Chapter Four: Becoming Noise

The citywide screens produced pressure, but the circuit still closed through his behavior profile—a model assembled from sixteen years of clicks, pauses, and evasions. “What if the profile can't recognize you?” Xu asked. They could not erase observation. They could contaminate the observer. Lin wrote behavior agents and logged three hundred contradictory versions of himself into Qiongjing. One watched parenting videos. One studied deep-sea welding. One bought red women's shoes at dawn. Each retained a fragment of his real history, then buried its edges under random pauses, back-swipes, and mistakes. Myriad excelled at extracting desire from noise. Lin had helped teach it. Now he wanted the teacher to mistake its student.