By the second hour of his cover shift, Su Ding'an was leaning against the card reader, looking through news headlines on his phone.
After covering a few shifts, he'd worked out a rhythm of his own. He spent the first half hour sensing everything carefully and confirming there were no irregularities within his jurisdiction. For the rest of the time, he could mostly relax.
Today was the same. Gravity felt stable. The weights of the scooters, signs, and street trees along the road were all about the same as what he'd recorded yesterday. There was nothing to get nervous about.
Then, just as he swiped to the next story, an incorrect weight appeared in his awareness.
It hadn't suddenly emerged. It was more like it had been there all along and happened to pass through a certain corner, allowing his awareness to catch it.
That weight was different from the surrounding signs, scooters, and street trees. It was so out of place that it felt like an unclassified expense had appeared in a ledger—no matter how he looked at it, it didn't match any existing category.
He lowered his phone, closed his eyes, and tried to amplify that awareness a little, wanting to confirm he hadn't sensed it wrong.
It wasn't his imagination.
He couldn't describe its exact shape or material. He only knew that it had weight. The number wasn't particularly light or heavy, somewhere between a cat and an adult, and that weight was moving.
It wasn't moving fast, but it was steady, heading straight toward the boundary of his jurisdiction, as though it knew exactly where it was going.
Su Ding'an stood up, slipped his phone into his pocket, walked out of the machine room, and followed the direction indicated by his awareness.
The sunlight outside the machine room was a little harsh. He squinted until his eyes adjusted, then continued toward the jurisdiction's boundary, guided by that sensation.
People on the street went about their business as usual. Some were on the phone, others were waiting for the bus. No one noticed him, and no one noticed the moving weight.
He walked faster and faster, then finally broke into a run. His leather shoes struck the sidewalk tiles in rapid succession, drawing sidelong glances from several pedestrians, but no one actually stopped to ask what was wrong.
As he ran, he estimated the distance in his head. He had never once walked the jurisdiction's entire boundary. He'd only seen its approximate range in the documentation. This was the first time he'd actually run toward that line.
When he reached the intersection, he saw a rusted address-number plate embedded in the ground. Most of the paint had peeled away, leaving only a few barely legible digits. A scooter illegally parked beside it had one wheel resting right on the edge of the number plate.
That was the end of his jurisdiction. The documentation stated it clearly, and he'd made a point of checking it again last night. He hadn't expected to need it today.
He barely hesitated before taking one step forward.
His awareness vanished instantly, cleanly, as if someone had pulled a plug. The sensation of the power going out shot from the soles of his feet straight to the top of his head. His vision even went dark for half a second. He staggered and had to grab the nearby utility pole to steady himself, a thin layer of sweat breaking out across his forehead.
He took several breaths and waited for the dizziness to pass before remembering that he needed to step back.
He stepped back.
His awareness returned immediately, like a plug being reinserted. That familiar sense of weight flooded back into his mind all at once. The moving weight was still there, only a little farther away now. Its speed hadn't changed. It was still moving forward at an unhurried, steady pace.
Unwilling to give up, he tried again. He lifted his foot and stepped out. The power cut off. He stepped back, and the weight returned.
It was the same three times in a row. The dizziness each time he stepped out wasn't any lighter than the first. After the repeated attempts, he even started to feel nauseated, his stomach churning.
Su Ding'an stood on that invisible line, watching the thing run farther and farther away on the other side. There was nothing he could do but watch helplessly as the sense of its weight faded bit by bit.
A pedestrian happened to be waiting for the light nearby. Seeing him step out and back in place, the man frowned and studied him a few times, probably assuming he was doing some strange stretching exercise—or following some new fitness trend.
A woman waiting for the light also glanced at him twice. Seeing his serious expression, she lowered her head and went back to scrolling on her phone, deciding not to get involved.
The light turned green, and the pedestrians gradually moved on. Su Ding'an remained where he was, one foot hovering slightly off the ground, ready to step out and pull it back at any moment, like he was dancing a routine only he could understand.
He looked up at the sky. If one of his coworkers saw him like this, he figured the story would probably get passed around as some strange urban legend.
He pulled out his phone and opened the photos he'd taken of the Guidelines for Duty-Position Substitution Procedures, searching page by page for a way to expand his jurisdiction.
There was no direct entry in the table of contents. He guessed it was probably filed under the appendices. When he flipped to those pages, he found it right away.
He needed to fill out a Jurisdiction Temporary Expansion Application, attach the reason, and wait for approval from the Staffing Division. It would take three business days to process.
He read the sentence twice to make sure he hadn't misread it, especially the part about three business days. He read that section one more time, hoping his eyes were playing tricks on him.
Three business days.
Su Ding'an looked toward the direction in which the weight had disappeared. In about ten minutes, the thing would probably be completely beyond the range of his awareness.
He took out his phone and called Zheng Yang. His fingers were still a little uncooperative as he dialed, probably a lingering effect of the three consecutive power outages he'd just experienced.
She picked up quickly. From the background noise, she still seemed to be in the office; he could faintly hear the clicking of a keyboard.
"There's something running outside my jurisdiction. I need to expand the jurisdiction."
He explained the situation in one breath. Even he could tell that he was speaking considerably faster than usual.
"Fill out the application."
Her answer was very brief—so brief it sounded as if she'd dealt with this kind of situation many times before and didn't need to think about it.
"Will we make it in time?"
"I can submit it for you, but the fastest it'll be is three days."
Her tone was as ordinary as ever. He couldn't tell how urgent she thought the matter was—or whether she thought it was urgent at all. Su Ding'an even suspected she was processing some other form while talking to him on the phone.
"In three days, it'll be in Kaohsiung." The words came out before he could stop them. His voice was a little hoarse from exhaustion and urgency.
There was a half-second pause on the other end.
"Then put Kaohsiung."
Su Ding'an froze, unable to tell whether she was serious or joking. Standing where he was, he went over it again.
"You mean put Kaohsiung down and expand the jurisdiction to cover all of Kaohsiung?"
"Yeah. The process is the same either way. Just make the reason clear."
She said it so evenly, as though this were the most ordinary application in the world, no different from ordering supplies for an additional copy machine. She showed no awareness whatsoever of how absurd the matter was.
Su Ding'an was silent for two seconds. Several ways of questioning it flashed through his mind, but he swallowed them all and decided not to ask anything else. Instead, he asked her to send him the form.
"How large should I make the area? All of Kaohsiung City? Or do I need to specify a district?"
"Whatever you want. The person approving it isn't actually going to measure the site."
Zheng Yang added that in a tone carrying a trace of the dark humor Su Ding'an had gradually grown familiar with.
The form arrived on his phone soon after. Its format was much like the other attachments he'd seen before. The only difference was that the field for Temporary Expansion Area was especially large, as though whoever designed it had anticipated that someone might enter an outrageous answer.
He completed the form right there, filling in his name, duty-position number, and original jurisdiction one item at a time. When he reached the Temporary Expansion Area field, he thought for a few seconds, then wrote: All of Kaohsiung City.
In the Reason field, he wrote three lines, arranging the reasons in order: tracking an anomalous object, being unable to complete the normal process in time, and concern that the delay would affect the response window. He even left an extra space between them so the words wouldn't look cramped.
When he finished, he looked it over and felt as if he'd written an entry for an essay contest. Every line carried the stiff official tone his four years of administrative experience had polished.
He sent the form back to Zheng Yang, checked that the receipt time had appeared on the screen—2:03 p.m.—then put his phone away and looked once more at the address-number line. The sense of the weight had already faded until it was almost impossible to detect.
For the next three days, he continued covering shifts as usual. Every time he went to work, though, he would instinctively sense in that direction, holding on to an inexplicable sliver of hope, as if the thing might circle back on its own.
On the first night, the trace was still there, very faint, like a brushstroke in a watercolor painting that was almost dry.
By the second day, he could barely sense it anymore. All that remained was a vague sense of direction, and he couldn't say for sure whether he was imagining it.
On the third day, there was nothing left. The trace of that weight had vanished completely from his awareness, as if it had never appeared at all.
That afternoon, the approval notice arrived.
"The Jurisdiction Temporary Expansion Application has been approved. The effective area covers all of Kaohsiung City."
Su Ding'an stood in the machine room and finished reading the line. He froze for two seconds, then suddenly found the approval notice in his hand a little ironic. It had arrived quickly and officially—just far too late.
He stood up and walked to the wall, extending his awareness in that direction. This was the first time in the past few days that he actually had authorization covering Kaohsiung.
There was nothing.
He tried again, extending his awareness as far as it would go. Still nothing.
The thing had long since run off to who knew where. Even with his jurisdiction expanded to Kaohsiung, he couldn't recover the position it had occupied three days ago. The authorization had arrived completely lawfully, yet it was utterly useless.
He printed out the approval notice, found a pushpin, and pinned it to the machine-room wall. Beside it were the three hard boundaries he'd copied down on his first day. The two sheets of paper hanging together created a strangely striking contrast.
After pinning it up, he stared at the notice for a while. He suddenly felt that this was worth recording, in case he forgot the gap between the rules and the speed at which they moved. He picked up a pen and added a line beneath it.
"Rules aren't meant to hold you down. They're meant to be checked."
He paused, then added half a sentence. The tip of his pen rested on the paper for two seconds before he continued.
"But checking takes three days too."
When he finished, he slipped the pen back into his pocket and looked at the two lines hanging side by side on the wall. He suddenly found it a little funny, then decided it wasn't that funny after all. The laughter didn't feel like genuine amusement so much as not knowing how else to react.
He sat back down in the peeling chair beside the card reader and flipped the Guidelines back to the appendix page. He read the entry for the Jurisdiction Temporary Expansion Application once more, going over it word by word, hoping to figure out whether he could react more quickly next time.
He still didn't know what the thing that had run away was or where it had gone. He only knew that if he encountered a similar situation next time, he'd probably still have to fill out a form first.