He was three steps out of the building when a girl with pink hair came around the corner at speed and walked straight into his chest.
She yelped. He caught her elbow. They both looked up.
"Fang Jia."
"Chen Yang!"
She recovered first, tucking her hair back, smiling as though they had parted last week on good terms.
"Well. Where's your girlfriend today?"
"My—" He stopped, genuinely confused, and then remembered the lobby of the Regal Grand and who exactly would have reported back on it. "Ah. That."
"So?"
"What are you doing here?" he said, changing the subject with both hands.
"Interview." She pointed up at the glass. "In this building, actually. I'm looking to move."
Her smile widened. "I've decided I want a change of job."
Chen Yang felt his soul leave his body. She wanted to join a company in this building. There were four companies in this building. One of them was his.
"Well," he said, backing off a step. "Best of luck with it. Really—"
"Wait."
He turned around. "What?"
Fang Jia hesitated. She looked at the pavement, and then at his shoulder, and then, going faintly red, at him.
"There's a class reunion next week," she said. "You should come. We should — I mean, people should keep in touch. It's been long enough."
"Do you want to see me?" Chen Yang asked.
She did not answer that.
He thought about it for a while, standing there on the pavement.
"All right," he said at last. "I'll come."
At the base, three men were waiting at the gate when the light let him out, and all three of them straightened up like soldiers.
"Boss!"
Chen Yang walked over to the biggest of them, who had a load of rebar on one shoulder as though it were a coat.
"Zhang Chi. How's the construction going?"
"Fine, boss. Genuinely fine." The big man grinned. "Turns out people work well when they're fed. Who knew? Another few days and the defensive wall closes at the north corner — after that, a common mutant isn't getting in here without heavy tools."
"Common mutants," Chen Yang said. "Will it hold against enhanced humans?"
Zhang Chi's grin faded, and he considered it honestly.
"Harder," he admitted. "Much harder. A mutant runs at a wall. A man looks at the wall, then goes and finds the part of it we haven't finished." He shrugged. "Looks like we'll be increasing our firepower for a while yet, whatever we build."
"Boss! Look — Leelu's back!"
She came through the gate with a strap over each shoulder and a case swinging from each hand.
"Reporting in!"
"Look at you," Chen Yang said, delighted. "Excellent work."
She dropped the cases and threw them open right there in the dirt.
"Everything you asked for. All of it." Row upon row of sealed serums lay glinting in the foam. "There's enough here to bring every single person in this district up to level four."
"How did you buy this much at once?" he said, honestly startled.
"Because a deal that size was to their advantage too," Leelu said, with the smugness of a woman who has haggled well. "Once he understood we could keep supplying, the price per unit came down. A long deal is always cheaper than a short one."
"Then we start injections immediately."
Her smile faltered. "Boss — once they're strengthened, this district's consumption doubles. More than doubles. Within a week we'll need—"
He put his hand on her head.
"There is enough food," he said. "For all of them. Stop carrying it around."
And behind his eyes, for a second, he let himself see it: the plant lines running, the cold stores, the crates going into the ring — rice, flour, ham, cabbage, corn, oil, sugar, dish after dish after dish, more variety than any of these people had heard of.
Leelu's eyes went dreamy in exactly the same way. "So many different things," she breathed. "Things I've never even—"
"You'll be first," Chen Yang promised. "Every new delicacy that arrives here, you taste before anyone else."
She looked so completely happy that he had to look away, and for one ridiculous second he pictured the whole district lined up and bowing to him in gratitude, which was not the kind of thought a serious executive was supposed to enjoy as much as he enjoyed it.
Then her face changed, and she was serious.
"There's other news."
"Go on."
"Word's spread." She lowered her voice. "About our trades — that somebody out here is exchanging food for supplies at volume. And it spread even though we changed the meeting places every time and rotated the partners, exactly like you said."
Chen Yang nodded slowly. He had expected it. You cannot move that much food through a starving country and stay invisible; the food itself tells people.
"It was always going to happen. That just means we take strength faster than the news travels." He started walking, and she fell in beside him. "Two jobs. First, recalculate the monthly rations for the whole base assuming everyone's at their new level, and give me the real number, not a comfortable one."
"I'll have it tomorrow."
"Second — pick people. Careful ones. I want them inside Grey Rat quietly."
Leelu glanced up at him and understood immediately. "Information. On what's actually happening over there. On them."
"On their trump cards," Chen Yang said. "Before they play any of them. Know yourself and know your enemy, and you can fight a hundred battles without fear."
She repeated it under her breath, filing it away, and then turned to go — and stopped, and turned back with a sly little smile.
"Oh. And Uncle Wei finished."
"Finished what?"
"Come and see."
Chen Yang went through the door of the workshop at a run.
"Uncle Wei! Is it—"
"Boss." The old scientist looked up from a nest of cable with red-rimmed eyes. "Perfect timing. Truly perfect."
Something moved on his shoulder.
It was small, and it had wings, and it had two neat curling horns, and it stretched, and yawned, and looked directly at Chen Yang.
Chen Yang stopped as though he had run into glass.
He pointed. His finger shook.
"Game content," Uncle Wei said calmly.
"That's—"
"Holographic projection. That's all it is. The creature is data; the projection layer puts it where you can see it." He waved a hand through the little thing's body, and it re-formed around his wrist, annoyed.
Chen Yang reached out, and it flowed away from his fingers exactly like something alive avoiding a touch.
"Does it work on a phone?" he said. "An actual phone, not this rig?"
"Certainly."
Uncle Wei sat down at the computer and pulled a handset over. "We wrote a projection algorithm to run inside a smartphone's envelope — power, heat, everything. It's an old-fashioned approach, I'll admit that freely. Nothing elegant about it. But it is extremely stable."
He tapped the screen.
A fox came up out of it. Nine centimetres tall, pale gold, brush-tailed, and it sat down on the desk beside the keyboard and curled its tail around its feet.
Chen Yang did not say anything for a long moment.
Days. This had taken days.
"It's perfect," he said quietly. "I've never seen anything like it in my life, and it's perfect."
Uncle Wei, who had been watching him not react, went pale. "Boss. If you're unhappy with the—"
"What's the projection range?"
"Three metres, give or take."
"Can it run on a normal computer as well? Not a phone. A desktop."
"That's a different language layer, that would mean—" The scientist began to worry aloud about the port.
Chen Yang clapped him on the shoulder, hard, because he was too pleased to control his own arm.
The old man went straight over sideways.
"Uncle Wei!" He grabbed for him. "Are you all right? I'm sorry, I didn't—"
"Fine," Uncle Wei said dizzily from the floor. "Perfectly fine. I simply have not slept in some days and the room appears to be rotating."
Chen Yang got him into a chair. "Then rest. The rest of it can wait."
"It cannot and I am fine." The scientist waved him off and sat up straight. "Ask your remaining questions, boss."
"All right. How big is it? The install size."
"Ah." Uncle Wei brightened with professional pride. "Thanks to the cloud layer, the client is just over four hundred megabytes."
Chen Yang stared at him. "Four hundred megabytes."
"Is that a problem?"
"Modern games are tens of gigabytes," Chen Yang said faintly. "Tens. People delete photographs of their children to install them."
He shook his head. Wasteland technology, he thought. It is simply another species of thing.
"There is one consequence," Uncle Wei warned. "Because so much sits in the cloud, the game requires a constant internet connection. It will not run offline at all."
"Not a problem." Chen Yang was already somewhere else, and the grin that crossed his face was not a wholesome one. Always online. Which meant always reachable. Which meant there were a great many other ways for players to spend money in there.
"Last question. How does the payment system work?"
"We used templates from other titles — nothing invented, so nothing risky." Uncle Wei turned the monitor. "You'd be surprised, boss. Even before the great disaster, the companies had this fully developed. It was a science."
The screens went past one after another. VIP tiers that unlocked the good part of the game. Boxes that opened into a random reward with a fanfare. Collections with one piece missing, always one piece, and a shop that sold pieces.
Chen Yang looked at them for a while.
Two centuries, he thought. Technology has gone somewhere I can barely follow. And the methods for getting money out of a person's pocket have not moved a millimetre.
"Any more questions?" Uncle Wei asked.
"Send me the source files."
"I'll finish the final edits tonight and deliver the finished product tomorrow morning."
Chen Yang nodded, then paused, and pointed at the phone still lying on the desk — the one he had brought in as an example, out of which a fox spirit had just walked.
"What's your professional opinion of that? The handset itself."
Uncle Wei picked it up and turned it over with faint contempt. "A well-preserved piece of ancient junk."
"Could you develop new hardware based on it?" Chen Yang grinned. "Something better, built on that platform?"
The old man shrugged, and for once he looked genuinely apologetic.
"Beyond my competence, boss. Software is my specialization. I've spent my life inside code; I don't understand hardware and I won't pretend I do."
"Then where do I find someone who does?"
"The city," Uncle Wei said. "There's a man in Grey Rat, if he's still alive."
"Good." Chen Yang went to the door. "One more thing — if the finished product is as interesting as what I've just watched, everyone on this project gets a bonus. Everyone."
Uncle Wei stood up and saluted, swaying slightly.
"We won't let you down, boss."