The rain outside crackled and rattled like a cluster of sharp-tongued women playing mahjong at full heat. Epsilon set the air conditioner to 25 degrees, then rolled over and resumed reading the letter Kexi had written to him. There were not many characters on the page, but their arrangement and colors plainly contained some deeper meaning. Epsilon studied it for a while, got up to pull several dictionaries down from the shelf, dug out the Wenquxing he had bought ten years earlier, then lay back down and kept reading.
The door to the inner room had not been shut tightly, leaving only a slit the width of two fingers. Mango poked her head out from the cardboard box lined with a printed cushion and looked around in every direction. The rumble of the central air-conditioning outside grew louder, though it was still within bearable limits. Mango jumped out of the box, strolled proudly and contentedly around the room, drank a few mouthfuls of water, then used the back of a solid wood chair to spring up onto the top of the refrigerator. It was pleasantly cool there, the perfect place to escape the summer heat. Beyond the glass window beside the refrigerator lay the night view of Hejiang within Orange East’s first ring road. Mango blinked and watched the flickering night sky with lively interest, now and then batting a paw at empty space.
Ordinarily, the night over Orange East had no visible stars. Yet on this night the stars blazed brilliantly, shining together with the glimmers leaking out from the cracks between the reinforced concrete rising from the earth’s crust. Mango could not tell starlight from lamplight. Of all colors, the only one that interested her was Arsenal’s away kit. And Epsilon, reading the letter inside the room, did not notice anything unusual in the sky that night, much less realize that those fifteen stars in the southern sky had something to do with the characters on the page.
The mobile phone on the bedside table twitched once. “Everything’s taken care of, but the tickets are hard to get.” Kexi had sent a text message. The sentence was written in binary, densely packed over several pages. As Epsilon silently sounded out the letters, he calculated how much longer it would be before he could see Kexi.
Mango jumped down from the top of the refrigerator, squeezed herself through the crack in the inner door, let out a meow, leapt onto the bed, and settled across Epsilon’s thigh. He stroked the underside of her chin, and she began to purr softly in contentment.
Epsilon closed the phone and tapped a few points in the air with his right hand. Without the slightest warning, he disappeared. Mango tumbled onto the bed. Warmth still lingered in the covers. She stood in puzzlement, sniffed from side to side, turned in several circles, stared blankly for a moment at the dark patch on the wall, then walked to the foot of the bed near the door, lay down, closed her eyes, and went to sleep. She knew that someone would surely change her litter and refill her food in the morning.
Epsilon exited the previous interface, loaded a few plugins, and flew off along the route of the KM-CD intercity train. A gigantic blade server made up of 520 system motherboards was waiting for his arrival.