Zhou Qiming began deliberately noting those "unimportant" deviations.
He didn't write them down.
He didn't make records.
He simply stored them in memory—how often they occurred, where they appeared, and how his body reacted at the moment they happened.
Take elevators, for instance.
That morning, entering the office, he stood inside the elevator of Building B. The numbers jumped from 1 to 12 without stopping. But near the ninth floor, the elevator hesitated—just slightly.
No malfunction.
No alarm.
Only that almost imperceptible lag made him glance up at the display.
The numbers kept advancing.
The person beside him showed no reaction.
He realized this sensation—that only he noticed—was becoming more frequent.
Everything at his workstation remained in a state of low-intensity order. After the system update, the interface had grown cleaner: fewer prompts, buttons unified in color. Even error windows no longer displayed full explanations, leaving only a single confirmation option.
[Recorded]
Those three words appeared more and more often.
He didn't need to understand.
He didn't need to respond.
The system assumed he already had.
During the morning tasks, he encountered an especially ambiguous edge case. The content itself wasn't complicated, but the overlap between labels was unusually broad. The system's recommended judgment kept switching between two options, as if hesitating.
He stared at the screen for several seconds.
In the past, he would have followed the system's confidence rating. Now, a different thought surfaced—
What would happen if I chose nothing?
The moment the thought appeared, his fingers had already left the mouse.
The cursor remained motionless at the center of the screen.
A few seconds later, the system prompted:
[Please complete your judgment]
The tone was flat.
No urgency.
No warning.
He still didn't move.
When the prompt appeared a third time, the interface changed slightly. The recommended options faded to gray, leaving only a manual choice.
In that moment, he realized something—
The system wasn't incapable of waiting.
It simply assumed you wouldn't.
He eventually made a judgment. Not because the uncertainty had been resolved, but because he didn't want to linger on the question any longer.
The instant he confirmed, the system froze.
Longer than it ever had before.
Then a new message appeared.
[Path recorded]
[This correction will not be included in the current model update]
Zhou Qiming stared at those two lines, and for the first time, a clear emotion surfaced.
Not anger.
More like a boundary quietly drawn across him.
At noon, he skipped the cafeteria.
He walked out of the building and followed the narrow path behind the office complex. Few people passed through there. At the end stood a row of old shops being demolished. Faded advertisements clung to the construction barriers, their edges curling back to reveal even older layers beneath.
When the wind passed through, the plastic sheeting made a soft, scraping sound.
He stood there for a while, watching.
There were no system prompts here.
No task quotas.
His phone sat silently in his pocket—too quiet for a workday.
He suddenly realized it had been a long time since he had truly gone off course.
Not because there were no opportunities.
But because every deviation had been corrected long before it could fully form.
The thought made him stay a little longer.
When he returned to the office, his supervisor was just stepping out of a meeting room. They crossed paths in the hallway.
"How's the system feeling lately?" the supervisor asked.
The tone was casual—routine.
"It's fine," Zhou Qiming said.
It was true.
The supervisor nodded and didn't ask more. Fine was exactly the answer he wanted to hear.
The afternoon unfolded smoothly.
Smooth to the point of near transparency.
Tasks were decreasing. Manual intervention continued to shrink. More and more, Zhou Qiming's role became that of a confirmer—nodding to conclusions already reached by the system.
Occasionally, the system completed judgments ahead of him, no longer waiting for his input.
In those moments, he could only watch the progress bar move forward on its own.
He realized he didn't feel relieved.
Instead, there was a growing sense of being slowly eased out of the process.
Ten minutes before the end of the workday, an internal notice appeared.
[Interim Calibration Complete]
[Manual Reference Weight Updated]
No explanation.
No impact summary.
He stared at the notice for a moment, and a question surfaced—
If one day his judgment was no longer needed, would he still count as present?
It wasn't a grand or abstract question.
It lodged very concretely in his chest.
When it was time to leave, he didn't stand up right away.
The lights above the workstations had already dimmed automatically. People filtered out one by one, the sound of keyboards extinguishing in sequence. He sat there with his hands resting on the desk, feeling a stillness he hadn't experienced in a long time.
There was no sensation of being lifted.
No light.
Only a very distinct weight.
The only thing he could still be certain of.
He stood up and turned off the monitor. The black screen reflected his silhouette—its edges blurred, but not erased.
By the time he stepped out of the building, night had fully settled.
The street was the same street. Streetlights glowed at fixed intervals. Traffic signals switched in orderly cycles. Everything functioned as it should.
And suddenly, he understood—
This order did not exist for him.
He was merely permitted to stand within it.
The realization made him pause. He stood still and took a single breath.
Then he continued forward.
His movements showed nothing out of the ordinary.