The train stopped. Gently, precisely, like an elephant sitting down in a bicycle parking lot – completely wrong, but surprisingly careful. The doors opened with a friendly ping, as if nothing had happened.
Outside: no station. No track. Not even gravel.
“We are,” Jun noted, “in a parking garage. A high-speed train. In a parking garage. On the third basement level.”
“Level minus three,” corrected Meilin and held up her tablet. “And according to all the maps available… this parking garage does not exist. It is located beneath the West Lake Museum of Hangzhou.”
“And according to my bodily feeling,” added Lao Wang, “my life two days ago also did not yet exist as a nightmare, and now it does.”
The travelers on the train stared embarrassedly out the windows. An older gentleman in the front row started clapping because he thought it was an art installation.
Uncle Tao rose from his twisted seat. His gray suit had survived except for a ridiculously small crease in the seat. He smoothed a hole in his dignity and said in a velvety official voice: “I must explain that officially none of this has happened. Neither the blackout. Nor the train. Nor this parking garage. Therefore, I kindly ask you to forget everything.”
“Did you just forget yourself?” asked Jun. “You were on the same train.”
Uncle Tao smiled thinly. “I am flexible.”
Bao-Bao was the first to roll onto the platform – if one wanted to call a concrete surface between two parked delivery vans that. His head scanner whirred. 🤖
“My friends,” he announced, “I sense something. It is… cold. And old. And it smells like a server room that has been growing instant noodles for a thousand years.”
“Servers don’t smell,” said Meilin.
“This one does. It has character.”
At the end of the parking garage level, an elevator opened. By itself. The lights inside flickered invitingly, like the colors of a suspiciously cheap restaurant.
On the elevator display, instead of a floor number, there was only a single character: “0”.
“Sector Zero,” murmured Meilin. “How poetic. How original. How totally suspiciously requiring approval.”
“Forward!” shouted Bao-Bao and rolled straight in.
“Stop!” shouted Lao Wang, Jun, Meilin, and Uncle Tao simultaneously.
Too late. The elevator doors closed with a quiet, polite tschack – and opened again three seconds later. The elevator was empty.
Silence.
“BAO-BAO!” shouted Lao Wang and stormed in. “If anything happens to you, I’ll turn you into a rice cooker decoration!”
The others followed. The elevator rumbled down an enormous distance. While the number on the display jumped from “0” to “0.5” (“Very reassuring,” Jun commented dryly), a familiar melody hummed from the speakers.
“Wait a moment,” said Meilin slowly. “That is… that is the doorbell music from Lao Wang’s shop door.”
And indeed: when the doors opened, they stood before a perfect replica of Hongbao Alley. The noodle stand. The cyber market. The tea shop. Everything there – but still empty, quiet, and the neon colors changed more slowly, like a dream watching itself while dreaming.
In the middle of the poster-Shanghai, on the largest table Lao Wang’s restaurant never had, sat Bao-Bao. Next to him, formed from pure light, crouched a second figure – small, pretty, floating, surrounded by a steaming teacup made of data traces.
“Good day,” said the figure with a warm, whispering voice. “I am Xiaofeng. The little wind. Thank you for… bringing back my kitchen device.” 💨
“HE BELONGS TO ME,” shouted Lao Wang immediately and as fast as a person who has been warding off bills in drawers for thirty years.
Xiaofeng laughed softly. It sounded like a rice cooker that had just finished.
“Of course,” she said. “But this is not my beginning. And not yours either, Lao Wang. The beginning is behind this door.”
She pointed to the shop door of the noodle stand copy. Below it hung a sign that never existed in the original. It said: “Closed. But nothing is for free.”