Chapter Four: The Ten-Million-Word Business

“A wager on our first contract,” Qiao Mi said. “Bankruptcy really is the company culture.” Chenzhou studied the access logs. “They aren't buying an investigation. They're buying a conclusion that lets them fire eighty people.” Contactless sensors covered every crate, and robotic arms performed the handling. Rather than squander capacity reading the warehouse, Chenzhou opened his level-one index and defined three fields: anomalous time, acute fear, silver compound. He touched a forklift wheel, an emergency stop, and a cracked thermos. The first two held only anxiety over performance scores. The thermos yielded a brief scene. A night clerk discovered that a chip case had the wrong weight.