Chapter 3

Chapter Three: Mei

December 10th, 2025. China.

She worked out of Shenzhen, because that was where problems like hers were allowed to exist.

Not officially, of course. Officially, the city was a miracle of glass and speed and disciplined ambition. A place where innovation was encouraged, provided it behaved. Where slogans about progress were etched into steel and light, and the future was always framed as something already underway. But everyone in her building knew the real reason the government tolerated startups like hers here: the distance between experiment and deployment could be kept very small, and mistakes could be quietly absorbed before they became embarrassments.

Her name was Lin Mei.

She was twenty‑five, slept under her desk more often than she admitted, and had not been on a real date in almost three years. Not because she couldn’t have gone on one. Because choosing anything that did not move her work forward felt like theft, from her time, from her family’s expectations, from the version of herself she was supposed to become.

At eight forty-seven in the morning, she stood barefoot on the cold concrete floor of her office, hair pulled into a careless knot, staring at a wall of live camera feeds stitched together into something that almost made sense.

Almost was the problem.

Her company did not call itself a surveillance firm. The official language used phrases like urban optimization and predictive civic safety. Her investors preferred integration platform. Her government liaison preferred not to use nouns at all, speaking instead in verbs and trajectories.

Lin Mei called it what it was.

A threshold problem.

China already had the cameras. Millions of them. On poles, in elevators, at intersections, inside shops, on trains. They blinked and watched and recorded without judgment. It already had the data: faces, gaits, purchase histories, travel patterns, social graphs dense enough to feel like maps of breathing. What it did not yet have was coherence. Everything existed in parallel systems, siloed by jurisdiction, vendor, ministry, or political caution.

Her job was to make it feel like one system.

Not smarter. Just continuous.

If she succeeded, the city would no longer be experienced as a sequence of moments, but as a single uninterrupted motion. A person would enter the frame once and never truly leave it.

She leaned closer to the screen, fingers flying over the keyboard as she adjusted the weighting on a fusion layer she had rewritten six times that week. The model flickered. A face tracked across four camera feeds, stuttered, hesitated, then resolved, clean and confident.

“Too aggressive,” she muttered.

Someone behind her cleared their throat.

Mei did not turn around.

“If you say ‘deployable,’” she said, “I will throw something.”

Her cofounder, Zhang Wei, laughed softly. “I was going to say ‘impressive.’”

“That’s worse,” she replied. “Impressive means you want to show it to someone.”

Zhang leaned against a desk, arms folded, watching the feeds rearrange themselves. “The liaison is coming this afternoon.”

“I know.”

“He wants progress.”

“He always wants progress,” Mei said. “Progress is vague. Accuracy is expensive.”

Zhang watched the feeds for a moment longer. “Your parents called again.”

Mei closed her eyes.

“They did not call,” she said. “They sent a message. Calling would imply negotiation.”

Zhang smiled. “They’re worried.”

“They’re embarrassed,” Mei said. “I’m twenty‑five, unmarried, and building tools for the state instead of grandchildren for the Party.”

“That’s not fair.”

“They would say it more politely,” she allowed. “With history. And duty. And concern.”

Her family’s loyalty to the Party ran deep. Committee positions. Teaching posts. Long memories of instability and the firm belief that order was a moral good. Her work was not controversial at home. Her priorities were. Success was expected. Sacrifice was respected. Romance was indulgence.

At noon, the liaison arrived with two aides and a smile that never touched his eyes. He asked questions that sounded technical and answers that sounded like approval. Mei demonstrated carefully, emphasizing safeguards she did not fully believe in and omitting failure modes she was still wrestling with late at night.

“This will scale,” he said eventually.

“It will converge,” Mei corrected. “Scaling is political.”

He considered her for a moment, then nodded as if she had said the correct thing, or at least the least dangerous one.

By the time they left, her shoulders ached and her jaw hurt from holding tension in place. The office felt louder in their absence, as if the machines had been waiting to speak again.

She shut everything down, grabbed her coat, and left before anyone could ask her to stay, before responsibility could disguise itself as necessity.

She took public transit because she could.

The train was crowded but orderly. People stood shoulder to shoulder without touching. Screens overhead scrolled news, ads, weather. No breaking alerts. No urgency. The city moved like it always did, efficient and indifferent, confident in its own density.

She got off three stops early and walked the rest of the way to her favorite sushi place, a narrow storefront run by a middle‑aged Japanese man who recognized her order and never asked questions. The sign outside buzzed faintly, one letter dimmer than the rest.

Today, he looked tired.

“Rough week?” Mei asked, settling onto her stool.

He hesitated, then nodded. “Japan is… complicated right now.”

Mei blinked. “Because of the holidays?”

His mouth tightened. “Because of the banks.”

She frowned. “What about them?”

He looked around the restaurant, then leaned closer. “Some failed. Others might. People are very nervous.”

Mei sat back, processing. “That’s terrible,” she said. Then, automatically, reflexively, “But China’s economy is large. Robust. We can absorb shocks.”

The words sounded rehearsed even to her, like lines she had inherited rather than chosen.

The man did not argue. He simply nodded and went back to work, as if disagreement would require energy he did not have.

She ate, paid, thanked him, and stepped back into the street, the air colder than she expected.

At home, she kicked off her shoes, changed into soft clothes, and queued up the drama she had been saving. Historical setting. Impossible love. Men who spoke gently and noticed small things, who arrived exactly when the story needed them.

She watched with her knees pulled to her chest, half‑smiling, half‑aching, aware of the contrast and unable to look away.

Her phone buzzed with a message from her mother. A reminder. A suggestion. A gentle warning disguised as concern.

Mei muted it.

On the screen, the heroine confessed her feelings and was met with devotion instead of delay. The camera lingered. The music swelled. Certainty was rewarded.

Mei laughed quietly at herself.

Outside her window, the city glowed. Cameras blinked. Data flowed. Systems learned, adjusting themselves in increments too small to feel.

Somewhere else, something had begun to crack.

Mei turned the volume up and watched as if love, like progress, might arrive on schedule.