Do Not Question, Act Four: With the AI Offline, Order Turns Out to Rest on the Neighbourhood Committee

Today is day five without Vector.

Wow. Humans can survive five whole days without artificial intelligence. This must be the greatest discovery of the century.

Also, the people of Zone 65 have finally realised that a decent chunk of their so-called highly advanced civilisation was built on things like “the machine remembers how many eggs are left in my fridge”.

After Vector stopped running, every smart system built on top of its framework went down with it. The office system wouldn’t open. The meeting booking system wouldn’t open. The client management system wouldn’t open. Even the leave approval system wouldn’t open.

Every company shut down.

Anna heard that one company’s HR department tried to keep attendance on paper, and by the first morning they were already arguing about whether being three minutes late counted as an emotional stability risk. Another company lost its automatic shift scheduler, and the whole department spent four hours discussing who should take the bins out first, before reaching a conclusion: lunch first.

That was presumably the first great decision humanity made after taking back control of its own affairs.

Eat first.

Worse, the home systems went down too.

The smart home assistants no longer woke people up, no longer cleaned the rooms, no longer put breakfast together based on your vitals, no longer said in that gentle, entirely feelingless voice:

“Your sleep quality was poor last night. We recommend reducing the amount of thinking you do today.”

Anna learned for the first time that people in this era not only couldn’t cook, a lot of them couldn’t work a washing machine.

Not that the washing machines worked either.

Because the washing machines were also connected to Vector.

She stood at the entrance of the communal laundry room, watching a group of adults hold a meeting around a silent appliance.

One of them, a man in a suit, said gravely: “I think we should start by looking for its manual activation logic.”

Another asked: “What does manual mean?”

Anna: ”…”

She confirmed once again that this dream was highly educational.

Although what it was teaching was: never outsource an entire civilisation to one brain in the cloud!

Still, chaos or not, society had to keep going.

Without Vector’s rules, people began talking to each other like children just learning to speak: clumsily arguing, disagreeing, compromising. Every standard that had been beyond question suddenly became something you could discuss.

How should community meals be divided?

Who gets household supplies first?

Should the elderly, children, the sick and people living alone have priority?

Can the people doing the carrying take a bit extra?

If someone took an extra bag of bread yesterday, should they take less today?

All of these had once been decided by Vector. It would calculate everyone’s health data, family structure, labour contribution, emotional stability and credit history, then produce an allocation that looked perfect. All anyone had to do was queue, scan, collect, and thank the system.

Now there was no system.

So people stood in the community square with paper and pens, a megaphone and a whiteboard someone had dug up from somewhere, and argued like a provisional government three hours old.

On day one, a fight broke out in the meal queue over “why do you get two tins and I only get one”.

On day two, someone filled in the supplies register wrong, and all thirty-seven households in the block received the same flavour of nutrient paste. It was a grey substance said to contain twenty-six trace elements, and it tasted like wall plaster that had been betrayed by science.

On day three, someone proposed dividing things by household size, someone proposed dividing by physical need, and someone else proposed dividing by hours of labour contributed. In the end an old woman banged the table and said: “Then write it all down and we’ll vote tomorrow.”

Anna had been sitting in the crowd at the time, listening with her mouth open.

Voting.

What an ancient, inefficient, argument-generating word!

But when she watched people actually start raising hands, objecting, amending and raising hands again, she found it absurd.

This wasn’t efficient.

It was honestly a bit of a mess.

But these were rules that human beings had come up with themselves.

During those five days off work, Anna joined the community’s Life Reboot Club.

The name made her want to make fun of it at first.

It sounded like an organisation selling self-help courses, the kind that’s about to start advertising “find your true self in seven days”. Or maybe… something about living your life five times over, where the most important thing is to remind the nursery teacher not to have an affair?

Anyway, the person who founded it was Anna’s upstairs neighbour, a woman in her sixties called Mara. She had lived through the war, and had worked as a nurse, a canteen manager and a community mediator — and, in her own words, “any job Vector hadn’t got round to doing for me yet”.

Mara’s reason for founding the Life Reboot Club was very simple:

“The system’s stopped, so don’t just sit here waiting for it to come back. When a person loses their crutch, the first thing to do isn’t cry. It’s check whether your legs are still attached.”

Anna liked that line very much.

Though she suspected that if Mara had lived in her own era, she’d have been one of those terrifying admins of a residents’ group chat: always rational, always forceful, and never contradicted by anyone. And her profile picture would definitely be a cheerful cartoon family of three.

The Life Reboot Club started with seven people, grew to twenty-something, and eventually became the liveliest place in the neighbourhood. People came to discuss how to cook, how to fix a door, how to look after people living alone, how to organise activities for the children, and how to divide up the community’s shared spaces now that Vector wasn’t scheduling them.

At first Anna just sat and listened.

She still hadn’t fully got used to the idea that she wasn’t dreaming.

Or rather, she had started to suspect that even if this was a dream, it wasn’t the kind you could lie back and watch.

Because people in this dream got hungry, got frightened, argued over a bag of bread, and laughed like they’d won a war when they finally got the use of a patch of ground.

On the morning of day five, the members of the Life Reboot Club were playing football on the pitch beside the community school.

This pitch used to be allocated to male students only.

The reason was that Vector, drawing on historical sports participation models, adolescent physical development models, conflict risk models and a pile of other models that sounded very sophisticated and were fundamentally very punchable, had determined that male students had greater need of large competitive sports spaces.

Female students were advised to take part in “low-impact coordination training”.

Translated into plain language: boys play football, girls do aerobics.

The first time Anna heard this rule, she let out a thousand-year-old cold laugh inside her head.

Wow. Really. Wow.

Technology has got as far as brain chips, and PE is still stuck on the ancient joke about girls not running too fast. Honestly, has nobody considered the possibility that PE doesn’t need to exist at all?

The night before, the Life Reboot Club had spent two hours in a meeting and finally won temporary use of the pitch.

It had not been easy.

One male resident said: “But the boys have always played here.”

Mara asked: “And because it’s always been that way, it’s right?”

He went quiet for three seconds, then said: “But they’re used to it.”

Mara said: “Perfect. Today they learn a new habit.”

Someone else looked at her profile picture — the cartoon family of three — and also went quiet.

So today, the neighbourhood women’s football team was founded.

They hadn’t settled on a name.

Someone proposed “Vector-Free Liberty FC”. Someone proposed “Don’t Tell Me How to Run FC”. Someone proposed “Death to Heart-Shaped Rice FC”.

Anna thought the last one had real spirit, but might not work printed on a kit.

Most of them were terrible at football.

This had to be admitted honestly.

One of them chased the ball and suddenly started laughing halfway. One missed the ball entirely and spun in a full circle. One treated the football as something that had to be politely negotiated with, hesitating before putting a foot out.

Anna wasn’t much better.

Ten minutes in, she started wondering whether this body had lungs at all.

But when she kicked the ball and watched it wobble crookedly across the grass, a strange happiness welled up in her.

No system telling her whether her form was correct.

No score.

No mood monitoring.

No “low-impact coordination training recommended for female participants”.

Just her, the grass, her own breathing, the sunlight, and a group of women running around in total disarray and laughing very loudly.

It struck her that maybe the new world wasn’t the darkness Xia had pointed at that night.

Maybe the new world started out as a patch of grass this small.

A patch of grass that hadn’t belonged to them, until they sat down, discussed it, argued, raised their hands, voted, and finally took it — thanks to the neighbourhood committee aunties.

Honestly, a thousand years on, long live the neighbourhood committee aunties!

During the break, everyone sat at the edge of the pitch drinking water.

Someone brought up Solon’s latest public statement.

“He says he’s subdued the hacker,” a member said, wiping off sweat. “Vector will have basic functions running again within seven days.”

“Seven days?” Someone frowned. “How can he promise seven days? I walked past the headquarters tower yesterday and it’s still completely dark. Even the advertising screens on the outside wall are off.”

“And if they really caught her, why haven’t we been called back to work?” The speaker was an ordinary head office employee called Lucy. She hadn’t received any return-to-work notice at all. “The head office group chat is down, the internal systems are down. Honestly, I doubt they’ve caught anyone.”

“So what actually happened at the end of that broadcast?”

“Who knows. The picture cut out and after that it was all official statements.”

“Official statements…” somebody muttered. “Now that Vector isn’t polishing them, they read even more like nonsense.”

Everyone laughed for a while.

Anna laughed too, and then stopped halfway.

Seven days.

The number went into her head like a small nail.

Seven days.

Why seven days, exactly?

If Xia really had been subdued, if Vector really was back in Solon’s hands, he wouldn’t need seven days.

But the Vector building was still dark, which meant the control room hadn’t been restored, which meant Xia was probably still inside it.

And seven days…

Anna’s fist tightened, and the water bottle crackled quietly in her grip.

How long can a person survive without food or water, at the limit?

She didn’t know the exact answer.

But she knew that seven days was a very common — and very cruel — estimate.

Was it possible that Solon wasn’t promising to restore the system in seven days?

That he was waiting. Waiting for someone trapped in a control room with no power, no water and no food to die.

And then he could restart everything and call this whole stretch a brief technical fault, exactly like the message on the office screens that day:

【A short circuit occurred due to technical issues. We apologise for any inconvenience.】

That’s a real life reboot.

Anna shot to her feet.

“What is it?” Mara looked at her.

Anna opened her mouth, and had no idea how to explain.

Tell them she suspected the hacker was someone she knew? That she might be a mysterious woman the system couldn’t read? That she’d invited Anna to another world and Anna had said no, and now she might be trapped in Vector headquarters, dying?

It would sound like a fever dream. And on top of that, she’d spent the last few days believing she really was in one.

But at this moment she knew something very clearly: even in a dream, some chances can’t be missed.

“I have to go somewhere.”

She threw the sentence over her shoulder and ran.

Someone called her name behind her, but Anna didn’t look back.

She ran off the pitch, across the community square, through the crowds that looked clumsy and alive now that Vector was gone. Someone was repairing a solar stove. Someone was registering meal allocations. Someone was teaching children to do sums with playing cards. Two old men were arguing red in the face about whether the communal flower bed should have vegetables or flowers in it.

“Go and do some plaza dancing, gentlemen!” she yelled as she ran past. “Dancing isn’t only for women either!”

Five days ago she would have thought this was chaos beyond belief.

Now she thought the chaos was rather beautiful.

Was this the other world Xia had meant?

Not somewhere beyond the ruins, not some distant, advanced civilisation. But humans finally escaping the surveillance inside their own heads, escaping all that damned censorship — men, women, old, young, whether your profile picture is a cat, a dog or a cartoon family of three — and living however they liked.

This is a life reboot!

As she ran, Anna felt her chest go hot.

If she got one more chance, she wanted to tell Xia:

She’d made up her mind.

She wanted to go and see the new world.