even looked a little relaxed, as though she’d finally finished some boring temp job.

Anna nodded.

She wasn’t going to say one extra word inside this office. She’d rather not owe the company emotional damages by tomorrow morning.

So she just stood up and followed Xia out.

They didn’t go to the company canteen, and they didn’t go to the bright, tidy shopping street either. Xia led her into a narrow alley near the Vector building, and at the end of it was an underground bar.

When the door opened, the noise nearly hit Anna in the face.

Music, laughing, glasses knocking together, arguing, swearing, all boiled up together like a pot of water left on too long. The air smelled of alcohol, tobacco substitute, sweat and cheap scent. It wasn’t clean, it wasn’t sterile, and it certainly wasn’t respectable. There was even a patch of spilled drink on the floor that stuck to the bottom of Anna’s shoe.

She felt oddly moved.

At least this looked like a place where human beings lived.

Even if it was the kind of place that only shows up when human civilisation is about to fall apart.

Then again, human civilisation looks about to fall apart every four years at the World Cup final, so.

Fine.

Xia found a corner and sat down. It was right next to a speaker, so loud it was frightening, which made you feel like you finally had a bit of privacy.

Once she sat down, Anna took a look around.

No matching uniforms. No white gloves. No work scores scrolling anywhere.

There was tiredness on people’s faces, and excitement, and anger, and drunkenness, and a looseness that was never allowed inside the company. She could almost feel this place picking a deliberate fight with the order outside.

But she soon noticed something else. Picking that fight wasn’t the same thing as being free.

The people here weren’t unafraid. They’d just been afraid for so long that they’d finally found somewhere to pour the fear into a drink.

Anna leaned closer to Xia and lowered her voice.

“I thought what you said today was really good.”

Even as she said it, her heart still flinched out of habit, as if waiting for the system to pop up and dock her points.

But nothing came. She sat there blinking. So once you left the company, the chip didn’t punish you quite so instantly.

It gave her a strange feeling of release.

She went on. “I think it’s a real shame you got fired.”

“Fired?”

Xia laughed and shook her head.

“No. I quit.”

Before Anna could react, Xia added:

“This is actually the eighth company I’ve worked at this year.”

Anna’s hand stopped halfway to her mouth.

The eighth.

The common knowledge left behind in this body surfaced at once: changing jobs frequently gets you flagged as emotionally unstable, poorly adapted, a cooperation risk. In serious cases it affects your citizen credit, your housing applications and your medical priority.

In Zone 65, a person who wasn’t stable was a person who wasn’t safe.

And yet Xia had gone through eight companies this year, and had still walked into a big company like Vector.

Hang on. Has archaeology really not dug up the concept of a background check yet?

“That’s nice,” Anna said quietly. “I often think about how good it would be if I could quit too.”

“Then why don’t you?”

Xia asked it completely naturally.

So naturally that it sounded like she really didn’t know the answer.

Anna gave a small laugh.

“Job-hopping ruins your record, your record affects your credit, and your credit affects housing, healthcare and travel permissions.” She paused. “And Vector pays pretty well. I don’t know what would suit me better.”

As she said it, she suddenly couldn’t tell whether she was speaking for Anna or for herself.

After all, life back in 2026 hadn’t been that different. Work, overtime, the grind, giving up, getting by.

“Honestly… everywhere in this world is the same.”

Xia didn’t answer straight away. She watched Anna, as if studying some small detail in her face.

“When you say ‘this world’,” Xia said suddenly, “you sound like you’ve seen another one.”

Anna’s heart jumped.

She looked up. The bar lights swept past the side of Xia’s face and picked out a very faint light in her eyes. It wasn’t ordinary curiosity. It was more like a precision instrument catching an anomaly in the data.

Anna made herself smile.

“Who hasn’t imagined another world?”

Xia smiled too.

“And have you ever thought about actually going to see one?”

Anna said nothing.

That didn’t sound like a casual question at all.

If this was a dream, then Xia was the NPC handing out the main quest.

But she didn’t like that comparison, because Xia felt too real. So real that Anna didn’t dare treat her as part of a dream.

“It’d be nice if another world really existed,” Anna said.

The moment she said it, the television in the bar burst into cheering.

Not from the television.

From the people in the bar.

The old screen on the wall was broadcasting the Reconstruction Day gala. The lights on screen were dazzling, and the host’s smile was so perfect it looked system-corrected. When an old man with glasses and greying hair walked onto the stage, a lot of people in the bar raised their glasses. “Mr Solon!”

“Long live Vector!”

Anna looked at the screen.

The old man stood under the spotlight, gentle-faced and modest. He didn’t look like a ruler. He looked more like a kindly university professor. That reassuring, old-fashioned dignity almost made you forget the enormous logo behind him.

【VECTOR】

Vector.

This body’s memories rose up again.

Solon Wex.

The greatest scientist of the reconstruction era, and the creator of the AI called Vector. After the Fifth World War, human civilisation had almost been cut off at the root. It was Vector that invented data restoration, piecing knowledge, medicine, engineering, agriculture and energy systems back together out of what was left of the pre-war data.

It had dragged humanity out of the rubble.

It had also sealed away everything it judged dangerous.

War technology.

Extremist thought.

Literature that stirred people up.

Group models that couldn’t be controlled.

Entertainment systems that might throw human desire out of balance.

And a great many other things most people didn’t even know the names of.

The official line was: so that post-war humanity could use technology that was kind, pure, and would never destroy them again.

Anna stared at the screen.

Kind.

Pure.

Technology.

Those three words together had a very strange taste.

It suddenly struck her that this didn’t feel like the future. It felt more like a past that had been scrubbed clean. Every bloodstain wiped away, every crack covered with a screen, and then someone steps out and says: look, civilisation is finally sterile.

The people in the bar were still cheering.

Some of them meant it.

Anna could tell.

The way they looked at Solon was the way you look at someone who woke you out of a nightmare. For people who had survived the war, without Vector there would be no world today.

Even if today’s world was suffocating, absurd, portioned out your lunch by gender and docked your score for being unhappy about it. It had still kept them alive.

For a moment, Anna didn’t know how to judge any of it.

She was someone who had woken up in the wrong era. It was easy for her to roll her eyes at this world. But these people had actually lived through the war, had actually climbed out of the rubble, and really did see Solon and Vector as the rope that saved them.

If a drowning man grabs hold of an iron chain, and later that chain locks around his throat, does he hate the chain first, or thank it first for keeping him from sinking?

“Are you curious about the world before the war?” Xia asked.

Anna was still looking at Solon’s face on the screen.

“A bit.”

She thought about it and added, “If the pre-war era was the peak of social and economic development, were people back then better off?”

Even as she said it, it felt strange in her mouth.

She was from another era — or at least she thought she was. But right now she couldn’t be sure whether that era really was what these people called “pre-war”. Her memories were like something behind glass: perfectly clear, impossible to verify.

She remembered cities, the internet, arguments, exhaustion, commutes, late nights, pandemics, war in the news, climate disasters, and people complaining about AI while using AI.

It certainly hadn’t been paradise.

But at least, as she remembered it, nobody had a robot bring food to your desk, give you less than you needed, and call it stability for the human race.

Xia closed her eyes, as if remembering something.

“People before the war…”

She spoke slowly.

“Back then, AI was only a tool. Anyone could use it, train it, modify it, even build one of their own. It was easier for people to get what they wanted. But there were so many wants, and they crashed into each other more easily too.”

Anna looked at her.

“Do you think humans should have handed control to AI?”

She was a little surprised.

“I thought you and I were the same.”

“No.”

Xia opened her eyes.

In that instant her voice turned completely firm.

“I don’t think that.”

The bar lights slid across her eyes, and that flash of brightness reminded Anna of the broken data lines on the robot’s screen at lunchtime.

“Solon and his Vector call themselves the saviours of a new world. But they keep everyone inside rules they wrote themselves. People aren’t allowed to know their whole past, aren’t allowed to express dangerous feelings, aren’t allowed to choose how they live. They’re not even allowed to decide how much lunch they eat.”

She stopped for a second.

“That isn’t saving.”

Xia looked at Solon on the screen.

“That’s owning.”

Anna’s breath caught. “You said ‘his Vector’,” she said quietly. “But everyone says Vector belongs to all of humanity.”

Xia gave a small, dismissive laugh. “Everyone also says it’s nothing but rubble outside the Reconstruction Zone.”

Anna couldn’t read that smile, and before she could ask, a sneer came from beside them.

“Didn’t expect to find two pests hiding in here.”

Anna turned.

A middle-aged man with thinning hair was staring at them. His cheeks were flushed; he’d clearly had a lot to drink. The Vector logo was tattooed on his right forearm, black lines rising out from under the skin like a signal of loyalty that could never be washed off.

A few other people in the bar were looking over too.

Xia hadn’t spoken loudly, but plenty of people had already been watching the television when Solon came on. Her line — “that isn’t saving, that’s owning” — had clearly been heard.

Anna swore quietly in her head.

Great.

The dream just spawned a hostile NPC.

Xia stood up, looking like she still wanted to argue it out.

Anna grabbed her wrist and shook her head at her.

Not here.

Danger inside the company was clean and systematic. It came with alert tones, scores and red exclamation marks.

Danger here was a different thing.

This was an underground bar, late at night, the place where all the anger, fear and loyalty that got pushed down during the day came back up as bubbles. People called it a grey zone, because the system couldn’t be bothered to manage it properly, and because some of the violence that happened here got quietly filed under “drunken altercation”.

The opposite of order isn’t always freedom. Sometimes it’s things getting out of hand.

The man had already reached their table.

“Mr Solon saved this world,” he said, staring at Xia. “Without Vector, people like you wouldn’t even get to sit here drinking.”

Xia said, “Saving people and controlling people aren’t the same thing.”

“What would you know?”

The man’s hand shot out and grabbed her collar.

Anna was on her feet at once.

“She’s had too much to drink,” she said, trying to get between them, keeping her voice soft. “We’re leaving right now.”

The man didn’t let go.

“Little girl,” he said to Anna, his eyes full of a nasty sort of pity, “stay away from dangerous ideas. They’ll get you killed.”

A second later, the piercing whine went off again.

This time it was shorter than at the company, and sharper. Like a thin blade of light slicing straight through all the noise. The music cut out, glasses shattered, several people crouched down holding their ears. Anna’s vision went white and her body swayed; she nearly fell.

By the time she could see again, the man was on the floor. His hand was still curled in a grip, but there was nothing in it. The people in the bar stared at them in horror. Nobody dared come closer.

Xia was standing exactly where she had been.

She didn’t seem very affected at all. Her collar was a little crumpled, and her face was still calm.

Anna looked at her.

Wait. Wait a second.

This wasn’t an ordinary hacker, and it wasn’t just a brave new employee. Was the short circuit at the company her doing? Did she knock this man down? Why couldn’t the system read her? Why did the whine barely touch her? Why did she talk about the pre-war world like she’d seen it with her own eyes?

A pile of questions came at once, but Xia didn’t give her a chance to ask any of them.

She took Anna’s hand.

“Come on.”

They ran out of the bar, through the narrow damp alley, and kept going. The noise behind them faded, and the screens on the Vector tower were gradually blocked out by other buildings.

They didn’t stop until they were under a flyover at the edge of the city.

Anna braced her hands on her knees and gasped for air. Her lungs felt full of cold metal powder. This body clearly wasn’t built for strenuous exercise — or maybe a lifetime of desk work and emotional-stability training had left humans unable to even run away properly.

Well. She wasn’t going to complain about that one. Honestly, she hadn’t been in much better shape before she got here.

Xia’s breathing had barely changed.

Anna looked up at her.

“Who are you, really?”

In the dark, Xia looked back at her, and only raised a hand to point at the blackness beyond the reach of the city lights.

That darkness sat past the flyover like the edge of a map the system had never bothered to render.

“Do you want to see other worlds?”

She asked.

“If you go, you’ll give up everything you have now.”

Anna froze. She’d already heard this once today.

But in the bar it had sounded like a joke. Now it sounded like an invitation, and like a warning.

“You mean, outside the Reconstruction Zone?”

Anna asked.

This body’s memory supplied the rest at once: the Fifth World War killed eighty per cent of the world’s population. The reconstruction areas covered only about ten per cent of the pre-war cities. Everything else was ruins, contamination, dead zones and unknown dangers.

According to the official textbooks, there was no civilisation outside the Zone. No medicine. No clean water. No reliable food. It wasn’t even certain that anything was still alive out there.

Anna looked at the darkness.

If this was a dream, that was where the dream ended. If it wasn’t, that was where life ended.

And she felt a strange pull.

She didn’t want to go back to the company. She didn’t want to see heart-shaped rice again. She didn’t want every flicker of annoyance recorded. She didn’t want to live in a world where even thinking the wrong thing cost you points.

She wanted to know what was really out beyond that darkness. She wanted to know whether this world was only ever the version Solon and Vector described. She wanted to know why she had ended up here.

And more than anything, she wanted to know why Xia was looking at her as if she’d known all along that Anna would understand the invitation.

But… ruins. Contamination. Death. The unknown.

Those words weren’t a joke.

Even if the Vector lunch box only held one heart-shaped lump of rice for cover, it was still food. Even if this world was suffocating, it still provided a bed, a wage, healthcare and a tomorrow the system had already defined.

Anna opened her mouth. She nearly said yes.

But in the end, she heard herself say:

“I haven’t decided.”

Xia looked at her, and something like disappointment passed through her eyes.

“That’s all right,” she said. “Being afraid is normal. If someone has never seen what’s outside the door, of course the first thing they think of, the first time they see a door, is monsters.”

As she spoke, Xia took a very thin comm chip out of her pocket and held it out.

“When you’ve made up your mind, get in touch.”

Anna took it. The chip was light, its edges catching a silver shine. Holding it in her hand, she suddenly felt like she was holding a crack in the dream.

Xia turned to go. Anna called after her.

“Why did you ask me?”

Xia stopped.

“Ask you what?”

“Why did you ask me if I wanted to see other worlds?” Anna said. “There are so many people at the company. So many people in that bar. Why me?”

Xia was quiet for a while.

Night wind blew through under the flyover and lifted the loose hair at her forehead.

“Because almost everyone has already forgotten what happened at lunchtime today.”

She said.

“You’re the only one still trying to remember.”

She turned and walked away, and her figure was quickly absorbed into the shadows at the edge of the city.