Chapter Four: The Ten-Million-Word Business

As he reached for an alarm, his supervisor put a hand on his shoulder. “Don't investigate. Unless you want your daughter to forget being admitted to school.” [INDEX MATCH: COERCION EVENT. COST: 1,472 WORDS.] The workers were not thieves. They were memory hostages. Qiao Mi mapped the missing crates. Every route passed Automated Tollgate Thirteen on the north viaduct—a gate closed after an accident six months earlier. A node that did not exist in reality kept signing for real cargo. They found the gate behind concrete barriers and weeds. Its nameplate lay in a drain. When Chenzhou touched it, he saw a maintenance worker removing the equipment under shutdown orders, then staring at a terminal which insisted the next day that the work had never