Zheng Yang's text message came in ten minutes before quitting time.
Su Ding'an was still at Hongchang Trading, sorting a stack of reimbursement forms.
"Tomorrow I'll take you to watch a decommissioning. Just watch. Don't say anything."
He stared at the message for several seconds before asking what decommissioning meant.
Zheng Yang replied quickly, as usual, without a word to spare.
"It means the position is removed, and the person is gone."
Two seconds later, she added another sentence. Her tone was completely flat, no different from reporting a set of figures.
"It's more or less like scrapping an asset, except the thing being scrapped is a person."
Su Ding'an set down the stack of reimbursement forms in his hands and looked up at the words on his phone, unsure what to say.
He had worked in administration for four years and handled all kinds of scrapping procedures. Equipment being scrapped had to be photographed for the records, with its usable service life noted as well.
He had never imagined that one day the same logic would apply to people.
He slipped his phone back into his pocket and continued sorting the reimbursement forms. Halfway through, he stopped and read that message again.
The five words the person is gone hadn't caught his attention the first time.
It was only on the second reading that something felt off, though he couldn't say exactly what.
At nine the next morning, he arrived on time at the Common Sense Staffing office on Basement 2.
Zheng Yang was waiting at the door. She led him through several hallways he hadn't yet gotten to know, then turned into a conference room.
It was even smaller than he'd expected.
There was one long table, two rows of folding chairs, and an old projector standing against the wall. It wasn't turned on, and a thin layer of dust had settled over its lens.
The air held a faint smell of paint. In one corner, he could still see a repaired crack, though the patch job wasn't very smooth.
Seven or eight people were already sitting in the folding chairs. He recognized two or three faces from the duty officers he'd met the day Old Zhou had shown him around the positions. One of them even nodded at him.
He found a chair in the last row and sat down. Zheng Yang stood beside him instead of sitting.
Her gaze remained fixed on the far end of the table. She didn't look at Su Ding'an, as if she'd stood through this kind of occasion many times already—so many times that she no longer needed to think about it.
At exactly nine, a man in a dark suit walked in. He was carrying a worn leather notebook. He went to the head of the table and stopped.
He wasn't tall, and there wasn't much expression on his face. His eyes didn't linger on anyone in particular, sweeping over each face for roughly the same amount of time.
He opened the notebook and flipped to the page marked by a bookmark. His movements were practiced, and he found the page immediately.
He didn't turn one page too many or one page too few. The bookmark had clearly been placed there more than once.
He paused for half a second before reading the words that followed.
"Position number: Sunrise 732."
His voice wasn't loud, but he enunciated every word clearly.
"Absent-without-leave record: exactly two hundred years."
When he read out the number, not a single person in the conference room gasped.
Su Ding'an silently repeated the number to himself. Two hundred years. He wanted to make sure he hadn't heard wrong.
No one beside him looked surprised. Everyone wore the expression of people waiting for a meeting they'd attended countless times to move on to the next item on the agenda.
"Basis for decommissioning: under the relevant operating provisions, continuous absence without leave exceeding five years is grounds for immediate decommissioning, with no need for the individual concerned to appear for confirmation."
The man closed the notebook, tucked it under his arm, and looked over the room.
He put slightly more emphasis on the final word.
"Any objections?"
No one raised a hand. No one spoke.
The folding chairs made a few faint scraping sounds. Other than that, the entire conference room was as quiet as if everyone were listening to an official document they'd heard read out countless times before.
Su Ding'an turned his head and quietly asked Zheng Yang who the man was.
"Mr. He, Head of the Audit Division."
She kept her voice low, just loud enough for him to hear.
Just then, the conference room door was pushed open.
An old woman in an old-fashioned cloth blouse walked in. She moved slowly, her feet dragging a little, but no one stepped forward to support her, and no one pulled out a chair for her.
She stood in the doorway and swept her eyes around the conference room, as if searching for a familiar place. When she couldn't find one, she simply remained where she was.
Su Ding'an heard someone beside him murmur that she was the duty officer for Sunrise 732, responsible for the morning light at a particular angle.
He didn't catch exactly what angle it was. He only heard the person add that the stretch of light she was responsible for was very short—so short that most people went their entire lives without ever paying particular attention to it.
The cloth blouse she wore was an old-fashioned indigo, with a ring of nearly faded embroidery around the collar. It had clearly seen its years, but there was no telling what era the style belonged to.
Mr. He didn't ask her to sit. He went straight to the point.
"You've been listed for decommissioning due to absence without leave. There have been no clock-in records for two hundred years."
He read the sentence just as quickly as he had read the position number, without slowing down or stressing his tone. It sounded like nothing more than one line in a procedure.
The old woman looked at him, with no immediate sign that she understood.
"What does absent without leave mean?"
No one in the conference room answered her.
Mr. He paused for half a second, then repeated what he had just said, slowing his speech slightly but changing none of the wording.
"You have no clock-in records. They have accumulated to two hundred years."
He turned the notebook toward her and pointed to one of the columns. It was blank from top to bottom, without a single number in it.
"I've been here all these two hundred years."
The old woman's voice wasn't loud, but it was utterly certain—not like she was arguing, but more like she was stating a fact she had never once doubted.
"I've always been here. Every day, when the sun is supposed to rise, I'm here. There hasn't been a single day when I wasn't."
"There are no clock-in records."
Mr. He's tone didn't grow harder or softer. He simply said it evenly, like he was reading an error message that had popped up from the system.
The old woman frowned. The term was clearly unfamiliar to her.
"What does clocking in mean?"
She asked again, adding another sentence this time.
"No one ever told me to clock in during my shifts. Every day, when the sun is supposed to rise, I bring the light up. That's what I do."
Sitting in the back row, Su Ding'an had the rim of his coffee cup against his lips when he heard her say that, but he didn't take a sip.
He watched the old woman's expression for two seconds. She looked genuinely confused, her brow furrowed and her eyes fixed on Mr. He as she waited for an answer. There wasn't the slightest hint that she was talking back or pretending not to understand.
She really didn't know what clocking in meant. He was certain of that in the moment.
No one in the conference room responded.
Mr. He lowered his head and wrote something in the notebook. When he finished, he looked up, preparing to move on to the next item on the agenda.
Su Ding'an turned to the duty officer beside him.
"Has anyone ever explained it to her?"
He asked in a very low voice, but the moment the words left his mouth, the entire row of folding chairs fell silent. The silence was even more complete than when Mr. He had read out the position number.
No one answered. No one shook their head or nodded. Everyone's gaze dropped slightly, as if they were looking down at their own shoes.
Old Zhou was sitting in the row in front of him. Only then did he speak, his voice even lower than Su Ding'an's.
"No one ever explained the rules in the first place."
He paused, then added,
"I didn't find out the company had enrolled me in labor insurance until I'd signed my third contract. Someone next door happened to mention it, so I looked it up."
"Then how are new people supposed to know?"
Su Ding'an pressed him.
Old Zhou shrugged, his eyes still fixed forward.
"Who knows? No one goes out of their way to explain anything. The ones who can hang on, hang on. The ones who can't probably leave. And when they leave, no one asks why."
Su Ding'an said nothing after that. His eyes returned to the old woman in the front. She was still standing where she had been, her back perfectly straight, as if she had no idea that she had just been counted as an absent-without-leave record.
She was still waiting for an answer no one would give her. What does clocking in mean? After asking, she hadn't said anything else.
Her face held an expression somewhere between confusion and calm, as if she was used to not understanding the terminology used in places like this, but had never imagined there would be consequences this time.
Mr. He announced that the decommissioning was scheduled to be carried out three days later, then adjourned the meeting.
The folding chairs were put away one by one. The duty officers filed out of the conference room. No one made a point of looking at the old woman, and no one went over to say anything more to her.
She stood there by herself for several more seconds before slowly walking toward the door, her footsteps dragging slightly, in the same direction she'd come from.
When she passed Su Ding'an, she paused for half a second and looked at him. There was no grievance in her eyes, no plea for help—only simple confusion, as if she was still trying to figure out exactly where that conversation had gone wrong.
She didn't speak and kept walking. Su Ding'an didn't speak either. The two of them simply passed each other.
When Su Ding'an got up to leave, Mr. He passed by him and suddenly stopped. He glanced at him.
The look wasn't sharp, nor was it particularly directed at anyone. It was merely a routine inspection, as if he were checking a list of attendees.
"You're the new temp worker."
It wasn't phrased as a question. Each word landed exactly where it was.
Before Su Ding'an could decide how to respond, Mr. He had already lowered his head and written a line in his notebook. When he finished, he closed it, turned, and walked away without looking at Su Ding'an a second time.
Su Ding'an stood there, watching his back disappear around the corner of the hallway.
He looked down at his hand and realized that, at some point, the coffee in his cup had gone completely cold.
He didn't think about what Mr. He had written down. His mind was still circling that question from earlier: What does clocking in mean?
Zheng Yang came over and pushed the folding chairs back into a neat row against the wall.
"Let's go. You still have to get back to Hongchang Trading for work today, right?"
Su Ding'an nodded and followed her out of the conference room. Neither of them spoke again along the way.
After returning to Hongchang Trading, he managed to finish the work in his hands. He clocked out at six on the dot and took the MRT back to his rented place.
The question kept circling in his mind the whole way: What does clocking in mean? And there was also what she had said: I've always been here.
When he got home, he didn't eat dinner first. He took the Guidelines for Acting as a Substitute for a Position out of his bag and spread it across the small table.
He flipped to the table of contents and scanned it item by item until he found a section titled Accessing Attendance Records. Then he turned to the corresponding page.
The provision was short: The acting substitute may access attendance records related to the performance of duties within their scope of authority. Records unrelated to their duties may not be accessed.
He read the sentence twice. When he finished, he silently broke it down into the format he was familiar with: scope of authority, application requirements, restrictions.
It looked exactly like the countless approval memos he had written at Hongchang Trading.
He knew one thing clearly: this was outside the scope of his duties.
Sunrise 732 wasn't his position. The old woman's attendance records had no business connection to him whatsoever. Whether by reason or by principle, he had no grounds to access them.
He flipped through several more pages and found the prescribed format for the application form. Among the required fields was one labeled Reason for Application, with a note in parentheses underneath: The connection to the applicant's duties must be clearly stated.
He stared at that parenthetical note for a long time. The light from the desk lamp was a little too yellow, giving the pages a worn, aged tint.
He thought of a rule they'd taught him at Hongchang Trading: whenever you couldn't write down the connection, you first had to figure out whether there truly was no connection, or whether you simply hadn't found it yet.
He flipped his notebook back to a blank page and wrote Sunrise 732. Underneath, he wrote Gravity Duty Room. A full page of blank space separated the two positions.
He stared at that blank space for a long time, but came up with nothing.
He still picked up his pen and wrote the words Access Request in his notebook, then began studying how to fill it out line by line. It wasn't until he was halfway through that he remembered he hadn't eaten dinner.