Zero-Probability Accident
When the first light fixture began to swing violently, Xu Anhe was still standing beside her desk.
Someone shouted that it was an earthquake. The voice was immediately drowned out by a louder impact. Folders on the bookshelf tipped in the same direction, an office chair slid away from the desk, and crashed into the low cabinet behind it. The floor-to-ceiling windows gave off a continuous low hum, and the office reflected in the glass looked as though a layer of it had been crumpled.
Xu Anhe grabbed her phone, moved away from the window, and crouched beneath the long table bolted to the floor. She shielded her head and neck with one arm and braced her other hand against a table leg. Each time the tabletop swayed, the metal joints gave off a brief scraping sound.
Before the power failed, her screen was still lit.
72,000 sat in the center of the display, with a red line running beneath it. On the right was a call window that had never connected.
All the lights went out.
The emergency lighting came on several seconds later, its cold white glow stretching along the walls. Something shattered in the distance, followed by the heavy sound of a fire door closing automatically. The floor was not simply rocking from side to side. For a while, it felt as though the entire floor had first been lifted, then suddenly dropped.
Xu Anhe tried to count the seconds.
Seven, eight, nine.
When she reached twelve, another, stronger jolt interrupted her. The cable trays overhead made an alarming sound, and a section of lightweight ceiling fell between two desks. Someone began to cry under their breath, while others kept saying, “Don’t run,” telling the coworkers near the exits to stay where they were.
After more than twenty seconds, the strongest shaking gradually eased.
No one got up immediately. The light fixtures were still swinging overhead, and sheets of paper drifted slowly to the ground, as though time had stopped several seconds later than the floor.
Xu Anhe remained crouched until the table legs stopped striking the ground. In the darkness, hurried breathing came first. Only afterward did people begin trying to call out their locations. A coworker near the aisle turned on a phone light. The beam swept across toppled filing cabinets and debris scattered over the floor, and illuminated a mug still slowly turning at the edge of a desk. The mug had not fallen, but the coffee inside had run over the edge and dripped onto the floor.
She looked up to make sure nothing overhead was loose before sliding halfway out from beneath the table. Information on the phone’s alert page was still updating. Several numbers disappeared briefly, then reappeared. She did not take a screenshot and forward it. Even the official systems were still correcting themselves. Any isolated image could become a false message within minutes.
“First, make sure no one’s injured.” The validation team supervisor poked his head out from under a desk, breathing somewhat heavily. “Don’t use the elevators. Watch for aftershocks.”
The coworkers called out one another’s names. Some had been scraped by falling objects, and someone’s wrist had struck a desk corner while they were taking cover, but there were no serious injuries for the moment. Xu Anhe glanced at her phone. The mobile network was down to one bar, and the earthquake warning countdown had already become an incident update.
She pressed the number for the Luwan Intermodal Center risk management office.
The call did not connect. It did not go to voicemail, and the line was not busy. The screen simply remained on “Connecting,” then ended on its own after more than ten seconds.
She switched to a text message and typed: “Please reply to confirm you’re safe. If you can leave, evacuate according to the instructions on site.”
Her previous message asking about the version history still had not been read.
Xu Anhe stared at the two gray check marks. She knew that a communications failure could not prove anything about someone’s situation. A congested cell tower, a power outage, or a lost phone could all produce the same result.
But the contact had said he would be at the center all day.
Over the past two years, he had stayed late to fill in data and had called three times over the name of a single field, yet he had never left a message saying, “I’ll send it to you in half an hour,” without following through. Xu Anhe tried to tell herself that during a disaster, no reply might instead mean he was helping with the evacuation. But she also knew that was only one of many possibilities, and could not be treated as a conclusion meant to comfort her.
The office evacuated in sequence to the safe assembly area. The stairwell was packed with people from other floors, and the air smelled of dust, sweat, and the heat from the emergency lighting equipment. With every floor they descended, their phones received several delayed messages: family members reporting that they were safe, roads cut off, trains suspended, and disaster updates forwarded from unknown sources.
Someone said the terminal at Luwan International Airport had collapsed.
Someone else said it was only the glass curtain wall that had shattered.
Another video showed large numbers of passengers running out from the direction of the airport. The person filming kept shouting, “It’s all collapsed inside,” but never captured the building itself.
Xu Anhe did not forward it.
Someone stopped at a landing to watch the video, immediately blocking the crowd behind them. A disaster-preparedness guide instructed everyone to keep moving downward and not stop in the evacuation route to verify information. Xu Anhe moved with the line, one hand against the wall and the other gripping a phone with no signal. Every two floors, she checked the contact’s conversation window again, but the gray unread marker never changed.
She had once believed that the greatest value of numbers was giving people a shared baseline unaffected by emotion amid chaos. Now the screen simultaneously displayed “terminal collapse,” “partial damage,” and “pending confirmation,” each message carrying a different time and source. She could only set the untraceable information aside temporarily, as if validating a model, even though some of it might be describing people she knew.
When they reached the assembly area, the company confirmed that the building’s main structure was temporarily safe and instructed every department to remain in its designated area and wait. Aftershocks came at intervals. Each time, the crowd fell silent for a few seconds before conversation resumed. Veer’s major-incident response lead set up a temporary work area beside the parking level. Several laptops were connected to a backup network, and the team began confirming insured clients, affected locations, and employee safety.
The first verifiable official warning appeared at 10:31 a.m.
Luwan International Airport would remain in limited operation, and the main terminal structure had not collapsed; the damage was at the affiliated intermodal center. The central transfer hall had suffered a partial collapse, nearby public passageways were closed, and the airport express, intercity rail, and city subway line were suspended either entirely or in part. The warning urged the public not to approach the airport and to leave the disaster-response roads clear.
The response lead projected the news footage onto a temporary screen.
Filmed from outside the security cordon, it showed only gray-white dust rising from one side of the intermodal center, with darkness behind the glass exterior wall. Passengers were guided out through passable exits. Some were barefoot, some dragged damaged luggage, and some kept turning back to look for the people they had come with. Rescue workers entered against the flow of evacuees, stretcher after stretcher carried across the security cordon.
A passenger with a face covered in dust stood at the edge of the frame, repeatedly describing people calling for help underground, but could not say which level. Another passenger insisted they had seen an entire section of floor collapse, though the direction they pointed had already been obscured by smoke and dust. Xu Anhe did not decide who was right. In the immediate aftermath of a disaster, even what someone saw with their own eyes might be only a partial view, and partial images were the easiest to mistake for the whole.
The live footage suddenly cut back to the anchor desk, then switched to a floor plan of the airport. The red area on the map covered the entire intermodal center, while the anchor repeatedly reminded viewers that it was the restricted zone, not the actual collapse area. Even in the temporary work area, some people sucked in a breath at the sight of the red. Xu Anhe stared at the legend. For the first time, she felt that “scope definition” was no longer merely fine print beneath a report. If a marker was misread, it was enough to give everyone a completely different image of the site.
The casualty figures beneath the footage changed repeatedly. At first there was only “multiple people injured.” A few minutes later, an unverified report of deaths appeared, then was withdrawn. Different media outlets were not even using photos of the same entrance.
“Don’t put the news figures into the incident notice yet,” the response lead said. “Record only the facility status officially confirmed.”
Xu Anhe rewound the footage by more than ten seconds.
An arrival announcement could be heard in the background of one piece of on-site video. The announcement was broken apart by alarms and voices, but she had heard that echo through her headphones not long ago. The footage had probably been shot on the north side of the central transfer area, not far from the risk management office.
She called again.
It still would not connect.
When the call ended automatically, she did not redial immediately. Emergency communications might need that line more than her anxiety did. She placed her phone facedown on the table, but her eyes remained fixed on the time in the corner of the screen. During the morning call, the contact had promised to send the version history within half an hour. The time between the end of the call and the earthquake had been short enough that he might not have had time to organize the files, yet long enough to complete an export. She did not know which it was.
“You know someone at the site?” the supervisor asked.
Xu Anhe turned the unanswered work number toward him. “The contact in the risk management office. He promised to send me the version history before the earthquake.”
“Do you have a personal number?”
“I only have his work number.” Xu Anhe pulled her phone back.
The supervisor forwarded her a contact list. “We’re confirming through the operations unit. Don’t contact the rescue workers at the site yourself. They don’t have the capacity to look for a specific person on our behalf.”
Xu Anhe nodded. The restriction was reasonable, but it did not make waiting any easier.
On the screen, a rescue worker raised a hand, signaling for the people outside to move back. The camera shook with them, briefly capturing the inside of the transfer hall. Part of the floor slab was still intact. The real damage was to a section of space near the primary pedestrian link area. Falling debris, tilted fixtures, and escalators that had stopped running had divided the original flow into several narrow exits. It was not that there were no exits. It was that too many people had been forced onto the same exit at once.
72,000 was no longer merely a calculated result for the first time.
It became every movement in the footage of people turning back to search for someone, every stretcher carried in against the flow, and every dark area where the camera could not determine whether anyone remained.
Before noon, the company ordered the model validation team to secure all files related to the intermodal center. The backup network could now connect to the internal system. Xu Anhe returned to the temporary workstation, entered the two-factor authentication code, and opened the morning’s review case.
She first checked the test copy she had retained.
The file was still there. The creation time, data period, and result of 72,000 were unchanged. Her submitted review comments also remained in the local synchronization record, timestamped 9:46 a.m.
Next, she opened the risk summary returned by the client system after the incident procedure had been activated.
The page loaded very slowly. The facility name appeared first, followed by policy data, operating status, and model version. The risk marker at the top spun several times before finally lighting up green. Beneath it, the display read: “Does not meet mandatory escalation conditions.”
Xu Anhe did not move the mouse.
She reduced that window to the left half of the screen, then placed the test copy saved that morning on the right. On the right was 72,000, crossing the red line. On the left was the green “Conditions not met.” Both records were marked as created before the incident, and both pointed to the same review case.
Xu Anhe first confirmed the system times on both sides, then asked the IT staff to record the backup source and loading path. Two IT employees had been preparing to resynchronize the data, but stopped when they heard her request. If someone overwrote the state now in an attempt to restore normal operation, the contradiction might be reduced forever to an unverifiable memory.
The IT employee responsible for operating the backup system looked at the two windows. “These can’t both be true.”
The other IT employee, who was checking the client-side data, continued, “The backup data may not have finished synchronizing, or the client may have returned an earlier version.”
Xu Anhe looked at the version dates on both sides. “Confirm the data sources first. Don’t change any fields.”
She did not say that someone had falsified anything. Post-disaster system failover, synchronization delays, or mislabeled files could all temporarily cause the same case to show different results. The most important thing at that moment was not to name the contradiction, but to preserve it.
She captured both screens, sent them together with the local records into the incident preservation area, and then entered the discovery time and operating steps.
In the primary system, the escalation process from that morning had been reduced to a case number, while the status field continued spinning. She opened the history, and the page displayed: Temporarily unavailable.
Her phone vibrated once.
The operations unit had returned the first batch of personnel status reports. Several people in the risk management office had been reached, while many others remained unaccounted for. The list did not confirm any injuries or deaths. It only included each person’s last access-control record or location in the work system.
Xu Anhe scrolled down until she found the contact.
Status: Unaccounted for.
Last location: Central transfer area.
The right-hand screen still displayed 72,000. The green marker on the left glowed quietly, as if assuring everyone that before the incident occurred, there had been no risk here that required escalation.