Chapter One: One Million Words

He wrote three rules on paper. Objects are storage media. Emotion is write permission. Capacity is not time. It is the price of retrieval. My own memory cannot be trusted. He stopped at the third. He remembered Xingyao calling on the night of the fire, crying that an experiment had failed and telling him not to come. Yet now the call felt expertly edited: sobbing, alarms, but not one childhood name only the two of them used. At two in the morning, metal scraped outside his door. Someone was picking the lock. Chenzhou did not call the police. He pressed his palm to the door. A memory deposited ten minutes earlier struck him: the man in the cap stood in the corridor, speaking into an earpiece.