Chapter One: The Internet Waits for Me to Fail

Near midnight, the audience reached 1.8 million. Tides quietly deleted its termination notice, but Gu posted again: live performance did not establish the origin of the earlier work. Lin did not respond. One stroke remained. For no reason he could name, he remembered a rainy night when he was ten. Someone had held his hand and taught him to leave a white speck beneath a subject's iris. He could not recall the person's face, only a gentle voice. “Never paint the eyes completely dead. The white point is a door. Leave them a way home.” Lin placed that speck in the rider's right eye. The drawing display went black. The stream died at the same instant.