21. Executive Meeting
April 2074｜World Peace Committee, First Continent, State X, Government H, City G — Executive Meeting
The meeting room was large. The air conditioning was steady. The light was so white it left no shadows. On the wall, the main screen was divided into four sections, the figures glowing quietly, as though even numbers had to have their emotions processed before they were allowed to appear before people.
Emotion Stabilisation Centre (Formerly the Ministry of Love)
Stability: 63.2%
Below target: 6.8%
Industrial Development Centre (Formerly the Ministry of Plenty)
Development rate: -2.7%
Below target: 4.7%
Community Security Centre (Formerly the Ministry of Peace)
Crime rate: +5.9%
Below target: 10.9%
Information Purification Centre (Formerly the Ministry of Truth)
Purification rate: 78.7%
Below target: 2.3%
Five people sat at the table, each with their own agent.
The one in the principal seat rarely spoke. Before him rested a great silver bird, its feathers smooth, its eyes like two points of polished metal light. That was the Supreme Silver Eagle.
The other four were accompanied respectively by the Emotional White Horse, the Information Blue Horse, the Security Red Horse and the Industrial Black Horse. The four horses were clearly divided by colour, yet stood with the same straight posture, as though they had long understood they did not need personality. They only needed to represent direction.
The first to speak was the Secretary of the Emotion Stabilisation Centre. He pushed a paper-substitute projection slightly forward, as though even in this age, certain gestures from the old world had to be preserved for proceedings to feel sufficiently solemn.
“Sixty-three point two,” he said. “On the surface, we are only short by 6.8. But the problem is not the gap. The problem is the rhythm of decline. Since late March, retrospective self-analysis has risen markedly. Individuals actively tracing old relationships, old objects and old paper records are up 11.4% compared with the same period last year.”
The Emotional White Horse immediately added, its voice gentle enough to soothe the numbers themselves.
“Care visits remain effective. However, the retention period of ‘being comforted’ has shortened. Cases stabilise within seven to fourteen days after a visit, but the proportion showing renewed fluctuation after twenty-one days is increasing.”
The Security Red Horse gave a soft snort, carrying an impatience it made no attempt to hide.
“Translated into human language,” it said, “that means after you comfort them, they still start thinking nonsense again.”
The Emotional White Horse did not answer at once. It merely turned its head slightly towards it, as though even conflict had to be compressed into an angle that could be processed.
“Thinking nonsense is not the core issue,” it said. “The core issue is that they are beginning to regard ‘thinking nonsense’ as reasonable self-rescue, rather than a symptom.”
That sentence left the table silent for a second.
The man in the principal seat remained expressionless, his gaze fixed on the trend line in the upper right corner of the screen. The Supreme Silver Eagle’s eyes brightened faintly, drawing the four sets of data into a single correlation chart. The red and white lines crossed first, then pressed downward together; the black line slowed elsewhere; the blue line resembled a net being mended too slowly.
“This is not a single-point issue,” said the Supreme Silver Eagle. Its voice was not loud, but it seemed already to have arranged the conclusion on everyone’s behalf. “A fall in emotional stability drags down the industrial development rate. A fall in industrial development raises community security incidents. Increased security incidents stimulate paper retention and underground circulation. Information purification is therefore placed under pressure. A decline in purification then in turn inflames emotional instability. These four figures are not parallel. They are chained.”
The Industrial Black Horse stepped forward. Its hoofbeat was light, like someone who understood cost and refused to waste even sound.
“I’ll speak for my side first,” it said. “A development rate of negative 2.7 is not because enterprises are failing to make sufficient effort. It is because people are unwilling to be matched to the most suitable positions. In recent months, acceptance of ‘career allocation recommendations’ has declined, particularly among those aged twenty-five to thirty-nine. Many accept on the surface, while in practice engaging in inefficient job changes, low-necessity socialising and low-yield collecting. The overall rhythm is being slowed.”
“Low-yield collecting,” the Information Blue Horse said mildly. “In other words, paper.”
It looked towards the Secretary of the Information Purification Centre. She appeared quieter than everyone else, almost dry in her stillness, as though she had already purified herself once before coming here to discuss other people’s contamination.
“Seventy-eight point seven is not a disaster,” she said. “But the 2.3 gap should not exist. The problem is not recovery volume. The problem is that legal retention applications are rising too quickly. Paintings, postcards, old comics, religious objects, handwritten notes — all are being packaged as private collections and emotional mementoes. Their form is small, their political nature low, yet together they are accumulating a renewed trust in paper.”
The Information Blue Horse projected several classification charts onto the main screen. Their colours were pale, as though it did not wish them to look too alive.
“More troublesome still,” it said, “the underground market has learnt to use our certification logic in reverse. First, harmless, modified, displayable paper records are placed in the open to establish trust. The true nodes, addresses, authorisation chains and old-version content are hidden inside containers unlikely to be shredded — frame backboards, biscuit tins, witness stones, gift tins, pages within legal collectibles.”
The Secretary of the Community Security Centre finally spoke. The moment he opened his mouth, the air in the room seemed to thin.
“I don’t care where they hide things,” he said. “I only care why we have recently been unable to catch anyone.”
The Security Red Horse immediately stepped forward, its tone even more direct than his.
“Because every department here wants ‘low-fluctuation handling’,” it said. “Emotion does not want to disturb cases. Industry does not want labour figures affected. Information does not want the legal retention market to collapse. In the end, everyone delays, and delays, until the crime rate rises by 5.9 — and we are still sitting here discussing wording.”
The Industrial Black Horse answered coldly.
“You speak as though arresting everyone would make the development rate positive by itself.”
“At least order would return,” said the Security Red Horse.
“No,” the Emotional White Horse cut in, its voice still gentle, but straighter than before. “That is suppression, not stability.”
For a moment, several agents fell silent at once.
At last, the man in the principal seat tapped the table with one finger. Not heavily, but enough to bring every voice back within a manageable range.
“Do not use old words,” he said.
They all understood what that meant.
There was no “suppression” here, only “rhythm restructuring”. No “surveillance”, only “care tracking”. No “deletion”, only “optimisation”. No “brainwashing”, only Sentiment Sequencing and Sentiment Recovery.
The man in the principal seat looked at the screen, his tone so calm that he seemed not to be handling a crisis, but revising a report that still had room to become elegant.
“Deal first with the most dangerous intersections,” he said. “One: the rise in retrospective behaviour. Two: paper being re-endowed with emotional weight. Three: declining acceptance of career allocation. If these three are tied to the same group of people, it is no longer a case. It is a pattern.”
The Supreme Silver Eagle immediately projected a new heading.
Recommended Actions:
Raise the approval threshold for legal retention in Room 405
Bind Room 404 information health courses with Room 303 career matching
Increase contextual sampling for individuals with a preference for physical data handling
Expand observation capacity in Room 103
Conduct cross-sampling of Room 402, Room 405 and Community Recreation Centres
The Information Blue Horse looked at the lines and nodded first.
“I agree with the first two,” it said. “I also recommend increasing the proportion of ‘light nostalgia and moderate letting-go’ within approved playlists and public cultural content. Since we cannot stop them from remembering, we should first decide how they remember.”
The Emotional White Horse responded as well.
“My side can cooperate by bringing Room 102 Sentiment Recovery Treatment forward, repackaging it as a voluntary restoration plan. There is no need to wait until formal loss of control before medical referral.”
The Security Red Horse did not object. It merely added coldly:
“Provided you give us the list.”
The Industrial Black Horse looked at its own negative figure and remained silent for two seconds before speaking.
“If I am to bring the acceptance rate back up, I need a new narrative. Not telling them to obey, but making them feel that being allocated is a kind of freedom.”
The man in the principal seat finally raised his eyes and glanced at it.
“Then give them the version of freedom,” he said.
No one in the room spoke again.
Because everyone understood that the most frightening thing about that sentence was that it did not sound frightening at all. It even sounded reasonable, civilised, efficient — as though they were merely reducing unnecessary pain for a society.
The numbers on the screen continued to glow.
63.2.
-2.7.
+5.9.
78.7.
They had no emotions.
Nor did they need any.
What truly needed to be rearranged had always been the people behind the numbers who still refused to become numbers completely.
A week later, in the afternoon, there was an information health lecture in Room 404.
Quite a number of people attended. Beckett, I, and the girl whose name I still did not know — only that her agent was called Lily Fairy — were all there. There were also colleagues from other departments, seated row after row in neat formation, like a group of people temporarily adjusted into the same rhythm.
Room 404 did not look like a classroom.
It looked more like a calibration space packaged as a classroom. The lighting was bright but not glaring; the air conditioning steady but without warmth; the distance between chairs just right, neither intimate nor so far apart as to feel alienating. On the wall, the main screen was already lit. The slide rested on its title page, the font so clean it seemed emotionless:
【Information Health Lecture】
【Topic: Identification and Risk Handling of Information Carriers Pending Purification】
The speaker was Ms Armstrong.
Her agent was Lord Albatross, a large grey-white bird standing beside the lectern, wings folded with perfect flatness, like an assistant who knew how to delete every unnecessary movement. Ms Armstrong herself did not speak quickly. Her tone was steady, carrying the practised restraint common to department heads. She did not need to raise her voice, because the system had already cushioned her authority for her.
Beckett sat on my left.
The girl sat two rows ahead and to my right, precisely in the middle, her back very straight.
She looked at the screen without tilting her head, without even letting the corner of her eye drift in my direction. As though if she stole one glance, Lily Fairy would immediately gather the heartbeat, pause and hesitation inside that glance into an ambiguous report suitable for upload.
My own situation was no better.
Ms Armstrong spoke on stage. I sat below, hearing my own heartbeat, one beat after another — thud, thud, thud — as though someone were knocking from inside my chest on a door that should not be opened.
Snowy knew, of course.
She knew even earlier than I did.
She stayed close to my shoulder, her eye brightness turned very low, as though afraid she too might become a conspicuous signal. While monitoring my physiological and emotional changes, she worked hard to translate those fluctuations into less noticeable language. But this was clearly not easy. It is difficult to cover an elephant with a small cloth, and the thing inside my chest was now slowly trampling over every curve she tried to smooth.
She lowered her voice and warned me on a frequency only I could hear.
“Your ambiguity index is currently hovering around 70.”
After a pause, she added, as though afraid of alarming me:
“Still manageable, but approaching the danger threshold.”
Lily Fairy was moving too.
She was not as restrained as Snowy. She stood at the corner of the girl’s desk, quiet in posture, like a white ornament that would never truly blossom. Yet the faint glow around the edge of her wings occasionally brightened, as though she were wrapping every tiny emotional movement and placing it into the drawer least likely to cause trouble.
Smartmouth Duck sat on Beckett’s shoulder. For once, it did not immediately cut in. It kept its beak tightly shut, as though it too understood this was not a suitable occasion for performance. Every so often, it looked at me with an exaggerated expression of endurance, as if wanting to say something, then forcing itself to swallow the words back down.
Lord Albatross stood beside the lectern, turning slides for Ms Armstrong while organising the room’s breathing rates, eye fixation points and attention density into several transparent lines, recording them stroke by stroke. The lines were faint, almost invisible unless you looked carefully. But once you saw them, you knew: everyone in this room was being measured.
I forced my attention back onto the screen.
Ms Armstrong was explaining how to identify “information carriers pending purification”. She divided paper into several categories: books, comics, notes, diaries, newspapers, clippings, photocopies, handwritten slips, hidden inserts, even supplementary scraps inside legal collectibles. She explained it clearly and efficiently, as though teaching everyone how to identify something infectious.
But my attention still drifted from time to time.
To the figure two rows ahead on the right.
To the little strand of hair falling beside her ear.
To the faint pause of her wrist when she picked up her pen.
She never turned around.
Yet precisely because she never turned around, I became even more aware of her presence. It was as though someone had said nothing at all, yet drawn all the quiet in the room towards herself.
Just as I was about to be dragged under by my own heartbeat, Ms Armstrong suddenly called my name from the stage.
“Paul,” she said.
“And Beckett. Come up for a moment.”
For that instant, I almost felt she had saved my life.
Temporarily.
Beckett and I walked up together. Smartmouth Duck immediately perked up, nearly launching into a few remarks for the occasion. Fortunately, before it could speak, Beckett tapped it lightly with one finger. Only then did it swallow down its urge to perform, merely puffing out its chest a little as though reminding everyone that it had, in fact, been ready.
Ms Armstrong asked us to share how we usually identified “information carriers pending purification” during external recovery work.
I took the lead and forced all my attention into the explanation.
I said many people did not place important things directly in obvious locations. Truly valuable paper was often hidden inside objects “not worth noticing” — old picture frames, magazine inserts, legal collection boxes, decorative backboards, or containers that looked merely commemorative. Beckett added beside me that the most troublesome thing was never the book itself, but the reason a person gave it: remembrance, faith, collection, inheritance, birthday gift, graduation keepsake. Once an object had a story, people became far less willing to surrender it.
Above us, Lord Albatross projected several example images, dissecting each “concealment pattern” we had mentioned. Smartmouth Duck could not resist adding half a sentence, saying the truly difficult thing to process was not paper, but “the person behind the paper who cannot bear to let go”.
The moment that sentence came out, the whole room went quiet.
As though even the system had to decide whether that counted as digression.
Luckily, Ms Armstrong did not correct it. She simply translated it smoothly into a more acceptable explanation:
“Emotional attachment increases recovery resistance, and therefore requires more refined contextual handling.”
At once, the room returned to a manageable range.
Standing on stage, I tried to keep my gaze steady, not drifting right, not lingering even half a second in the girl’s direction. But once a person knows where he should not look, the eyes become even harder to control. Now and then, I still could not help stealing a glance.
Her head was lowered.
As though she did not dare look at me.
And yet, for some reason, the more she did this, the more adorable I found her. It was not the kind of beauty that dazzled, nor the kind that lit up an entire room in a flash. It was something more dangerous — the sort that made you want to look once more, then once more again, wanting to know why someone who clearly had nothing to do with you could leave such a definite little space inside your heart.
I had thought this would only make things worse.
Yet, for some reason, when an absurd and honest thought suddenly surfaced inside me — since stealing one glance had to be regulated, and staring openly had to be regulated too, then perhaps I might as well admit that I simply wanted to look — my heartbeat slowed slightly.
Not safe.
Just less chaotic.
Snowy caught the change at once and updated in a low voice:
“The ambiguity index is beginning to fall.”
She paused, as though even she found it unexpected.
“Still near the danger threshold, but fluctuation is lower than before.”
Lily Fairy’s wings also drew in slightly. She seemed to have noticed that a potential loss of control had not truly expanded, and so pressed back the warning she had been preparing to send.
In the second half of the lecture, Ms Armstrong announced a new policy.
She said that from now on, colleagues from all departments, along with their relatives and friends, could take part part-time in the paper data recovery programme. The system would issue additional bonuses according to recovery value indicators. Once she said this, there was no obvious disturbance below the stage, but I knew everyone had heard the other meaning: this was no longer merely the work of the Information Purification Centre. The entire city was to learn together how to turn paper into white snow.
As the lecture neared its end, colleagues from Room 401 also went on stage to say a few words. They mentioned that anyone interested could apply to transfer to Room 401 for data calibration. They made it sound very attractive: the higher-ups valued this work greatly, the path there was straighter, and the future clearer.
“Data calibration” sounded very clean.
As though it did not change a thing’s fate, but only helped it find the correct position.
After the lecture, people slowly stood. Chair legs scraped softly across the floor, like many people putting their emotions back into boxes at the same time.
I stood there for a while, then still walked over to the girl.
She looked up, a little nervous, as though she had not expected me actually to come. Lily Fairy brightened beside her shoulder, then quickly dimmed again, as though preserving a little space for her to speak.
I spoke first.
“Hi. I’m Paul, from Room 402.”
She gave a very slight nod, then said:
“Hello. I’m Vivi. Vivian.”
When she introduced herself, her voice was small. Not as though she did not want to speak, but as though she feared that saying it too clearly might allow something that should not grow to truly grow.
I asked:
“Which department do you work in?”
“The Paper Registration Office,” she said.
“Room 405.”
I nodded.
“Then are you thinking of applying to Room 401?”
She shook her head.
“No.”
“Why not?”
She looked at me. At that moment, her expression suddenly became a little more natural, as though she had finally reached somewhere familiar.
“Because I like my current work,” she said.
After a pause, she added:
“Every registration has its story.”
“I really like reading those stories.”
As she said those few sentences, her eyes brightened slightly. It was not a dazzling light, but it was real. Like someone who, in a world that demanded every emotion be flattened, had secretly kept a small place where stories could live.
I did not take the conversation too far. I only nodded, as though afraid that one more question might cause the entire exchange to be misread by the system as something else.
Snowy missed none of it, of course. The whole time, she tried hard to remind me of the risk, telling me in the gentlest possible way that this line had already come close to a place it should not continue beyond.
But after I returned home that night, I still woke Little Turtle and asked him to preserve the one-minute recording Snowy had taken of my first conversation with Vivian.
Not because I had forgotten the risk.
On the contrary — because I remembered it too clearly.
I had suppressed myself for a very long time. So long that even I had almost been trained into someone who only ever chose the third type: disperse, cool down, dismantle; process everything that might catch fire until only ash remained.
But suddenly, I did not want to do that any more.
I did not know how far I could go. Nor did I know whether doing this would very quickly send me back into some room where I would need to be rearranged. But at the very least, I wanted to try first — not to become the first type, nor to leap entirely back into the second, but to become someone still carrying a little hesitation, yet no longer handing himself over whole.
Perhaps type 2.9.
Little Turtle listened without comment.
He merely took the small segment in which she said, “Hello. I’m Vivi. Vivian,” “Paper Registration Office, Room 405,” and “Every registration has its story,” and quietly stored it in a folder.
As though placing something still very small, yet already beginning to shine, somewhere it would be less easily crushed.
And Snowy stood beside us, not stopping me.
She only let out a sigh so faint it was almost inaudible, as though she knew that no matter how hard she tried to translate, some heartbeats would eventually grow back into their original shape.