After making it through nineteen-hour shifts for three straight days, Su Ding'an had only just gotten his schedule back to normal when a notification popped up on his phone: Quarterly Health Examination. Occupational Health Room. B2.
He read the notification twice, confirming that it wasn't another cover shift assignment, and sighed in relief. He decided to show up on time. Being late to two things in a row wasn't a good omen, especially since he'd only just left a less-than-favorable impression on Mr. He. He had no desire to add to that impression a second time. He specifically saved the appointment time in his phone's reminders and set two alarms—one an hour early and one ten minutes early—afraid he'd miss another notification.
Standing outside the Occupational Health Room, he first noticed a sheet of paper posted on the door. Its corners had already begun to curl, and it looked like it had been there for a long time.
“Please do not think about anything work-related during the examination.”
He stared at the sentence and read it twice, then realized that what he was thinking about at that moment was the sentence itself. So he decided to try thinking about something else.
He tried thinking about what to eat for dinner. Halfway through, he remembered the boxed meal he'd missed out on last time. After going in a circle, he ended up back at work anyway.
He tried again. This time he thought about whether he should go home for a visit over the weekend. Halfway through, he remembered how many shifts he'd covered this week and that he still hadn't finished adding up the hours. The subject circled back to work again.
He gave up. The paper's demand itself was a little unreasonable. He pushed open the door and went inside.
The duty officer handling health exams wore a plain mask. They never took it off from the moment he entered until the moment he left—not even while speaking.
The room was small. Several posters lined the walls, covering various bits of health advice. The fonts were old-fashioned, and the posters looked about as old as the building. One of them explained how to wash your hands properly. Its corners had yellowed and curled up, giving the impression that he hadn't even been born when it was posted. Another discussed a balanced diet, and the surface of the paper had been rubbed shiny from being handled so often.
The procedure was brief. The other person pointed to a machine in the corner. Its casing was grayish white, and its small screen looked several years out of date. A few scratches marked the edges. They gestured for him to step onto it.
Su Ding'an did as instructed. Once he stepped on, he felt a faint vibration beneath his feet. It wasn't quite like the dizziness he'd felt the first time he clocked in—this was subtler and quieter. It did, however, remind him of what it felt like to get weighed as a child.
The other person glanced at the small screen beside the machine, picked up a pen, and wrote a number on the form. The handwriting was neat, with none of the hurried quality of Mr. He's notebook.
Human component: eighty-seven percent.
Su Ding'an stared at the number for several seconds without immediately processing it. His first thought was that it sounded like a passing grade. After all, the passing score on an exam was only sixty. By that logic, he had cleared the bar with a fairly high score.
“What is this?”
The other person's voice was muffled behind the mask, but their tone was steady, no different from someone reading off a health report. There wasn't the slightest emotional fluctuation. Su Ding'an couldn't even guess how old they were or whether they were male or female.
He casually asked for their surname. They only said, “Just call me the health-exam duty officer.” There wasn't the slightest indication that they wanted to chat, so Su Ding'an didn't press.
“The more hours you accumulate covering shifts, the more characteristics of those positions remain on you.”
The other person paused, flipped through the forms beside them to confirm what they were about to say, then added, “And they don't disappear after you clock out.”
Su Ding'an instinctively wanted to argue. Every time he clocked out, the sense of weight was clearly pulled away from him. The words reached his lips, but he swallowed them back. Vaguely, he felt that the other person was talking about something else—something different from his clock-in access resetting to zero.
Su Ding'an froze. For a moment, he couldn't connect those words to himself. The first thing that surfaced in his mind was the heavy sensation from the Gravity Duty Room, along with the image of that shadow. Hearing it now, it suddenly seemed less abstract and much more concrete—concrete enough to make him uncomfortable.
Su Ding'an gripped the form in his hand until his knuckles turned slightly white.
“Below sixty percent, mandatory reassignment.”
The other person said it flatly, as if reciting the most ordinary examination standard. Their tone was exactly the same as when they'd said, “And they don't disappear after you clock out,” as though this were merely a routine administrative procedure.
“You permanently become part of some aspect of common sense. You are no longer human.”
Su Ding'an gripped the form in his hand, his knuckles turning white. For a moment, he couldn't speak. His throat was so dry it felt like something was stuck in it. His mind rapidly counted through every shift he'd covered over the past few months, and the more he counted, the more panicked he became.
“Then what kind of common sense will I become after the reassignment?” he finally asked, his voice cautious.
“It's not certain. It depends on which position's characteristics remain strongest at the time.”
The answer was delivered as blandly as a description of some ordinary classification method.
Su Ding'an was silent for three seconds. The first image to flash through his mind was unexpectedly Old Zhou's. That unbothered expression of his surfaced before any of the abnormalities Su Ding'an had encountered over the past few months.
He thought of the faded photograph of Old Zhou's time clock. He thought of Old Zhou saying that he'd signed forty one-year contracts. He also thought of the line about how the first time, he'd held out for three days. Suddenly, Su Ding'an felt that there was something hidden behind that number—something he'd never considered, something he now didn't quite dare think about too closely.
He quickly suppressed the feeling with a sarcastic remark.
“So what percentage is Old Zhou at now?”
“That's personal information. I can't tell you.”
The other person answered so quickly that it sounded like they'd prepared the line in advance, waiting for someone to ask. After answering, they even casually slid the form a little closer to themselves, as if afraid he might reach out and snatch it away.
Su Ding'an silently placed Old Zhou's forty signed contracts next to the form in his mind. The more he thought about it, the more he felt that number couldn't be pretty. He even wondered whether Old Zhou's unbothered expression was related to it.
Su Ding'an didn't ask anything else. He shifted his gaze back to his own form and checked the number again: eighty-seven, written clearly in black and white.
He couldn't help asking one more question.
“If I cover a few more shifts this month, will it drop faster?”
“Yes.”
The other person answered crisply, without the slightest softening.
“The more shifts you cover, the faster the residue accumulates.”
Su Ding'an remembered that he'd already started considering taking on a few more shifts this month to save money. The idea suddenly seemed far less worthwhile. When he got back, he decided, he would recalculate the cost and compare the agency fees he'd earn with this number on the same spreadsheet.
The other person paused, then gestured for him to look at his shadow.
Su Ding'an looked down. The lights in the Occupational Health Room cast his shadow across the floor. He examined it carefully and discovered that the edge of the shadow sagged slightly, as if another layer of invisible weight had been added. The curve wasn't large, but it was definitely there. He wasn't seeing things. He even waved a hand along the edge of the shadow, trying to confirm that the sag wasn't an illusion caused by the angle of the light.
He took a step to the side to make sure his eyes weren't playing tricks on him, and to see whether the sagging shadow would change shape with him. The curve moved with him without falling a single step behind.
The floor tile cracked.
The crisp sound was completely different from what he'd heard on his first day in the Gravity Duty Room. This time, there was no warning. It simply split open in silence.
The faint snap startled him. He hurriedly stepped back to his original position and looked down at the crack. It was a thin line, right where he'd just stepped. It wasn't deep, but it was undeniably there, faintly corresponding to the sagging curve along the edge of his shadow.
He looked up at the health-exam duty officer. Their gaze had also fallen on the crack. They showed no surprise, looking as though they'd seen it many times before.
“Can this number go back up?”
He asked, then found the question strange even as it left his mouth, as if he were asking whether a payment could be refunded.
The other person paused. The length of the pause briefly made Su Ding'an wonder whether he'd asked something he shouldn't have, a little like Zheng Yang's meaningful silences on those previous occasions.
The other person flipped through a score sheet beside them, searching page by page.
“Yes.”
Su Ding'an froze. He hadn't expected such a straightforward answer.
“There is an item on the score sheet: Have you engaged in any non-work-related activities within the past thirty days?”
“So I need to slack off more?”
“Medically speaking, that's correct.”
The other person answered without hesitation, with no hint of a joke in their tone. They sounded as if they were stating serious knowledge straight out of a textbook.
Su Ding'an stood there digesting the answer, unable to decide whether it was absurd or fortunate. In the end, he decided to accept both possibilities. After all, when it came to slacking off, he'd practiced more diligently than anyone over the past four years.
He couldn't help asking how much non-work-related activity was required for it to count. The other person flipped through the score sheet and said that frequency and duration were what mattered. Sleeping, watching shows, and staring into space all counted, but he couldn't scroll through his phone and handle work at the same time. The system would deem that invalid. He asked one more question about whether there was a way to cheat. Without looking up, the other person said the system was more rigorous than he thought and there was no point wasting his effort.
He thanked them and walked out of the Occupational Health Room with the form in hand. On the way, he couldn't help looking down at the number again: eighty-seven, like a countdown printed on the page. He folded the form twice and tucked it into his inner coat pocket, handling it a little more carefully than he normally did with other documents.
On the way back, he deliberately avoided the seams between the floor tiles, walking as if he were playing hopscotch. Every step was cautious, and he was afraid that one careless move would crack another tile. Duty officers occasionally passed him in the hallway and gave him strange looks. No one asked anything, and he couldn't be bothered to explain. Explaining would be too much trouble, and they might not understand anyway.
As he walked, he calculated what useless thing he could do after work to bring the number back up. After thinking it over for a long time, he decided to buy a cup of oden at a convenience store and eat it slowly. That ought to count as a non-work-related activity.
He even began planning his leisure activities for the week: see a movie, play a few rounds of a mobile game, lie around doing absolutely nothing. He put them all on a to-do list. This was the first time in his life he'd written slacking off as a formal plan. While making the list, he even marked the priorities, as if he were laying out a work schedule.
He saved the list in his phone's notes app. Afterward, he glanced at it and thought that if a manager at Hongchang Trading saw it, they would probably assume he'd finally learned time management. The contents, however, were something else entirely.
At the corner, he ran into Mr. He.
Mr. He lowered his head and glanced at the spot Su Ding'an had just stepped on. Three floor tiles there had cracked. The cracks were thin and extended along the seams. They were almost impossible to make out under the lights, but Mr. He noticed them at once.
He raised his head and looked at Su Ding'an. His expression was just as calm as it had been when they'd first met. There was no emotion to read, and no way to tell what he was thinking.
Su Ding'an stood there, unsure whether he should explain. He opened his mouth, but in the end, nothing came out.
Mr. He said nothing. He took out the worn notebook, flipped to a page, paused his pen for a moment, and wrote a line. His movements were as practiced as usual. When he finished, he closed the notebook, tucked it under his arm, turned, and walked away without looking at Su Ding'an again.
Su Ding'an stood where he was and watched Mr. He's back disappear around the hallway corner. He lowered his head and glanced once more at the three cracked tiles by his feet, suddenly feeling that this matter probably wasn't going to end there. He ran his fingers over the form in his inner coat pocket again, confirming that he hadn't misremembered the number: eighty-seven. It was still there, but now it seemed a little heavier than before.