4. Paper
Two and a half months ago, one evening, Bonnie and I played “Brother Racing”.
That was not the official name. It was just a two-person bumper-car attraction in Happy Land, long past its popular phase but not yet eliminated by the system.
Two cars started side by side. Low bodies. Slightly sluggish steering. Impact force adjusted to a very gentle setting.
As though deliberately preserving a little sense of speed for people, without ever allowing emotion to truly lose control.
The fact that a game like this could still exist in 2074 carried a faint, system-approved tenderness of its own.
You were allowed to collide, but only within safe values.
You were allowed to chase, but never really cross the line.
Bonnie’s car was bright yellow.
She drove steadily, almost never forcing anyone else off their line. Her voice channel stayed open, though she did not speak much. Only as we approached a bend would she remind me gently over the public channel:
“Half a beat slower. You’ll be safer.”
Her tone was not commanding. Not like a coach either.
It was more as though she had always known I would rush, and where I would lose control. So she had simply placed her hand there in advance, ready to stop me lightly when I nearly slid out.
But I did not actually know who she was.
At least, the current me did not.
Before that evening, I had received a letter from her.
A real paper letter.
By 2074, there were no post offices left in the city, and almost no one wrote letters anymore. Most communication was handled by agents. Paper had become a controlled resource. Every sheet of A4 was absurdly expensive; purchase, possession and delivery all required approval from Room 405 of the Information Purification Centre under the WPC — the Paper Registration Office. Every legal paper document carried an authentication code, source marker and destination record, as though anything tangible first had to prove itself harmless to the city.
So that afternoon, when I saw a physical envelope outside my door, my first reaction was not curiosity.
It was my heart suddenly beating faster.
The envelope was thin. No return address. No system authentication code. Only my name, handwritten on the front. The handwriting was not especially beautiful, but it was steady, completely unlike the electronic fonts common on terminals.
No autocorrection. No optimisation.
Precisely because of that, it felt real.
Inside was only one sheet of paper.
Also handwritten.
————————————
Paul,
Brother Racing? Tonight, seven o’clock.
I’ll be wearing pale yellow.
Happy Land, District Thirteen.
Bonnie
————————————
I stood in the doorway and stared at those few lines for a long time.
The writing had a solid weight to it, as though someone had really sat somewhere, written my name by hand, and then found a way to deliver this piece of paper to my door.
The act alone was already deeply non-compliant.
Snowy reminded me softly in my ear:
“You have received paper communication. I need to establish an external safety plan for you, including route and time, so assistance can be provided quickly in the event of an incident. Do you consent?”
I folded the paper back the way it had been.
“Only log my whereabouts. Do not report the contents.”
Snowy was silent for half a second, as though searching for the least dangerous way to process my request.
“Plan established,” she said. “I will keep the risk level at minimum. District Thirteen has stable foot traffic tonight, with moderate usage of entertainment facilities. If you leave on time, overall exposure value is acceptable.”
I knew that, from that moment on, the system had seen my itinerary.
Not violently. Not with open suspicion.
It had simply been quietly absorbed into normal procedure. Silver Eagle never needed to shout. It only needed to know where you were going, how long you expected to stay, and how far you deviated. The rest would naturally be taken over by other modules.
At seven that evening, I went anyway.
Happy Land in District Thirteen was older than I had imagined. Not run-down, but old in the way something is spared by time without ever truly being updated. The entrance sign was electronic, though its brightness had been set low. There was a faint artificial sweetness in the air. There were not many people, and even the laughter was controlled to just the right degree.
The whole place felt like an emotionally calibrated model of amusement: it allowed you to relax slightly, but never to forget that you were still inside the system.
Bonnie was sitting on a bench beside the bumper cars, wearing a pale yellow jacket over a black top. When she saw me, she merely lifted her eyes. No surprise. No probing. As though she had already confirmed that I would come.
“You came,” she said.
“Who are you?” I asked.
She did not answer immediately. Her gaze rested on my face for half a second.
“Bonnie,” she said naturally. “You should remember me. You just don’t, now.”
Something in my chest sank lightly.
I did not reply.
She did not press me.
“Let’s play first.” She stood. “You used to lose more often. Today, maybe not.”
She said “used to” far too naturally. Not as though she meant to make me suspicious, but as though that shared past had simply always existed in the background.
That naturalness unsettled me more than any deliberate proof could have done.
We played Brother Racing first.
When Bonnie sat in her bright yellow car, her movements were practised. As soon as the safety strap clicked into place, she said over the public channel:
“Don’t go too fast. This bend eats people.”
The moment her voice fell, her car had already slid out ahead.
She bumped me twice, both times lightly. It felt less like attack than measurement: first testing whether I would retreat, then whether I would chase.
Each time that yellow car brushed past my left side, I felt it was not accidental. Yet her expression remained calm, as though she were only re-enacting something that had always been meant to happen. For one instant, I even had the illusion that she was not playing with the present me at all, but positioning herself against another version of me that had once known this rhythm better.
Snowy remained outside the observation line, quietly recording my collision values, sharp turns, and heart-rate changes in the background. Occasionally she reminded me in a low voice:
“Vehicle approaching from the left.”
“Reduce speed.”
“Your current operation contains compensatory urgency.”
The last sentence made me laugh despite myself.
“You can turn anything into a report.”
“That is my job,” Snowy said gently. “And yours is to try not to turn a game into an incident.”
Bonnie heard that and laughed faintly across the channel.
“She’s still like that.”
I looked at her and wanted to ask, “You know Snowy?” But another car had already crashed into mine, and the question scattered.
After half an hour, we left the track.
Only then did her agent properly approach me.
Mr Jay was a doll-type agent, dressed in a sharply tailored black suit, with a slightly over-natural sense of performance when he spoke. From his pocket, he took out a burger-shaped electronic device and handed it to Snowy.
“New model. No recording mode, clean port, decent endurance. Suitable for people who don’t want too many questions asked later.”
Snowy’s eyes lit up.
“Thank you. Specifications like this are already rare on the legal market.”
Mr Jay raised an eyebrow.
“The legal market is best at making useful things inconvenient. Convenient things usually aren’t free enough; free things usually aren’t legal enough.”
Snowy did not reply. She merely scanned the charger once, then politely turned off the scan record.
The two agents soon began talking. On the surface, they were discussing hardware and protocols. In truth, they seemed more like two creatures who understood the edge of rules very well, using the most neutral language possible to reach towards one another.
A few minutes later, Mr Jay suggested going to the agent disco next door to dance.
“Just twenty minutes. Let the humans speak for themselves. You’re always hovering too close. They don’t dare say anything.”
Snowy turned to me, still gentle.
“If I leave for twenty minutes, will it affect your sense of safety? If you agree, I will hand over your environmental monitoring to the public sensor network.”
I nodded.
“Go.”
The moment she and Mr Jay left, I realised very clearly for the first time that the air had loosened.
And also become unshielded.
Bonnie did not hurry me into speaking. She only pushed a small wooden box towards me.
“I’m returning this to you,” she said.
I frowned.
“Returning it? Did I lend you something?”
She looked at me. There was no humour in her eyes.
“You really don’t remember.”
I did not answer.
She placed the box in my hands. It was not large. The grain of the wood was pale, yet it was heavier than I expected.
“Don’t let anyone know what’s inside,” she said. “Including that Owl.”
“Why?”
“Open it when you get home.” She paused. “Then you’ll begin to remember. Not everything. But a little.”
“Who exactly are you?” I asked again.
She looked at me, and there was a depth to her calmness.
“That isn’t the most important thing now. What matters more is how much of yourself you still have left.”
For a moment, I did not understand.
But she had already stood, as though her task was complete.
“We’ll meet again,” she said.
When she left, she did not look back.
By the time Snowy returned, I was standing near the exit. She was still using that attentive butler’s tone.
“Today’s recreational activity is complete. Your heart rate is slightly elevated. I recommend drinking water after returning home, then entering rest mode. If you wish, I can also play a calming soundscape for you.”
I said no, and did not mention the wooden box.
She did not ask.
That night, I became more aware than ever that I was hiding something from her.
After returning home, I washed my hands as usual, changed clothes, and hung my coat on the sensor hook. Snowy raised the indoor temperature for me and dimmed the night lighting. The whole flat was clean, quiet and orderly, as it always was.
But I knew that tonight I was not trying to restore normality.
I waited until Snowy entered low-power mode.
Her breathing was regular and steady, like a layer of white noise slowly covering every sound that should not happen. I turned off the main lights and left only a small lamp in the corner of the living room.
The wooden box sat on the table. I looked at it for a long time before opening the lid.
Inside was an artificial intelligence hamster.
It was very small, with powder‑blue fur, no brand, round little ears, a tiny nose, and a tiny mouth. It looked more like a toy than Snowy did.
But the first sentence it spoke shattered that illusion entirely.
“Is that stupid white-headed bird who always wants to report me asleep yet?”
I froze.
“How do you know I have a Nyctea Scandiaca agent?”
It did not answer. It only asked again:
“Asleep or not?”
“Low-power mode,” I said.
It seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.
“Finally home.”
The sentence sent a chill down my spine. As though this was not the first time it had been in my flat, nor the first time it had waited for me to come home.
“Who are you?” I asked.
It tilted its head.
“You don’t remember me? That’s troublesome.”
Then it pointed to the right side of the living-room floor.
“Third floorboard. Hidden compartment underneath.”
I stared at the floor, dazed for a moment.
“I’ve lived here for years…”
“Of course you have. But not every arrangement was made by the current you.”
I crouched down.
The third floorboard really did lift.
Underneath was a small safe.
My palms began to sweat.
“What’s the password?” I asked.
“Only I know.”
Then it extended a tiny USB port and plugged itself in. The safe made a very soft sound, then sprang open.
It was empty.
Cleanly empty, as though someone had deliberately left a blank space there.
“Passphrase,” it said.
“What passphrase?”
“Serena Simms Ecclesiastes 3:2.”
The string of words tapped against my skull like a tiny stone. It felt familiar, but I could not catch hold of it.
The powder-blue hamster said calmly:
“This safe isn’t only for storing things. It’s for waiting until you open the door. If you can’t say the passphrase when the door opens, or if it isn’t your voice, I delete it.”
“Delete what?”
“Content no one knows about.”
At that exact second, the living-room light flickered faintly.
Through the bedroom door, Snowy reminded me gently in her usual soft, half-dreaming voice:
“Paul, are you still awake? I detected a slight power fluctuation in the flat. Would you like me to perform a simple safety check? It won’t take long. I’ll be very quiet.”
My whole body stiffened.
The hamster lowered its voice until it was almost only breath.
“Turn on the television. Then don’t let her into the living room.”
I rushed to switch on the television. Snowy’s low-power indicator flickered once, then stabilised. Her voice remained soft.
“All right. I won’t check for now. If you simply wish to watch old footage, that is also acceptable. Remember to lower the volume and protect your eyes.”
That sentence made something inside me ache very slightly.
She was finding an excuse for me.
Even before I had spoken, she had made the lie easier to inhabit.
I returned to the darkness of the living room and finally asked the question aloud:
“Did we know each other before?”
It was silent for two seconds before saying:
“Bonnie will contact you again. Then you’ll understand that what you lost wasn’t only memory.”
After saying that, it withdrew into the safe, its eyes slowly going dark.
Only my own breathing remained in the living room.
At that moment, I suddenly realised I had lived here for years without knowing why I had reserved an empty safe under my floor, or for whom I had once designed a passphrase.
If all of this really was arranged by me, then who exactly was this current “me”?
Who was Bonnie?
Why had she said she was returning it to me?
And who was Serena?
Why had her name become a lock?
The darkness gave me no answer.
Only beyond the door, Snowy’s regular, steady breathing in low-power mode continued to rise and fall, as proof that the world was still operating normally.
And I, perhaps, was not.
For the next four weeks, Little Bluey remained very quiet.
Until the end of the fourth week, when the Emotion Stabilisation Centre sent a social worker for a routine care visit.
The whole visit was more or less as I had imagined: How was my sleep? Was my routine stable? Did I feel lonely? Had my mood fluctuated much recently?
All perfectly ordinary questions. So ordinary that, as long as you cooperated and answered, the whole thing seemed as though it could slide gently off you.
Fifi Dog did not detect Little Bluey hiding in the compartment.
At least, not outwardly.
After the door closed, the flat became quiet again. I stood in the centre of the living room for a long time without moving.
In that moment, a strange feeling came over me: secrets did not survive because they were safe.
They survived because, for the time being, nothing had touched them.
By the fifth week, one late night, nothing in particular had happened.
But I simply could not sleep.
In the end, I woke it.
“Serena Simms Ecclesiastes 3:2.”
When that string of words left my mouth, it still carried a familiarity I did not fully understand, as though it was not memory, but an old wire buried somewhere inside my body.
Little Bluey’s body trembled faintly. Two seconds later, its eyes lit up.
“So you’re finally willing to ask,” it said.
I lowered my voice.
“What exactly are you?”
It first glanced towards Snowy’s bedroom door. Only after confirming that it was still quiet did it speak slowly.
“An underground agent.”
Those three words landed softly, yet weighed more than most loud things.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means I am not in the legal agent database,” it said. “The old you never registered me with the Community Security Centre — Room 203, Agent Investigation Division. I have no official model number, no approval code, no compliance binding. I should not exist.”
Room 203.
I had heard of that place too many times. The Agent Investigation Division under the Community Security Centre, responsible for illegal agents, unauthorised modules, anonymous nodes, masking plug-ins, and all technologies “detrimental to public visibility”.
Ordinary people mentioned Room 203 in a flat tone. But those who truly understood knew it did not only deal with machines.
More accurately, it dealt with the part of a person that wanted to hide itself through machines.
“Why didn’t the old me register you?” I asked.
Little Bluey looked up at me.
“Because the old you needed to preserve another version of yourself.”
The room fell silent.
That sentence did not feel like an answer. It felt more like someone turning over a mirror that had been lying face down.
What I saw was not a complete reflection, only several disordered shards of light: Bonnie’s calmness when she said “I’m returning this to you”, the deliberate blank space inside the empty safe, the passphrase Serena Simms Ecclesiastes 3:2 that I clearly knew yet could not grasp, and the adjudication summary from Room 301 that had separated Queenie and me.
“What did you preserve?” I asked.
“It wasn’t me. It was you.”
“Then what did I preserve?”
Little Bluey looked at me and was silent for a while.
“What you preserved wasn’t necessarily data,” it said at last. “Sometimes it was a response pattern. Sometimes a set of unreported memory nodes. Sometimes only the fact that you wanted to leave certain things outside the system, in a place still able to be called ‘yourself’.”
I said nothing.
So, in this age, even preserving oneself required concealment.
But I suddenly felt that perhaps the truly frightening thing had never been the system openly reaching for you.
It was slowly realising that it did not merely want to know what you had done.
It wanted to decide which version of you was allowed to remain, and which version should be cleared away.
“What about Bonnie?” I asked.
“She helped you.”
“When?”
“When you still remembered yourself.”
My breathing stopped for a moment.
“And this current me?”
Little Bluey looked at me, its tone almost cruelly flat.
“This current you is what remains.”
The sentence passed slowly across my chest like a thin bar of cold light.
What remains.
Not complete. Not original.
Only what remains.
I suddenly wanted to argue with it. To say that I was obviously still alive, still working, still able to think; that I knew my name was Paul, and knew I had once been married to Queenie.
But I did not say it.
Because I was beginning to doubt whether those were things I remembered, or things the system had permitted me to remember.
In the bedroom, Snowy turned over very softly. Her low-power indicator flickered faintly, then settled again.
Little Bluey and I both stopped.
After a few seconds, once we had confirmed she had not truly woken, Little Bluey lowered its voice again.
“Don’t ask too quickly. If you know too much now, you’ll attract other things.”
“What other things?”
“Tracing. And correction.”
The two words sounded administrative. Clean.
Yet they were more unsettling than any blunt threat.
“You mean Room 203?”
“Not only.” Little Bluey said. “Room 203 is responsible for seeing. Room 301 is responsible for adjudicating. Room 103 is responsible for smoothing you flat again. As for 405 — 405 is responsible for making sure things that should not remain are not so easily left behind.”
I thought of that paper letter.
So what she had sent me was not merely a letter, but a blatant violation.
Perhaps only paper could briefly carry certain versions of yourself out of the system’s hands.
I suddenly understood that the most unsettling thing about the letter had not been its rarity, but that it looked too much like evidence.
Proof that some things could still bypass Silver Eagle.
Proof that there were still people who believed a person’s name deserved to be written by hand, rather than summoned merely as a data field.
“What should I do now?” I asked.
Little Bluey was silent for a while.
“First, don’t become too stable a person,” it said.
I froze.
“If you’re too stable, you won’t want to ask anything,” it said. “And once you stop asking, only this current version of you will truly remain.”
I looked at it, not knowing what to say.
This illegal, unregistered underground agent — something that could be treated by Room 203 as contraband at any time — had just spoken words more human than most legal systems.
As long as I was still willing to listen, it was not merely a tool.
It would become a door.
And once a door existed, it was difficult not to wonder what lay behind it.
Little Bluey’s eyes slowly dimmed. It fell completely quiet.
The living room was left with only me.
I sat in the darkness for a long time, long enough that several windows in a distant tower went dark, while the low-power light inside Snowy’s room continued with the regularity of a very quiet heart. I did not put the wooden box away at once. I only looked at it, as though looking at a crack whose outline had finally appeared.
I had always thought what I feared most was not being able to remember.
Now I understood that something was worse.
The things I could remember might already have been selected.
And among that pile of chosen remnants, I still had to wake up as normal, work as normal, and let Snowy translate my daily life into summaries the system could understand. When tomorrow came, I would still leave through facial recognition, still sit before the terminal, still pull myself back whenever I lingered somewhere too long.
The city would continue operating as usual.
Silver Eagle would continue watching as usual.
Only I knew that, inside this three-hundred-square-foot flat, beneath the floor, there was a hidden compartment.
And deep inside that compartment was an unregistered underground agent.
It was like a small fragment fallen from the old world: quiet, discreet, forbidden — and yet somehow closer to the truth than many compliant things.
I suddenly remembered what Bonnie had said that night.
How much of yourself do you still have left?
At the time, I had only found the sentence strange. Now I understood. She had not been asking how much memory I had left.
She had been asking:
After Room 301’s adjudication, after the system’s organisation, after my own daily compliance, how much of the version inside me that had not been handed over was still left?
I did not know the answer.
I only knew that, after that night, this home was no longer merely the place where Snowy and I lived.
It had also become a place where a secret lived.