Chapter Two: A Borrowed Childhood

This time, he had forgotten the afternoon he wrote his first program. The keyboard, classroom, and adolescent exhilaration had faded into outlines. He knew it had happened, but it read like someone else's biography. “This isn't a reward,” Su said. “It's an exchange.” Shen overlaid the raw data from both messages. The future timestamp was not a creation date. It was the endpoint calculated by a mortality model. The first message had truly been created thirteen years earlier, on the day Su's mother died. The second was created seven years earlier, when Xiaokui burned. No one in the future was writing to them. The dead in the past were knocking through deaths that had not happened yet.