33. The Party House
After I finished reading the memory card Sandy had given me, the room stayed quiet for a while.
Snowy did not ask how I felt. She only lowered the lights a little further, as though too much whiteness might scatter the breathing I had only just managed to piece back together. After a long moment, she said softly, “Now you know.”
“Yes.”
“Then you should also know that knowing does not mean you can act at once.”
I looked at my empty palm and answered quietly. “I know.”
Over these past three months, I had learnt something rather undignified.
Endurance.
Not maturity. Not letting go. More like someone who had spent too long beneath a microscope finally understanding that the worst thing he could do was rush out and grow a new shape.
I made no mistakes. I stopped investigating. I stopped touching underground lines. I stopped actively contacting Flora Cooke, Serena Simms and Sandy Summers. Even after coming home, I adjusted the rhythm of my speech, the hour at which I switched on lights, the kinds of things I bought, until I looked as much as possible like a man who had been punished and was now obediently learning his lesson.
Snowy turned this life into a very presentable summary:
[Routine Stable]
[Social Recovery Resumed]
[High-Risk Contact: Zero]
[Backtracking Behaviour: Low]
[Recommendation: Maintain]
The lines looked like safety.
I knew they were only the shape into which I had temporarily folded myself so they could understand me.
The most effective way to bore the eyes watching you is not to disappear completely. It is to become normal. Normal enough that they begin to wonder whether they are wasting resources on someone who has already learnt to cooperate.
So I increased normal social contact.
A school reunion was one version of that.
That night’s party house was in District Nine. An entire floor had been booked. At the entrance, identity codes were scanned; names of people and agents rose briefly from the floor, then faded like ripples. Inside, the lighting was warm. Bottles along the walls reflected thin strips of light. Karaoke rooms, a pool table, dart machines and two dance machines were scattered between corners. It was exactly lively enough, as though youth had been repackaged so that, for one evening, everyone could pretend this was only an ordinary gathering.
The party had been arranged by Ennis Wynn. Her classmates usually called her Ennis.
Whenever she appeared, a room seemed naturally to organise itself around her. Not because she tried to command attention, but because she had always possessed the ability to make disorder quietly fall into place. That evening she wore a dark-blue dress and a thin beige jacket. Her hair was softly curled. Standing by the door to welcome people, she seemed to settle everyone else into position first, leaving herself until last. Her smile was light, but still memorable. Some people, even years later, kept that adolescent brightness of being seen without ever needing to try.
Her agent stood beside her: a Japanese-style girl doll, pale-skinned and black-haired, wearing a pale pink kimono with a little bell tied at the waist. Before speaking, she always gave a small bow. Her name was Minako.
When Minako saw me, she lifted a hand politely.
“Welcome, Paul. Tonight’s seating, song list and interactive-zone pacing have all been arranged. I hope everyone leaves with pleasant and stable memories.”
She said “stable” as though it were a blessing. In this era, perhaps it was.
Thomas Barlow was there too.
He still looked like someone who knew how to live loosely inside a crowd. His clothes were more refined than before, but his expression had not changed much, as though even after years inside high-tech supply chains, he had preserved a little of that secondary-school mixture of joking and seriousness. His agent, Show-off Mic, was dressed even more extravagantly than usual: a humanoid doll in a shiny silver short jacket, holding a microphone as though ready to steal anyone’s chorus.
“So you’ve finally agreed to come out,” Thomas said when he saw me.
“I’ve been very law-abiding lately,” I said.
Show-off Mic immediately lifted its microphone and sang in an exaggerated voice, “Law-abiding citizens are perfect for karaoke — tonight’s dance-machine premium service also welcomes emotionally stable physical release!”
Snowy, perched beside my shoulder, folded her wings slightly, as though measuring the volume of that sentence in advance.
“The sound field is open tonight,” she murmured. “Group socialising helps disperse single-point attention.”
Translated into human language, that meant: move around tonight, let the eyes fixed on me become busy processing other people’s noise.
After a while, the party house loosened into its own rhythm. Some people sang, some played mahjong, some laughed as they missed the steps on the dance machine, and some stood by the bar clinking glasses. The music continued. The lights stayed warm. Warm enough to make it easy to believe that whatever happened tonight did not need to be counted immediately.
I stood by the window with a glass of diet red wine, talking to Thomas.
He began with company news. Work remained the safest warm-up at gatherings like this.
“WPC has added a lot of orders recently,” he said. “Mostly monitoring and patrol agents. Safety modules, behaviour sampling, junction recognition, low-altitude inspection. Everything’s being expanded.”
Show-off Mic immediately took over like the voice-over for a product launch.
“Orders rising, budgets widening, social unrest, opportunities arriving—”
Thomas ignored it and went on.
“The economy’s been bad lately. Everyone knows it. Prices go up, wages stay still, courses increase, sampling increases. There’s been dissatisfaction in society all along. The administrative units just don’t want it to grow into a shape.”
I swirled my glass slightly.
“So they suppress the resentment first.”
“Yes,” Thomas said. “They translate every kind of feeling into something else. A personal issue. A course requirement. Risk management. As long as it doesn’t become a common language, it’s easier to handle.”
Show-off Mic brought the microphone to its mouth and lowered its voice theatrically.
“Collective dissatisfaction, if unnamed, may still be treated as scattered fluctuation.”
I could not help laughing.
Some truths, apparently, had to be delivered by an over-talented singing doll in the manner of a stage announcement, or they became too sharp to bear.
And just when I was most at ease, I mentioned something else.
“I bumped into my former partner Queenie on a hoverbus recently,” I said.
The moment the words left my mouth, Snowy moved faintly. She did not interrupt me outright. Instead, her warning came very quietly beside my ear, like a transparent label settling over the air.
“Reminder. Mentioning a former partner in a public setting is a high-backtracking association topic. If the other party is also on a monitoring list, the system will automatically create a two-way contextual index. You may continue, but I recommend limiting the content to ‘chance encounter’ and avoiding emotional detail. Tonight’s aim is to disperse attention, not help them complete their data.”
I lowered my glass a little. “Understood.”
Snowy added, “Also, Thomas has Show-off Mic with him. It isn’t bad. It just remembers too well.”
Show-off Mic immediately raised its head, looking ready to protest.
“I call that excellent sound-field memory—”
Thomas pressed down its microphone with one hand.
“Quiet tonight.”
I did not continue the hoverbus story.
Some stories, once spoken now, would no longer remain stories.
What I had not expected was that Ennis, sitting nearby, had heard.
She had been leaning by the bar, talking to another group of classmates. When she heard me say “former partner”, she paused almost imperceptibly, then turned her head. Her glance was not heavy, but it was precise, as though she had suddenly heard in someone else’s sentence a place within herself that had not yet been arranged.
Jason Knight, sitting beside me, had clearly heard as well.
What happened next came quickly, as though someone had nudged an otherwise comfortable evening half a step forward.
Ennis came over with her glass. She did not look at me for too long, nor did she speak as though she were responding directly. She simply said, very evenly, “My husband and I are divorced now.”
No build-up. No explanation. No excess emotion. It was something that had already happened, and she had merely placed it in the room for whoever had heard to decide how to receive it.
Behind her, Minako added quietly, “Status update complete. Thank you all for remaining present.”
The music was still playing in the party house. On the far side of the dance machine, someone was still laughing in time with the beat.
But in our small corner, the air dropped into a clear little silence. That kind of silence is the hardest to manage. It is not large enough to stop the whole room, but it is real enough that everyone must decide how not to appear foolish.
Then Jason spoke.
Too quickly, like someone answering a question before it had been asked.
“I’m divorced too, so we can be together now.”
Even his own agent, Mr Fox, seemed stunned.
Mr Fox wore a suit and gold-rimmed glasses, and always spoke as though drafting a business email. Usually, it excelled at making a scene sound like contractual terms, but this time even it lagged half a beat before managing:
“Timing of expression may benefit from subsequent optimisation.”
The word “optimisation” only made it worse.
I looked at Jason. For the first second, my mind was blank. In the second, a cold thought rose slowly: you don’t even know what her situation is. She hasn’t even said anything else.
Jason had clearly not thought that far. He seemed to have seen an opening and hurried to push himself into it, desperate to ensure he was not in the losing position.
He turned to me and asked, half-testing, half-interrogating, “Do you mind?”
I was genuinely startled. I had never placed myself on that line.
Worse still, I answered almost without pause.
“I don’t mind.”
The moment I said it, I was startled by myself.
It was not generosity. It was an automatic reply. Not letting go, but the old habit of shrinking myself out of the way so the scene would not jam.
Snowy, beside the wall, murmured very, very softly, “You have activated an old survival mode again. Make way first. Do not become the problem.”
The sentence was like a tiny mirror.
Suddenly I felt embarrassed, not for Jason, but for myself. I had once again used “making way” to purchase a seemingly peaceful evening, preparing to go home and settle the account slowly by myself.
Jason was apparently still not reassured.
Later, he pulled me downstairs to the small bar. The lights there were dimmer, the smell of alcohol stronger. Old song posters on the walls glowed under orange light like faded footnotes to youth.
He was slightly drunk, his eyes more direct than usual.
“Should I go after her?” he asked.
This time, I barely stopped breathing. “Go ahead.”
It sounded like permission. In truth, it was closer to a risk assessment.
Mr Fox immediately added in a low voice, as though packaging its owner’s bluntness into something more respectable, “Competitive pressure confirmed as removed. Subsequent stage may proceed into active interaction.”
A chill moved through me. Not because Mr Fox sounded too mechanical, but because it sounded too much like the truth.
When we returned upstairs, Jason did indeed start filling every gap. He did not approach Ennis gradually. He seemed desperate to insert himself into the frame. When Ennis helped Thomas and me choose songs, he immediately went over and said, half-joking and half-serious, “You haven’t sung with me yet.” When Ennis was talking to someone else, he would cut in with a joke. When she was choosing a song, he would move too close too quickly, as though he could reclaim presence through distance.
On his shoulder, Mr Fox became increasingly like an overzealous public relations consultant.
“Interaction frequency rising. Number of shared frames increasing. Recommend exploiting golden window.”
As I watched, I suddenly understood something.
Jason was not pursuing Ennis. He was pursuing a position that would immediately make him “not losing”.
It was then that Ennis came over and said quietly to me, “Jason is drunk.”
She left after saying it, as though placing a gentle request on the table — please deal with this — while trying not to embarrass anyone.
Minako stood by her shoulder, tilting her head slightly, the light in her eyes faint.
“The party concerned is under high emotional load. Recommend nearby parties reduce density of active approach.”
Nobody responded, as if by tacit agreement we were pretending nothing had happened. That was the refined thing about party houses. They allowed all manner of failure to be named as drunkenness and then swiftly turned the page.
I went to sing.
“Lucky Ferris Wheel.”
“Painless Heartbreak.”
“Karaoke King.”
Thomas really was the king of karaoke. He knew how to bring people in on the beat, which line to give way on, which line to push, and where laughter should be used to lift a song that was otherwise too wounded. Show-off Mic enjoyed the stage all evening, stealing little harmonies between verses and forcibly polishing every song with its own shine.
“The chorus would be better half a tone higher—”
“I’ll take this line, guaranteed smooth!”
“Come on, everyone together!”
But that night, I sang with real involvement. I barely needed him to lead me.
I was happy. Not because I was performing. Not because I wanted to attract anyone. Precisely because I did not need to achieve anything, I loosened. And it was when I was at my most relaxed that Ennis naturally came over and sang a few lines with me.
Her voice was still very good. Not the kind of brightness that deliberately showed off, but clean, fine, and made steadier by life rather than dulled by it.
Two lines were enough. No more, no less. Just enough to make one aware that she was there, without making it seem as though she had deliberately entered my song.
I did not respond to her in any special way. I simply sang my own part. Not coldly. I only did not want to misread anything as a signal.
Snowy reminded me very quietly, “Because you are not competing, she can approach naturally. The moment you seize it, it becomes risk.”
She was right.
Sometimes the least dangerous way for closeness to occur is to avoid making it look as though anyone actively claimed it.
The next day, the fire began. Not a public fire. The sort of fire the system was best at: steady, vicious, and burning silently backstage while people were marked first.
In the Spectrum Recomposition Project office, the psychologist did not begin with the samples that had already clearly crossed the line. She preferred to look first at those who still appeared to be engaging in ordinary social contact.
The public sound-field summary from the party house, group contact density, duet frames, bar conversations, Jason’s two active follow-up questions and one emotionally charged self-positioning were soon extracted again by Queen of Spades and placed into a new observation table.
[Sample 192: Jason Knight]
[Temporary Tag: Sudden Relationship Projection]
[Tendencies: High Response Anxiety / High Frame Demand / Low Context Reading]
[Recommendation: Pre-Observation in Room 103]
Ennis Wynn was also quietly placed on the White List.
Not because she had done anything wrong.
Because she had just emerged from a formal relationship and, during a public social event, had been scanned by two male lines of sight at once: one urgent, one withdrawing. For the Spectrum Recomposition Project, a person like that was worth watching. She still had unresolved emotion within her, and other people’s projections had already begun to grow around her.
In the white room, as Queen of Spades slowly folded her fan, she said only, “The newly divorced most easily become mirrors for others. A mirror need not shatter first. Once someone has seen themselves upon it, it already has data value.”
White light settled quietly downward, and another line appeared.
[Sample 193: Ennis Wynn]
[Temporary Tag: Emotional Projection Trigger Point]
[Tendencies: High Mirror-Bearing Capacity / High External Projection Adhesion]
[Recommendation: White List Observation]
White List observation established. The psychologist was satisfied.
Her arson never burned great crimes. It burned the small deviations that had not yet had time to be acknowledged.
That afternoon, Cindy and Linda went to see Jason.
Fifi Dog began with a home scan. Dolphin Bubble adjusted the sitting-room sound field to a low frequency that made it difficult for anyone to lose their temper. Mr Fox initially tried to make things sound dignified on Jason’s behalf, but once it saw both sides’ agents present, it withdrew half its words, as though even it understood that today was not suitable for making anything look too polished.
Cindy sat down, placed a bag of fruit on the table, and spoke in the mild tone she always used — the tone that could be mistaken for concern.
“Your emotional fluctuation has been a little high recently. We’d like you to sit in Room 103 for a while.”
Fifi Dog translated the words into procedure.
“System has detected high-density self-projection and immediate relationship-substitution tendency. Recommendation: short-term emotional stability observation.”
Linda pushed forward the blue wave line projected by Dolphin Bubble, as though indicating: we are not here to punish you; we only want you not to fall too quickly.
But anyone who understood would know that Room 103 was not a rest room. It was the still-soft chair before you were formally entered into the observation pathway.
Ennis soon noticed something wrong as well.
A patrol camera that did not belong to the building’s management system appeared downstairs. The public sensor screen in the lift began displaying emotional health reminders more frequently. Minako, originally only a lifestyle agent, issued several new prompts about “additional nearby sound-field sampling”.
Standing beside Ennis’s shoulder, Minako lowered her voice for the first time into something almost cold.
“We are being watched more closely lately. This is not ordinary public-safety sampling.”
Ennis was not foolish. She soon understood that the events of that night had not entirely dispersed.
Two days later, she asked to meet me at a very ordinary bakery.
Such places were best. Lots of surveillance, fragmented sound, everyone busy with their own business. It meant that what truly needed saying could be made thinner. The electronic price board on the wall slowly changed colour. Baking machinery turned steadily in the back. Even the buttery smell in the air seemed cut to a concentration precise enough not to cause trouble.
After sitting down, she did not circle around the matter.
“Do you know something?” Her question was calm, but I could see she was holding herself back.
Minako stood beside her cup, several degrees less sweet than usual, as though she too understood that this was not the moment to make the scene look pleasant.
I looked at Ennis and did not answer at once.
I knew that if I said even half a sentence too much here, she would no longer be merely observed. She would be formally pulled into someone else’s map.
In the end, I said only, “Now isn’t the time. I’m being monitored too.”
Ennis looked at me. Her gaze was very still. “What should I do?”
I lowered my voice. “Be normal first. Don’t look for answers yet. Don’t try to prove you’re fine either.”
She was silent for two seconds.
Then she nodded. “All right.”
She did not press me further. Perhaps she understood that, in this era, when someone was willing to say, “Now isn’t the time,” that was already a very serious warning.
Beside her, Minako added gently, as though offering the final comfort the conversation could bear.
“Stability does not mean surrender. Sometimes it only means not allowing someone else to write your version first.”
After that, I noticed the surveillance around me really did begin to fade. Not vanish completely. But those eyes were beginning to look elsewhere.
The Blue-winged Magpie still occasionally perched in the tree opposite, but no longer appeared at the same time every day. The chihuahua domestic agent downstairs also appeared less often. Snowy still saw the social summaries, but the density of tags began to fall.
One day, Snowy said evenly, “Attention cost is being redistributed.”
I understood. It did not mean I was safe. It meant I had finally succeeded in making myself less worth watching.
I endured. I made no mistakes. I stopped investigating, stopped contacting people recklessly, increased normal social activity, and let other people’s attention slowly loosen from me and turn towards those in whom new tensions had just begun to grow.
There was nothing heroic in that. Nothing bright. And the uglier part was that I knew, deep down, the people who drew that redirected attention were not people I had wanted to drag down. But Silver Eagle’s white light never lacked targets. When I learnt to fold myself back, it simply shone somewhere else.
In Silver Eagle 2074, those who survive are often not the bravest. They are the ones who know how to become, for a while, less visible on someone else’s map.
Even afterwards, I sometimes remembered the songs from the party house.
“Lucky Ferris Wheel.”
“Painless Heartbreak.”
“Karaoke King.”
The songs themselves were innocent.
The real danger lay in the fact that, while singing, people accidentally sang out a part of themselves that had not yet been arranged.
And what the system did best was never stopping you from speaking. It was waiting until after you had finished singing, then slowly writing every missed note into an observation list.