Qiu Che's Mother

Qiu Che's mother had lived with him for seventeen years in their apartment on the Seventh Ring Road. In this New Capital governed by Skyvault, she was an utterly ordinary citizen—she cooperated with the system, asked no extra questions, and rationalized her son's abnormalities as stress.

But Qiu Che gradually came to realize that the things she said sometimes didn't quite sound like her own.

Two bedrooms and a living room, the window facing the inner ring; at night you can see the thin light of Skyvault running between the buildings.

Her day runs on a fixed rhythm—what time she rises, what time she leaves, what time dinner reaches the table—and in seventeen years it has barely shifted. The neighbours say she is easy to get along with; the ward office says she has never caused trouble.

Her care for her son lives inside that rhythm too: eat a bit more, sleep earlier, don't think so much. That is the phrasing this city teaches everyone to use, and she uses it fluently.

Whenever the system updates, she is among the first in the block to finish. Recommended items get completed as soon as they appear; she never leaves one to the last day of its window.

Qiu Che took out an old map and showed it to her; her expression didn't change at all, as if she were looking at a blank sheet of paper.

She didn't remember the little pond park they'd gone to on his fifth birthday—instead she misremembered it as 'going to the zoo at six, watching a giraffe cry'—the time and place all wrong. What she remembered wasn't necessarily what had actually happened.

Whenever he asked about his father, she always gave the same string of well-rehearsed lines: a business trip, a while, out of town, bad signal. But the day they leafed through the album, in the first second, she showed a different reaction—a real one, not recited.

She said the way he'd been lately looked a little like his father during the stretch of time before he disappeared: often sitting by the window, looking outside, not talking, writing things. Halfway through, she suddenly stopped and changed her words: I didn't say anything.

The flat on the Seventh Ring Road was allocated seventeen years ago: two bedrooms, a living room, windows facing the inner ring. The furniture has been replaced twice and never moved—the sofa faces the same way it always has, and the side of the dining table against the wall has always been hers.

Her housework runs on a pattern: sheets on Tuesday, windows on Thursday, the fridge cleared out on Sunday. The pattern is as steady as the way she speaks, and in seventeen years it has not slipped.

Dinner is fixed at four dishes, three and a soup. The menu cycles weekly, and Qiu Che could recite which dishes fall on which day from the time he was small.

The neighbours describe her the same way: easy to get along with, no trouble, says hello. There is nothing further to the description.

Her vocabulary does not range far. Her concern for her son comes out in the same few lines: eat a bit more, sleep earlier, don't overthink it, everything all right at school. The order shifts occasionally; the sentences themselves rarely do.

Asked something she cannot answer, she does not say she doesn't know. She moves the conversation gently elsewhere, and moves it so naturally that as a child he never noticed.

There have been one or two occasions when what she said fell outside that range. The sentence ran longer, there was something in the tone, and when she finished she paused, as though checking what she had just said.

Afterwards she goes quiet for a while, then returns to her usual self, and asks whether he wants another bowl of rice.