At 3:10 p.m. on Wednesday, Su Ding'an pulled the last report from the copier.
The paper was still warm from the machine, soft heat lingering beneath his fingers. Standing beside the printer, he aligned all four corners out of habit, then flipped through the pages from the first onward.
One, two, three... forty-two.
The page numbers were consecutive. Not a single sheet was missing, and the binding order hadn't been reversed.
It was the smoothest thing he'd managed to do all day.
He was just about to turn back to his desk when the box of paper clips on it suddenly trembled.
The lower-left corner of the cardboard box popped up slightly first, as if someone had tapped it from underneath. Immediately afterward, the entire box lifted off the desk and floated two centimeters in the air, holding perfectly still.
The lid wasn't crooked, and none of the paper clips inside slid out.
Su Ding'an stood there and watched for three seconds.
He waved his hand above the box. He didn't touch any transparent string, and he didn't feel any air moving. Then he shoved his palm underneath it and moved it from left to right. There was nothing there.
The box continued to float quietly.
He crouched down and looked under the desk. The legs, power strip, and trash can were all fine. There was no mechanism, and no one was hiding underneath to pull a prank.
When he looked up again, something had happened over by the break room too.
The mug of coffee Ms. Wang had just made was floating about ten centimeters above the table. The coffee inside was flat as a dark-brown mirror, not a single drop spilled. It floated even more steadily than the box of paper clips.
At the meeting-room entrance, the unopened stack of A4 copy paper rose off the cart as well. The clear plastic wrapping reflected the fluorescent lights' white glare, and the entire stack looked as if it were being held up by an invisible hand. Not one sheet came loose.
Then the ballpoint pen at the neighboring workstation floated out of its cup, slowly turned halfway around in the air, and stopped with its tip pointing down.
The paper cups stacked on the water dispenser in the break room left their places one after another, forming a crooked line. The calendar on the wall turned its pages by itself without a breeze, flipping upward one page at a time until it reached today's date, then stopping.
The black stapler beside the printer slid several centimeters along the desktop, then rose with its staple mouth pointing down and turned halfway around in midair.
In the brief span of two minutes, Su Ding'an had seen more than ten objects suspended in the air.
What made him most uncomfortable, however, wasn't that all these things had floated up. It was that not one of them had been recorded on any form.
He even started wondering how he was supposed to fill out a repair request if he had to do it now. What exactly was he supposed to write in the "issue description" field?
"Multiple office items floating for no apparent reason"?
General Affairs would probably reject it and ask him to add the equipment numbers.
But the mug didn't have an equipment number, and the ballpoint pen didn't have an asset tag either. If he really had to create a file for every item, he'd need to submit at least eleven forms—and he still wouldn't know whether to send them to General Affairs, IT, or building management.
That thought made him more anxious than the paper clips flying up.
Su Ding'an lowered his head and looked at the stack of freshly printed reports in his hands.
His first thought was: These can't float.
He pressed the reports down onto the desk with one hand and held the other on top, as if pinning down a stack of bills about to blow away. Then he counted them again.
Forty-two sheets.
Every one of them was there.
Only then did he let out a small breath.
Over in the break room, Ms. Wang continued talking on the phone while holding her coffee, which was floating in midair. She wasn't actually touching the mug. She simply kept her hand in the position it had been in when holding the handle, and the mug moved forward a little along with her hand.
"I know, I know. I'll send you that quote in a bit."
Her tone was exactly the same as usual. She even had time to roll her eyes.
Inside the meeting room, Manager Wei reached toward the floating presentation remote and pressed a button. His thumb was clearly still several inches away from it, yet the slide advanced to the next page as usual.
Not one person on the entire floor gave those objects a second glance.
A cleaning lady pushed her cart past the break room, and the paper cups floating in the corridor blocked one of the wheels. She casually brushed them aside, as practiced as drawing back a curtain. The cart continued forward without her even breaking stride.
The part-time worker in charge of the IT equipment walked by carrying a stack of keyboards, his eyes fixed on his phone the whole time. He passed the floating copy paper, nearly hit it with his shoulder, and still didn't even look up.
Someone in the break room complained that the air-conditioning was too cold.
From somewhere else came the faint sound of a ballpoint pen hitting the ceiling.
The complaint drowned out the sound, and no one turned around.
Su Ding'an looked at the coworker in the next workstation.
"Don't you think that pen looks kind of weird?"
The coworker didn't even look up. His mouse kept clicking around on the quote.
"Think what looks weird?"
The pen was floating ten centimeters above his head.
He reached for the phone, and his arm passed beneath the pen. The airflow from his movement made it sway once, but it quickly returned to its original position. He didn't react at all.
Su Ding'an opened his mouth, but the rest of the sentence never came out.
He looked around again.
The break room, the meeting room, the printer area—everyone was doing exactly what they had been doing. Some people were revising quotes, some were hurrying up orders, and some were discussing whether to order chicken-leg rice or pork-rib rice for dinner.
There were no screams, no one taking pictures, and no one asking if it was an earthquake.
Everyone treated the floating pen and coffee mug as if they were perfectly normal, as if those things had always been supposed to float there.
Su Ding'an waved a hand in front of his eyes, closed one eye, then switched to the other.
His vision was clear, his depth perception was normal, and the fluorescent lights were still painfully white.
There was nothing wrong with his eyes.
That conclusion didn't reassure him. Instead, a chill ran down his back.
He suddenly had the absurd feeling that he was the only person awake in the entire office. Everyone else was following some invisible rule and carrying on with the performance, while he was the only one who'd forgotten to pick up his script.
His fingers tightened unconsciously, creasing the edge of the reports.
He immediately smoothed the page flat again.
His throat felt dry, and even the sound of swallowing seemed too loud. He softened his breathing, afraid that if he made a sound, all those people pretending everything was normal would turn their heads toward him at once.
Just then, his phone vibrated in his pocket.
Su Ding'an practically snatched it out.
The screen lit up, its cold white glow falling across the back of his hand. The caller ID was a number he hadn't saved. The area code was Taipei, and the remaining digits looked ordinary enough. Nothing suspicious stood out.
He stared at the number for half a second.
Over the past six months, he'd answered far too many calls from unknown numbers.
They were either salespeople pushing personal loans or real estate agents asking if he wanted to look at an apartment. Every now and then a company called, and as soon as he picked up, the first things they asked were, "Are you okay with an exempt position?" or "Would you accept a ten percent pay cut during the probationary period?"
He'd sent out 143 résumés, and only Hongchang Trading had gotten back to him. Nine times out of ten, those other unknown numbers were bad news.
Just last week, his roommate had gotten a call from someone impersonating the prosecutor's office and had nearly wired over two months' rent. The caller had even known which telecom company his roommate had signed up with in high school. His roommate had been so terrified that he still cursed about it whenever he brought it up.
But right now, Su Ding'an desperately wanted a normal person to talk to him, just to prove he hadn't gone crazy.
He tapped answer.
"Hello?"
The voice on the other end was quick. There was no small talk, and no asking whether this was a good time to talk.
"Su Ding'an? I'm Zheng Yang from the dispatch division at Common Sense Staffing. No one's covering the gravity shift today. Go over there for a bit. Three to six. Overtime paid separately."
Su Ding'an froze.
"What shift?"
The call had already ended.
The busy signal sounded twice in his ear. He lowered the phone and saw that the call had lasted eleven seconds—faster even than the time he'd hung up on his landlord during an argument over the water heater repair bill.
He was about to call back when a text message popped up.
It contained only an address, an account, and a temporary password. The address was an office tower on Section 3, Chengde Road, Datong District, Taipei City. Beneath the account and password was the label "Common Sense Connect temporary access." There was no explanation, and nothing said what relationship Common Sense Staffing had with Hongchang Trading.
Su Ding'an read the text twice.
The formatting was neat, the punctuation meticulous, and the final line—"Please complete the handover on time"—gave off an unmistakably businesslike air.
He opened the map to confirm the route.
The navigation screen spun once. The blue location dot overlapped the destination.
Su Ding'an looked up, then checked the message again.
The address in the text was the building beneath his feet.
The destination was on Basement 2.
He stood there for ten seconds.
The first thing that ran through his mind wasn't fraud or calling the police. It was that he still hadn't paid this month's rent.
He made NT$32,000 a month. After twelve thousand in rent, five thousand for student loans, utilities, transportation, and the work shoes he'd bought in installments last month, he had less than eight thousand left in his account.
There were eleven days until payday.
He had heard those five words—overtime paid separately—perfectly clearly.
At Hongchang Trading, even wanting to work overtime usually meant seeing what mood Manager Wei was in. At the end of a brutally busy month, the manager would only say, "Young people should learn more." Then, when someone actually submitted an overtime request, he would ask why the work couldn't have been finished during regular hours.
Now a shift had practically delivered itself to Su Ding'an's door, and all he had to do was take the elevator downstairs.
He ran the numbers quickly.
Even if he really had to deal with monsters or demons later, as long as the hourly rate was over two hundred, it was still a better deal than staying behind to listen to Manager Wei lecture them about copier-paper usage.
He shoved the stack of reports into a drawer and counted them one more time before closing it.
Forty-two sheets. Not one missing.
He grabbed the jacket from the back of his chair and told the coworker beside him that he was going downstairs to deliver something.
The coworker only grunted, neither asking what he was delivering nor where.
There was no Basement 2 button in the elevator.
Su Ding'an stared at the panel for a long time before noticing a black sensor no bigger than a fingernail beside the fire-control switch. He tried holding his phone's text message against it. The panel gave a short beep, and a B2 button that hadn't been there before slowly lit up.
As the elevator descended, he watched the floor number jump from eight to one, then from one to B1.
When it reached B2, the doors opened very slowly.
Outside was a windowless corridor saturated with the smell of a machine room—metal, dust, and the faint burnt odor that only came from an overheated transformer.
The fluorescent lights overhead alternated between bright and dark. The walls had probably once been beige, but moisture had stained them varying shades of gray. A faded yellow line on the floor extended all the way to the end of the corridor.
An old acrylic sign hung there.
One of the five characters in "Gravity Duty Room" had fallen off, leaving only "Gravity Duty □."
Beside the sign was a yellowed notice, its corners curled from dampness. Su Ding'an leaned closer. He could make out only the top line, which read "Notes for Acting Personnel." The text beneath looked as if someone had wiped it with a wet rag, leaving only a few blurry ink marks.
The only sentence he could read clearly was the last one:
"Do not adjust the constants without submitting an application."
Su Ding'an stared at the sentence for two seconds.
He didn't know where to apply for a constant, and he didn't know where the application form was kept.
The door wasn't locked.
He pushed it open and went inside. It looked even more like a forgotten security booth than he had imagined. Two metal shelves stood against the wall, along with a peeling office chair and an old-fashioned monitor as thick as a small television. On the corner of the desk sat half a pack of unfinished soda crackers, their expiration date seven years past.
The only thing that still appeared to be working was the card reader beside the door.
The screen displayed three words: Common Sense Connect.
Below were two input fields labeled account and password.
Su Ding'an typed in the information from the text one character at a time. His fingers were trembling slightly, and he entered the password incorrectly the first time. Red text immediately appeared on the screen: "Acting personnel input error. Please do not panic."
That did not make him any less nervous.
The second attempt succeeded, and the card reader beeped.
The screen turned green and displayed four words:
"Clock-in successful."
The next second, Su Ding'an suddenly knew something.
The knowing was as clear as knowing how many fingers he had. It required no thought, no calculation, and no one to teach him. The answer simply appeared in his mind, precise beyond doubt.
He knew the weight of every object on this street.
The crystal chandelier in the center of the lobby upstairs weighed 78.41 kilograms in total, including the three years of dust inside its shades and the screws that had loosened half a turn.
The white scooter parked at the end of the street weighed 103.7 kilograms, including the 4.3 liters of gasoline left in its tank and the yellow raincoat hanging from the front hook. Not a gram more or less.
The iced soy milk in the hands of a passerby on the corner weighed 214 grams, including the plastic bag, straw, and droplets of condensation on the outside of the cup.
He even knew that the phone in his pocket weighed 189.6 grams.
A tiny crumb of cracker was lodged in the lower-right corner of the phone case. 0.03 grams.
Su Ding'an instinctively pulled out his phone and really did see a tiny pale-yellow crumb by the edge of the case.
Before he could pick it out, more numbers came flooding in.
An office desk: 26.2 kilograms.
A water dispenser: 18.9 kilograms.
One hundred seventy-two people, each with a constantly shifting value that included their clothes, phones, wallets, and the lunches not yet digested in their stomachs.
Numbers poured into his mind in wave after wave, with no gaps between them. Su Ding'an braced himself against the doorframe. His vision suddenly went black, and his knees nearly hit the floor.
He took several breaths before he could just barely steady himself.
This wasn't like knowledge, and it wasn't like a superpower.
It was more like an inventory sheet.
An inventory sheet with no footer and no total column, one that kept scrolling downward without end.
And he was the person who had been temporarily dragged in to reconcile the inventory.
That interpretation calmed him a little. At least he understood inventory sheets, and he'd done reconciliations before. He'd just been counting office supplies back then. Now he was counting an entire street.
A question suddenly flashed through his mind.
What was happening to the things that had floated upstairs?
The instant the thought arose, an indescribable pull spread outward from his palm.
It wasn't wind, nor was it some kind of light.
It was more like the knowing itself had begun to move. The numbers in the ledger were checked one by one. Every misplaced weight was found and restored, while the empty fields filled themselves in automatically.
A burst of tiny sounds came from upstairs first.
The ballpoint pen dropped back into its cup with a knock.
Ms. Wang's mug sank, its base settling firmly onto the table. A ripple circled through the coffee, but it still didn't spill.
The stack of copy paper slammed back onto the cart with a muffled thud. The stapler landed on the corner of the desk, its staple mouth pointing forward, less than a centimeter from where it had been.
Almost everything on the entire floor regained its weight at nearly the same instant.
Su Ding'an even knew that the white scooter at the end of the street settled onto its suspension at that exact moment, its tires pressing half a centimeter into the asphalt. The passerby's soy milk dropped steadily back into his palm, the plastic bag merely stretching straight. It didn't even sway.
For a second or two, a few sticky notes that were slower to react were still hanging in the air.
As if remembering where they were supposed to be stuck, they floated back to the wall one after another and adhered themselves in place.
At last, the entire building fell quiet.
Su Ding'an stood in the duty room, one hand still braced against the doorframe.
The pressure in his head from being stuffed full of hundreds of numbers receded all at once, leaving only the sudden emptiness in his palm, like he had just set down an entire stack of heavy reports.
Everything had returned to where it was supposed to be.
A very specific, very inappropriate thought surfaced in his mind.
The books balanced.
For the next three hours, he hardly dared move from beside the card reader.
There were no work instructions on the wall and no emergency contact. The phone on the desk produced nothing but blank static when he picked it up, and aside from displaying the time, the old-fashioned monitor wouldn't let him open any functions.
So he could only work the shift in the most conservative way possible: stay awake, stay standing, and touch nothing.
At 3:47 p.m., his phone screen lit up.
He felt the sense of weight in his hand drift outward by one notch, as if someone had nearly pulled a page from the ledger for the entire street. Frightened, he immediately shoved the phone back into his pocket.
Around 4:30, the phone vibrated again.
Su Ding'an shot upright, nearly banging the back of his head against the metal shelf. He pulled out the phone and saw that it was only a shopping-platform notification saying his laundry detergent had shipped.
He muttered a curse, switched the phone to silent, and stuffed it into the innermost pocket of his jacket.
At 4:52, he started needing to use the bathroom.
The bathroom was outside the duty room, across a corridor and through a fire door. He didn't know whether stepping outside counted as leaving his jurisdiction, or whether three minutes away would make the copy paper upstairs rise into the air again.
He held it.
There was an unopened bottle of mineral water on the desk. He looked at it, then thought about how the water would eventually have to come back out after going in. In the end, he didn't even touch the cap.
At 5:17, his nose suddenly began to itch.
A sneeze had already reached the back of his throat, but he pinched the bridge of his nose and forced the breath back down. His eyes watered slightly, and the inside of his nose burned painfully, but he still didn't dare let go.
He couldn't risk it.
If he lost focus for even a second and everything on the street floated back up to the ceiling, he didn't know whom to ask for overtime comp time. He had even less idea how to write the incident report.
"During gravity coverage, a sneeze caused the jurisdiction to become weightless for three seconds." No matter which department received that description, it would look like he was deliberately provoking his supervisor.
After 5:40, he began staring at the clock in the upper-right corner of the card reader.
The minute hand moved more slowly than usual, and every jump of the second hand seemed to pause for an extra half beat. He even wondered whether the clock was under his supervision too. If it ran slow, did that mean he had to stand there for a few extra minutes?
During the final ten minutes, he watched the numbers in the lower-right corner of the screen advance one second at a time. It was more nerve-racking than following any TV series.
17:59:57.
Fifty-eight seconds.
Fifty-nine seconds.
Six o'clock.
Su Ding'an immediately pressed the temporary identification code included in the text message against the card reader.
Beep.
A line of green text appeared on the screen:
"Clock-out successful. Access reduced to zero."
The numbers were pulled out of his mind in an instant.
They vanished as cleanly as if someone had pressed a delete button. The weights of the streetlights, scooters, soy milk, and the steel reinforcing bars inside the walls all disappeared at once. His legs suddenly went weak, and he had to brace himself against the wall to keep from sitting down on the floor.
His hands were shaking so badly that his phone locked three times before he managed to open it.
Su Ding'an lowered his head and looked at his palm.
The skin was intact, with no red marks and nothing that didn't belong to him. Yet he could swear that it had just held down the weight of an entire street. Even his five fingers still retained a strange, nonexistent tingling ache.
He had just put his phone back into his pocket when it vibrated again.
A bank deposit notification appeared.
"Cover-shift payment of NT$1,860 has been deposited into your original payroll account."
Su Ding'an brought the phone closer and checked again.
One thousand eight hundred sixty dollars.
He hadn't misread it. It wasn't points, and it wasn't a bonus pending approval.
The money was already in his account.
He did the math in his head. Three hours, at NT$620 an hour.
That was more than he made in a full day at Hongchang Trading, and a better return than the 143 résumés he'd sent out over the past six months combined.
He stood in the Basement 2 corridor and stared at the number for a long time.
The lights overhead flickered twice, but he didn't bother with them. A pipe shuddered inside the wall, and he didn't investigate that either.
What this job actually was, and whom Common Sense Staffing was dispatching workers for, suddenly didn't feel so urgent to figure out.
All he could think about was that he could finally scrape together this month's rent, and he wouldn't have to push that five-thousand-dollar student-loan payment into next month. There were only two eggs left in his refrigerator. Tonight, he could even stop by and buy a box of dumplings on the way home instead of calculating how many to cook for one meal.
The elevator doors opened in front of him.
Su Ding'an stepped inside and pressed eight.
When he returned to Hongchang Trading, the office had returned to normal. The box of paper clips sat properly on the desk, Ms. Wang's mug was in the break room, and the ballpoint pen was back in the coworker's pen cup.
No one had noticed that he had disappeared for three hours.
Manager Wei even poked his head out of the meeting room and said, "Perfect timing. Print another copy of that forty-two-page report for me later."
Su Ding'an was silent for a second.
"Okay."
He sat back down, pulled open the drawer, and confirmed that the original report was still there.
Forty-two sheets. Not one missing.
His phone pressed against his thigh inside his pocket, the bank-deposit notification still glowing on the screen. He thought of the paper clips, coffee mug, and copy paper floating in the air that afternoon, and suddenly felt that the whole thing wasn't so hard to accept.
At least he didn't have to submit an overtime request over there.
At least he got off work on time.
And they had actually paid him.
That evening, Su Ding'an saved the unknown number in his contacts.
He thought for a long time before entering just six characters:
"Common Sense Staffing—Available."