Chen Hao flipped through the card that read "The most outrageous violation I've ever committed" several times. He tapped his fingers on the table twice, but couldn't get a rhythm, so he stopped.
He opened the terminal, created a new document, and the cursor flashed once.
The title was typed and deleted repeatedly. Finally, it was settled on: "My Three Adventures That Year When I Wasn't Caught".
He read it aloud himself and felt it was a bit pretentious, but it sounded better than saying "I was so awesome back then".
He wrote three lines in the first paragraph, then deleted it. It wasn't that he couldn't write it well, but he was afraid of downplaying it. That kind of thing, if glossed over in a single sentence, would seem like just a joke, but at the time, his heart was pounding so hard it felt like it was going to jump out of his throat.
He leaned back in his chair, staring at the light tube on the ceiling. Susan had dimmed it before, so it didn't look so glaring now.
My mind started replaying the events—the first time I secretly altered the energy dispatch table to help a friend get an extra unit of heat energy; the second time I bypassed the surveillance to enter the warehouse and took parts I shouldn't have; the third time was the most dangerous, I hacked into the system and delayed the alarm by thirty seconds just to finish transmitting the data before it was locked.
None of these three things were exposed. No one investigated him, and no one suspected him. He always thought he was lucky.
Looking back now, maybe it wasn't luck.
At that time, he didn't care what others thought; he only thought about whether he could succeed.
He lowered his head and continued writing, his typing speed slowing down. It wasn't because he couldn't express himself, but because with each sentence, he had to stop and ask himself: Is this what I really want to say? Or is this what I want others to think of me?
Footsteps came from outside the door.
Nana slid in, the chassis vibrating slightly as it passed over the seam. She stopped next to Chen Hao, the optical module scanning the screen.
“You’re altering the motivation section,” she said. “The original record shows that your initial reason was ‘it’s fun.’”
Chen Hao nodded. "It is fun. But saying it now, just saying it's fun, sounds like showing off."
“Humans tend to romanticize past behavior,” Nana said. “But I suggest preserving the original emotions. Authenticity is more important than profundity.”
Chen Hao chuckled. "You're quite perceptive."
“I just read a lot of research reports on recall bias,” she said. “In addition, I also compiled my own content.”
She pulled up a document titled: "When I Started Drawing".
Chen Hao raised an eyebrow. "You want to talk about this?"
“During the cultural festival, Susan and I jointly designed six murals,” Nana said. “There were seventeen disagreements during the process. Each time, I recorded her tone of voice, the frequency of her gestures, and the duration of her pauses.”
"You still remember these things?"
"Initially, it was a program setting. Later, I discovered that when she insisted on a certain color scheme, her heart rate would increase by 0.8 seconds. This was not within the task logic, but it gave me a new basis for judgment."
She paused. "I finally realized that art is not the product of the optimal solution. It grows out of chaos."
Chen Hao looked at her without saying a word.
Nana rarely uses the word "understand". She usually says "identify", "analyze", or "deduce". This time she said "understand", as if she really had a feeling about it.
“What would you say?” he asked.
“I’ll start from the seventy-second hour,” she said. “That was the most difficult phase of our collaboration. She tore up the third draft, saying I didn’t understand the meaning of light and shadow at all. I replied, ‘Light and shadow can be simulated numerically.’ She yelled at me, ‘Then try simulating anger!’”
Chen Hao laughed out loud. "And then?"
“I didn’t simulate anger,” Nana said. “But I lowered the brush pressure threshold, making the lines thicker and messier. She looked at it for a long time and said, ‘This time it’s right.’”
She saved this passage into her speech and marked it as the opening.
Just then, Susan pushed open the door and came in, holding a sketchbook. She immediately saw Chen Hao still writing and walked over to sit down.
"Not finished yet?"
"I'm stuck," Chen Hao said. "It's not that I don't know how to write it, it's that I'm afraid no one will believe me if I say it. I'll say I used to mess around, but now that they see me enforcing the rules, they'll think I'm just pretending to be a good person."
Susan opened her notebook, which contained a structural diagram shaped like a flame. "Then let's not talk about the result. Tell me what you were afraid of back then."
"What are you afraid of?"
"Afraid of getting caught? Afraid of failing? Afraid that you're not actually that great?"
Chen Hao was stunned.
He was indeed afraid of these things. But he never made them a priority.
“We don’t want to hear how smart you are,” Susan said. “We want to hear how panicked you were in that moment. We want to hear how you were panting under the table after you finished.”
Chen Hao lowered his head and deleted the entire preceding paragraph.
Start writing again:
“That day, after I finished modifying the form, I immediately logged out of the system. But I didn’t leave; I sat there waiting for the alarm to sound. After ten minutes, nothing happened. I became even more frightened because I realized that the system could be tampered with by one person without anyone knowing.”
He paused for a moment as he wrote this.
Susan drew a little figure squatting in the corner, sweating profusely.
“That’s fine,” she said. “No need to summarize the significance. Just tell me what you did and how you felt inside.”
Carl walked in at that moment, carrying a stack of printer paper.
“I’ve also prepared something,” he said. “Not a story, but three things.”
He sat down and spread out the paper.
First incident: A worker was connecting wires late at night, bypassing the safety gate. It was captured on surveillance footage, but no one took action. Carl investigated and discovered that the man had worked for 48 consecutive hours with no rest breaks on his schedule. His violation was because the freezer was about to lose power, and it contained medical samples.
The second incident: A female technician falsified maintenance records. It was later discovered that she was trying to secure a job transfer. System regulations stipulated that one had to wait six months before applying, which she couldn't afford. Her child was sick, and she needed a position closer to the living quarters.
The third incident: A senior engineer secretly copied the access key. Not for malicious purposes, but to provide a backup plan for his retiring assistant. The assistant wasn't qualified to inherit the equipment, but he had taught him all the operations.
“None of these things were reported,” Carl said. “The procedure was to issue a private warning and then adjust the process. But I’ve always remembered it. Because they weren’t bad people, they just had nowhere to speak.”
He looked up. "I want to talk about this. How people survive outside the rules."
The four of them were quiet for a while.
Chen Hao spoke first. "Yours is much heavier than mine."
“It’s not necessarily about making things easy,” Carl said. “They’re not coming tomorrow to hear jokes. They’re coming to see if you can still be a human being in a place like this.”
Nana activated the voice input function, importing everyone's initial draft fragments into the system. She generated an emotion fluctuation curve and projected it onto the wall.
Chen Hao's section has the greatest ups and downs, with a sharp rise in the middle, corresponding to the description of "hiding under the table".
“I suggest keeping this section,” she said. “The peak of fear occurs when the consequences of the behavior are unclear, which is consistent with psychological models.”
Susan chuckled. "You even do data analysis on our statements."
“I’m just making sure the communication is efficient,” Nana said. “Also, I suggested that Carl change ‘schedule’ to ‘time to catch his breath.’ The former is an institutional term, the latter is a matter of human needs.”
Carl thought for a moment and nodded. "Okay, let's change it like that."
Chen Hao flipped to the end of his manuscript, where he had originally written an explanation: "That's why I'm so insistent on the rules now." He stared at that sentence for five seconds, then deleted it.
Adding to the previous sentence: "At the time, I just thought he was stupid; I didn't realize he was hungry too."
The room became even quieter.
Susan pushed her notebook over. She had prepared four topics: "Why I hate the rules", "The time I almost killed someone by breaking the rules", "The things I thought no one saw", and "I actually really wanted to find loopholes".
"The first one is too ruthless," Chen Hao said. "We can't let the opening act cause a stir."
“Then let’s put it later,” Susan said. “I plan to talk about it last.”
"You really dare to say that?"
"If I don't say something real, all this preparation will have been for nothing." She closed her notebook. "Besides, you can only follow along if I tell you."
Carl put the printed copy away. "I'll go revise the wording. Some parts sound too much like a report."
Before he got up to leave, he glanced at the speaker stand. Only after confirming the wiring was working properly did he turn off the maintenance log terminal.
Susan stood up too. "I'll go back and go over the order again. This face needs to hold up tomorrow."
She left. The sound of her footsteps faded into the distance.
Nana returned to the charging dock by the wall and entered low-power mode. The optical module blinked, as if it were breathing.
Chen Hao didn't move.
He's still revising it.
Delete one line of explanation and replace it with a description of silence:
“I wasn’t caught that day. But on my way home, I kept looking back to see if anyone was following me. I knew I had won against the system, but I had lost to myself. Because from then on, I never believed that anyone would follow the rules again—until I started to try it myself.”
He stopped pointing.
Look up and look around.
Curtains hung, paper lamps were lit, and chairs were arranged in an arc. This place no longer resembled an office, nor a courtroom.
It's like a place where you can talk.
He saved the document and named it "Tomorrow's Opening".
Then I opened it again and continued to edit the last paragraph.
The lights were dim, and only the screen illuminated his face.
Nana's voice suddenly rang out.
"The frequency of text modification was detected to have increased by 40 percent."
"Um."
"You have been working continuously for three hours and seventeen minutes."
"Almost there."
"Would you like me to read it aloud for you?"
"Need not."
He deleted "I think the rules are important" and replaced it with "I'm afraid no one will dare to believe in even a little bit of fairness anymore".
Then close the terminal.
It opened again.
Change the title from "My Three Adventures That Year I Wasn't Caught" to "I Wasn't Caught, But I Was Afraid".
This time, he didn't delete it.
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