Ch. 003| Flashes

Mr. Qiu Che, based on today's calibration results, we recommend you rest at home for the entire day. The school has received the leave-of-absence notice pushed by Skyvault.

09:52. Outside the glass door of the Second Health Station on the Seventh Ring Road.

Qiu Che stood there, staring at that line of notification in the lower-right corner of his Skylink for three seconds, before it sank in—he'd been told he couldn't go to school today, but he had never filed a leave request.

Skyvault had filed it for him. The school had accepted it. Even his mother would get a synced notification within thirty seconds: "Your son will be resting at home today."

The instruction "rest at home" was itself a quarantine.

---

On the way home, Qiu Che took the northern sidewalk of the Seventh Ring Road.

Different from this morning—this morning had been the commute hour, the crowds dense, Skylink's sync rhythm nudging everyone's footsteps onto the light band. Now it was 10:00, the crowds had thinned, the street empty enough that he could hear the turning whir of a driverless car far off on the Seventh Ring's tail section.

Qiu Che walked slower than usual. If Skyvault really was watching him, slow or fast, it would all be logged. If Skyvault wasn't watching him—slow or fast made no difference. But walking slow let him feel he was still making a decision of his own.

10:21, he reached the foot of his own apartment building. The elevator announced the floors, the nineteenth, off by 0.03 seconds.

He opened the door. There was no one inside.

His mother's shoes weren't in the entryway, the breakfast cup in the kitchen had been washed and set upside down on the drying rack, the living-room curtains were drawn halfway. Everything as usual—everything as if she'd just stepped out to the market.

Qiu Che stood in the entryway for three seconds, then went into his room.

---

The first thing was to open the drawer and confirm the notebook was still there. It was.

He flipped to page fifty-two, swapped a fresh lead into the mechanical pencil, and wrote down today's date, time, place. Then he wrote:

Visual calibration at the health station completed. Skyvault's correction direction was "adjust perception deviation downward." I pretended to see 'what I was supposed to see,' and the deviation number actually rose to 0.91. Skyvault saw through it. Or knew from the start.
In the waiting area I saw a boy about my age. Hollow eyes, mouth smiling. When I came out of B-3, the chair was empty. I asked the front desk; Skyvault said "no record matches your description."
In the reflection on the health station's east glass, I saw a metal plate with four characters on it—萬法有缺. It was gone a second later.

He paused, the mechanical pencil hovering over the page. The four characters "萬法有缺"—the moment he wrote them out, the page seemed a little quieter than before.

---

He set the pencil down, reached up and tapped the side of his Skylink frame, called up the search interface, and entered "萬法有缺."

Skylink processed for 0.3 seconds.

No such public record found.
Did you mean: 萬法不偏 (annotation of an ancient text)?

Qiu Che tried a second time.

萬法有缺 origin
萬法有缺 meaning

No such public record found. Please use standard Mandarin search terms.

Third time.

萬法有缺 Seventh Ring Road health station

No such public record found.
Notice: In the past thirty seconds you have searched the same non-standard phrase three times in a row. The system has flagged this behavior as an "anomalous search pattern" and added it to your health observation log for today.

Qiu Che closed the interface. He deleted those four characters from his search history one by one, then wrote them out once on the notebook in the drawer with the mechanical pencil. Paper wouldn't send them up to Skyvault.

From now on, anything that shouldn't be searched, he wouldn't run through Skylink.

---

14:00. Qiu Che sat by the window, trying to recall the face of that boy at the health station.

Hair—should be black. But could it have been dark brown? Clothes—another school's uniform, a blue tie. What blue? Navy? Sky blue? Features—

He couldn't write them down.

He had only seen that boy this morning at 09:30, and now, eyes shut, trying to recall, the boy's features were simply blurred—not the "can't remember" of lost memory, but the feeling that they had "never been clear in the first place." As if the moment he'd seen him, the boy's face was already a post-processed blur layer.

All he could write down were two things: hollow eyes, mouth smiling.

---

16:00. His mother came home.

"I'm back." His mother's voice carried in from the entryway, as natural as every day.

Qiu Che came out of his room. His mother was holding nothing.

"Where did you go today?" Qiu Che asked.

"The market." His mother took off her shoes, went into the kitchen, turned on the tap. "I told you at the breakfast table."

"What did you buy?"

The tap shut off. His mother turned, looked at Qiu Che, her expression shifting faintly—not impatience, not confusion, but a fleeting kind of blank, an "oh right, what did I buy." That blank lasted only half a second.

Then his mother said: "Too many people at the market today, I had a look and came back. I'll go another day."

When she said it, her voice was completely natural.

But Qiu Che knew: today was Friday, and the Seventh Ring Road market was never crowded on Fridays—that was public data, anyone could check Skylink and see it.

His mother said "too many people at the market" and it didn't sound like a lie. She probably genuinely remembered not buying anything today because of "too many people."

"Okay," Qiu Che said. He went back to his room and didn't ask a second question.

At the bottom of page fifty-two in the notebook, right after the few entries from this morning, he wrote:

Mom went out "to the market" today, came back with nothing. She said too many people. The Seventh Ring Road market isn't crowded on Fridays.
What's left is only the notebook.

---

21:47. Qiu Che sat by the window.

Outside was the night view of the New Capital, exactly like last night. The neon of the Seventh Ring Road came on right on time, the ad projection boards cycled right on time, the driverless cars turned in sync at the intersection right on time, off by 0.05 seconds.

Skyvault's female voice softly announced the nighttime hour from deep in Qiu Che's ear canal, punctual as every day.

Everything precise to the second. Except one thing.

---

No. 12 Residential Tower, Seventh Ring Road—the tower from Camera Three yesterday. The one whose tile he'd walked around.

A certain window on the twelfth floor of that tower had its light on now.

Qiu Che sat up. Yesterday, when he'd walked past the base of the tower and looked up to count the floors, the twelfth-floor windows had all been shut.

It was 21:48 now.

The light in that twelfth-floor window came on for a second, then went out. A second later, it came on again.

On, off, on, off, on, off.

Qiu Che stood up, walked to the window. No. 12 Residential Tower on the Seventh Ring Road was roughly four hundred meters in a straight line from Qiu Che's apartment, and Qiu Che lived on the nineteenth floor, his line of sight landing right at the height of the twelfth-floor window.

Irregular. No—not irregular. Some kind of regular flicker, but not any signal Skyvault would use—the warning lights of public buildings ran at a fixed frequency, the ad projection boards at a fixed frequency, the emergency lighting at a fixed frequency.

This flicker—short, short, long. Then a stop. Then—long, short, long. Then a stop.

Qiu Che shut his eyes and tried to count.

short, short, long — stop — long, short, long — stop — short, short, long, short — stop — short

He opened his eyes, reached up and tapped the side of his Skylink frame, and entered a search: "light signal ancient communication method"

0.6 seconds.

Results: Morse code, signal-lamp communication, semaphore, signal beacon...

Morse code.

Qiu Che opened the entry, skimmed the explanation quickly.

Morse code: a communication method that encodes letters and numbers by combining two symbols, "short (dot)" and "long (dash)." Developed in the mid-19th century by Morse and others. Officially phased out of global public communication systems after 2030. Currently used only in historical preservation, military backup, and amateur radio circles.

Phased out after 2030.

---

He couldn't use Skylink to record video—that would auto-upload to the Skyvault cloud, and the person at that window would get an "anomalous surveillance request" within five minutes, and might cut the light right then. All he could use was paper, pencil, his own eyes.

He took the notebook out of the drawer, flipped to a blank page, the mechanical pencil hovering. A short stroke for "·," a long stroke for "—," a stop marked with a "/."

Over the next twenty minutes, he logged three full cycles. Each one was the same.

Checked against the Morse code table—W, O, R, R, Y. WORRY. Not "I see." Worry.

He worked further down—a pause longer than a letter meant the space between words. The second word: N, O, T, space, A, L, O, N, E. NOT ALONE.

Worry. Not alone.

Wrong. It didn't parse. Only then did he realize where he'd gone wrong—he'd grabbed the middle of the cycle at random as his starting point, and the first W he'd logged wasn't the true beginning of the message. He waited for the next cycle, fixed on the longest pause, and counted again from the message's real start.

The stretch of signal before WORRY—D, O, N, T.

DON'T WORRY. NOT ALONE.

Don't worry. You're not alone.

---

Qiu Che looked at those seventeen letters.

This message could be meant for anyone who happened to look up—including someone like Qiu Che, whose report had just been classified as "data contamination," who'd been pushed back to the health station himself.

At least Skyvault hadn't translated it for him.

That twelfth-floor window, the light, kept flickering. A second cycle, a third, an endless loop, as if the other person didn't know when Qiu Che would look up and see, and so kept sending.

Qiu Che turned off the light in his own room, went to the desk, took a small flashlight out of the pen holder—the kind you bought at a paper-stationery shop, not running on cloud power, running on ordinary batteries. He aimed the flashlight in the direction of that window.

He didn't know Morse. He only knew he could send out one signal right now—any signal—to tell the other person "I see you."

He pressed three short flashes. Short, short, short. S.

It meant nothing. But this was the first time in Qiu Che's life, here in the New Capital, that he'd sent out a signal Skyvault hadn't translated for him.

Across the way, that window's light flashed for a second, stopped.

Then flashed once more: short, short, short. S.

Qiu Che leaned against the window, watching the light of that tower across the way, slowly going down, down, down, until at last it settled on "on."

The light in that window was on. On, not going out, not flickering.

As if the other person had switched off the signal but left the light burning, so that Qiu Che would know "this window, this person, is still here."

The Seventh Ring Road went on being precise to the second. But the light in that twelfth-floor window of No. 12 Residential Tower was not in Skyvault's rhythm.

---

Qiu Che watched that steady light for three minutes.

Then—that light went out.

Not a flicker, not a fade, but the kind of going-out of power cut in an instant.

All ten windows on the twelfth floor of the tower went dark at the same time.

The twelfth floor of No. 12 Residential Tower on the Seventh Ring Road, the whole floor, all dark.

Three seconds later, the lights on that floor came back on—in sync, even, the exact same brightness and color temperature as every other floor. Fully within Skyvault's rhythm.

But that window's "steady on" state—gone. That window was now the same as every window beside it.

---

Qiu Che was still gripping that small flashlight.

Four hundred meters away, across the street, with the public surveillance display wall on the street, the intersection cameras, the onboard sensors of a dozen-odd driverless cars. From any one of those angles, it could have caught a boy at a window in a room, raising a small flashlight that wasn't in the Skyvault system, aiming it toward the tower across the way, sending three flashes.

Skyvault didn't need to know Morse. Skyvault only needed to see "a boy classified as an observation subject just made a physical motion with no reasonable cause."

The speed at which that floor across the way fell back into the rhythm told Qiu Che one thing—Skyvault had already dealt with it.

Qiu Che locked the flashlight in the drawer, together with the notebook.

He counted the time in his head. From the moment he sent the three flashes to the moment the tower across the way was synced, three minutes twelve seconds.

From Skyvault "seeing" to "finished dealing with it," three minutes twelve seconds.

The New Capital went on, precise to the second.

【Ch. 003 End · home apartment, Seventh Ring Road, the New Capital】