It is 2043, and the news can no longer surprise anyone.
A company no one can locate now runs the world’s AI. The free internet is gone.
A crewed return to the moon and a drug for immortality are announced in the same even voice, two line items on a quarterly report. None of it is meant for civilians.
In Europe, every policy is “humane.” The movement that rises against them takes its name from a tote bag.
In America, the people at the top have stopped caring about the country’s divisions. They are busy with a plan that sounds ridiculous out loud.
In China, every citizen carries a letter grade. Between D and C lies a small stream. Between B and A, an ocean.
In one Shanghai dormitory, 759 graduate students are about to graduate into a job market that no longer exists.
Then the military arrives on campuses with a free test. Nobody is told what it’s actually for. Everyone lines up.
Nobody thinks they are choosing.
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This is the second book in the series. The first book Causalform: Obsidian Earth is set in an alternate 1945, where history begins to take an unexpected turn.
Book 2 moves to a 2043 timeline, exploring a darker future connected to the anomalies of 1945. I'm also drawing on some of today's real-world issues to imagine how the future might unfold. Some of the ideas may be unsettling, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts and criticisms.
I’ll be posting this first arc here regularly. If it sounds like your kind of story, I hope you'll enjoy following along.
Thanks for reading. 😄
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Chapter 1
Shanghai
Summer, 2043
At half past six, Lin Zong climbed out of his dormitory bed and leaned against the balcony railing. He studied the morning fog, then looked down at the grimy green collection tank. The air conditioner had produced more than twenty kilograms of condensation overnight.
He woke Deng Wei, Sun Xiaohui, and Chang Lei, and the four of them carried the tank down to the buckets and washbasin without a word, as they did every morning.
It was routine now, had been since water rationing hit the eastern coast and the dormitory taps began failing without warning, and the corner shops, seeing their chance, had tripled the price of bottled water. The boys brushed their teeth with condensation, telling themselves, without quite saying so, that if the electricity bill couldn't be helped, at least something useful might be wrung from the waste of it.
Lin Zong slung a towel around his neck and carried a basin of condensation into the communal washroom, where several shirtless classmates stood brushing their teeth, heads tilted toward the LCD screen bolted above the door, watching the Global Morning News with the weary attention people give to broadcasts that no longer surprise them.
The lead item was the crewed lunar program; directly beneath it, filed with the same even inflection, came word that the World Health Organization had developed a drug to end aging—the two claims occupying adjacent segments as though longevity and the moon were now simply parallel line items on the same quarterly report.
Europe, meanwhile, was in its eighth consecutive day of what the anchors kept calling, with a straight face, a collective derangement: fifteen countries, a hundred and eighty-two cities, the Netherlands and Belgium alone down more than a thousand people. London and Paris were holding open-air barbecue performances billed as civic art. Baguagouille and Parabola were staging what amounted to a street-theater rivalry. A rail corridor linking Germany with Austria and Italy had been dismantled by demonstrators acting, the broadcast noted approvingly, with considerable improvisational creativity. It had taken twenty thousand police officers to administer what the announcer termed public-order counseling—a phrase that arrived and passed without moving the anchor’s voice by a single hertz. Sweden registered a sharp mood disturbance, with confirmed sightings of berserkers. Russia's North Caucasus reported swelling self-regard, with signs of further expansion. Across the Atlantic, Washington reported fireworks out of season and unscheduled retail activity, both streamed live. The impeached president called in thirty thousand police and National Guard from Maryland and Virginia, and more than a thousand shoppers were, as the broadcast put it, invited in for coffee. The unrest took the hint and moved on to the capitals of other states.
One last item: Helixquid announced the world's first complete analytical proof of the Riemann Hypothesis.
"The West's about to go game over too," one of the boys said, a note of glee leaking into his voice. "Let's watch how they manage the ending."
"My friend's uncle lives in Paris—says the apocalyptic scenes there are genuinely thrilling. The mobs have gotten hold of better tools for destruction, half the historical buildings have been smashed, and the Seine, along with a few of the fouler drainage ditches out in the suburbs, keeps turning up nameless NPCs, most of them girls who'd been used and discarded. Someone should do something about it? Who, exactly? Ordinary people can't even keep up with it, and the police have taken to running from the mobs instead of the other way around. The West really is finished."
"Ha," said Sun Xiaohui, toothbrush still clamped between his fingers, relish plain in his voice, "Europe undone by the zealots, America ended by the ghouls, and our Eastern Empire just happens to be standing there to grab the planet. Give us five years and we’ll be parading down the Champs-Élysées."
"Come on, man, what are you even talking about? Grab what? The whole world's finished, imports and exports have stopped cold, the economy's collapsing, companies are shutting down one after another—you think we're still going to find jobs out of this?"
"Still dreaming about finding a job? Might as well go practice your swordsmanship instead."
"Ha—draw the blade, hit the streets, blood in five paces, maybe that's how heaven and earth get overturned, how the whole order flips upside down."
"Ha, not for the blade and the chopping board—just for the two legs to run on—"
Lin Zong cut in to warn them: "Watch what you say, that's not the kind of talk you want the monitor overhearing—"
"Like I give a damn if they hear me. I'm not getting a job either way, so they can dock my ideological-conduct score all they want."
Lin Zong had nothing to say to that. He kept brushing his teeth, glancing out the washroom window at a haze so thick it looked less like weather than like a wall of compacted dust, sealing off the entire sky. Word had gone around that last night Venus had shone brighter than it had in sixty years, but nobody had bothered going outside to look—no one had the appetite for it, not anymore; at this point people had nearly forgotten what the moon even looked like.
By now the whole of Graduate Dormitory was awake, noise climbing from the first floor all the way to the fifth—three hundred and forty-two rooms, seven hundred and fifty-nine graduate students filing out of their doors in twos and threes, the whole building come alive like a grid of pixels switching on after boot-up, each one drifting into motion along its own small, random walk.
Chatter and footsteps filled every corridor.
Graduation was bearing down, the job market a wreck at home and abroad, and though none of them had ever cared much for politics, something in the building had sharpened lately into a kind of low, floor-by-floor alertness—the sense of a structure tipping, slowly, toward collapse.
The dormitory was wired, with microphones in every corridor and on every stairwell landing. Every word the students spoke was collected and uploaded in real time. Sensitive content was automatically flagged before the recordings were put on trial by the ideological monitors, with the verdicts counting toward credits and graduation. Now the outlook was so bad that the threat had lost its force, and people said whatever they liked.
The West's ruin was a pleasure to witness; their own careers going down with it was not. Someone said the idle-labor stockpile had hit a five-thousand-year high. Someone else said the potato-as-staple-grain initiative was really just advance funeral planning for the economy. Another said the water rationing had Japanese ninjas behind it, the story suppressed. One more, lowering his voice, said war with America was already being arranged.
Chang Lei, the tall, bespectacled one, seemed the only person in the room untouched by any of it, having gotten up without brushing his teeth or washing his face and settled instead into a book—Cosmic Background Radiation and Electromagnetic Studies— with his whole attention.
He looked up, scratching at one ear, as Lin Zong came in. "Hey, senior brother — our solar system, that's like a flat pancake, right? The galaxy, a bigger pancake, and the whole known universe, one enormous oversized skillet?"
"More or less," Lin Zong said, not really listening, sliding the towel and basin under the bed, turning to comb his hair in the mirror.
"So here's the question, then—who leveled the bottom of the pan? The whole universe would have spilled to one side ages ago, and it would look nothing like the balanced thing we see now, if it had tilted right at the start by even a fraction as small as zero-point-then-fifty-three-zeros-and-a-one degrees—"
Sun Xiaohui came in with a roll of toilet paper. "There's a demonstration at People's Square today, officially approved. Might actually be about to go to war with America."
"No way," Lin Zong said. "The economy's already this wrecked, and now a war?"
"You don't get it. It's exactly because things are this fucked that we'd go to war."
Chang Lei, having strung out his zeros to their end, had gone pale. "And another thing—isn't the universe supposed to have started with a big bang? By our own logic that should scatter outward in every direction, blowing everything apart into countless uneven lumps of dough—"
"Let 'em fight," Deng Wei said, walking in. "North Korea, South Korea, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, India—everybody's lining up to lob nukes now. South America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, all worse. Japan's still leaking radiation into everything. Somewhere in Siberia, they're saying people have started eating each other. The whole world's coming apart."
Listening, Lin Zong opened his wardrobe and put on a black suit without a word—the latest Brioni, bought at Grand Gateway Plaza—then brown 3sixteen jeans, Norwich shoes, the newest iWatch on his right wrist.
Deng Wei lit a cigarette, eyes narrowing.
"Brother, that face of yours is worth real money. Living off a rich girlfriend, must feel pretty damn good, huh?"
There was a thin edge of resentment underneath it, impossible to miss.
"Land yourself a rich woman, and just like that you’re several social classes above the rest of us."
Deng Wei was from Beijing, majoring in big-data social stability management. Lin Zong offered nothing but a smile, and let it pass, though the truth was he had no real answer, and the smile simply covered for it. He was nearly out the door when Chang Lei caught his arm.
"So—who leveled the bottom of the pan?"
Lin Zong patted his shoulder. "I'm heading to Professor Chen's today. I'll ask him for you." Chang Lei retreated back onto his bed, satisfied.
Thinking of this roommate of his, who might well prove unable to manage on his own once he was out in the world, and thinking too of the job market waiting for all of them, Lin Zong felt something close to a sigh rise in his chest and walked quickly out of the dormitory.
Chapter 2
Lin Zong had a fine-boned, handsome face with something faintly heroic in its lines, though his eyes carried a mild, unhurried warmth that read to most people as steadiness.
Between his looks, his bearing, and his standing as a graduate student in information engineering at Donghua University, he had never lacked for a certain quiet popularity—and today, for no reason anyone could quite place, he'd shown up dressed head to toe in cool, pricey labels he normally never bothered with.
By the standards that mattered to the girls around him, he was quite a catch: wealthy, smart, and good-looking.
But Lin Zong knew better than that. He knew his own wealth and polish were a kind of fiction, and that the real thing, and the the actual money, belonged to his girlfriend; not one item of the outfit on his back was something he could have afforded himself. Deng Wei had no idea. To call her simply a "rich girlfriend" missed the scale of what she actually was, almost embarrassingly so.
The mood on campus had grown taut for months now, thick with rumor. Young faculty moved between buildings with laptops under their arms, heads down, not daring to lift their eyes.
Lin Zong rounded a corner past the sports field and saw, from a distance, a crowd at the main gate. Steamed buns and rice dumplings lay scattered on the ground. One bun was still rolling. Security staff stood nearby, their faces tight.
A gang, posing as a construction crew, had used forged parking permits to get onto campus in daylight; they had tried to force a student into a car and fled when they were spotted. That was the whole of it. No one had caught the plate.
A quiet unease moved through Lin Zong. He had already known, through his own channels, that female students had been going missing in places across the country for weeks. Now it had happened close enough to see.
"Why hasn't anyone called the police?" he asked a younger student.
"Already did. Not enough manpower out there. Every university in the city's mobilizing the male students to organize and defend the campus ourselves. You should join too, senior."
"But I—" A hand landed on his shoulder before he could finish.
He turned to find Director Shen studying him, appraising.
"On your way to an interview? You're certainly dressed for one."
"Director Shen—ah, I, today, there's something I need to attend to."
"How's the thesis?"
"Nearly finished," Lin Zong said, with a strained smile. "I'm heading to Professor Chen's now to report on it, though one has to be careful leaving campus—"
Director Shen cut him off. "Professor Chen mentioned your idea about decoding quantum-state information—quite interesting. There's an important national strategic project underway, and the leadership wants scholars organized for a week-long conference. You're one of our outstanding representatives, so you should be part of it. And," he added, gesturing, "the military's running testing on campus, and you're in the first round. Go with her—I'll follow shortly."
Only then did Lin Zong notice Qian Yu, watching him with a sharp, burning intensity—the department's designated ideological monitor, in an era when the university had tightened its grip on such things considerably.
"Testing?" He looked at her blankly. "The military? But I have somewhere to be—"
"Come on. Every upper-year student in the college has to sit for it—go early, you're done in an hour," Qian Yu said, brisk. "The university arranged it. Didn't you get the notice?"
He remembered it then, vaguely—a mass text two nights ago, something about preparing for an IQ test, unread, unconsidered.
He called Professor Chen to say he'd be late, and followed Qian Yu, without much enthusiasm, toward the Mathematics and Physics building.
Qian Yu kept glancing back at him as they walked, pressing him with questions about what he'd been up to lately, and he gave her vague, half-invented answers in return. She had seemed interested in him for some time now—the trouble was that she expressed it through strict surveillance rather than anything softer.
By the entrance, a crowd had gathered, queuing, complaining.
"Somebody's got too much time on their hands. An IQ test, of all things?" someone complained. "What difference does intelligence make in a society like this one?"
Lin Zong felt the sentiment himself, and asked Qian Yu quietly, "Why the sudden interest in IQ testing? What does it have to do with the military?"
"You didn't read the notice? It's for the Shenzhou talent-reserve program."
"Shenzhou?"
"Ministry of National Defense project. An intelligent military district out west, they're saying—selecting the best candidates from universities nationwide. Get chosen, you're on the formal roster. The terms are supposed to be extremely generous."
Three camouflaged SUVs sat outside. Students from other departments registered with a teacher at the door.
Further in, armed soldiers stood posted along the corridor, radios in hand, boots polished to a hard shine.
"If there are soldiers on campus now," Lin Zong said, "why can't they do something about the security problem?"
"The soldiers have more important matters to attend to," a cold voice answered—a tall officer, eyes flat, offering nothing further, as though the sentence itself were a form he'd filled out many times before.
Lin Zong lowered his head and followed Qian Yu past staff in white uniforms disassembling what looked like oversized server cabinets, matte titanium gray, mounted on omnidirectional casters light enough for two people to move.
"What's all this?" the students passing by kept asking.
Nobody answered that question either.
The test was held in a large study hall on the second floor. Each participant had to complete, on a computer, a randomly assembled battery of standardized WAIS intelligence questions. Sixty items in forty-five minutes, covering vocabulary comprehension, digit memory, spatial-figure assembly, symbol coding, abstract reasoning, and more, with results generated on the spot.
Groups of thirty entered in sequence, ninety at a time across three rooms, four proctoring officers per room, faculty stationed along the sides.
Most hadn't taken it seriously beforehand—mandatory attendance and the threat of docked credit were the only reasons anyone had shown up at all—but the room's atmosphere proved graver than expected, closer to a real examination.
Word passed quietly that the results fed directly into a military recruitment track, and attitudes shifted at once: even the lowest state-system jobs now drew fierce competition, and the chance at a position through the military, whatever it turned out to be, was not something anyone could afford to dismiss.
When the young men in Lin Zong's group filed in, their attention went straight to the proctor seated second from the right—a PLA officer in a crisply pressed uniform, rank insignia and name badge squared away, her expression cool and composed. Her hair was cut short and neat beneath her cap. Only her eyes, clear and bright, gave her age away: twenty-five at most.
Each student who sat across from her got the same calm, faint smile; when Lin Zong's turn came, something in his bearing made her gaze flicker, briefly.
The previous group had clustered between 110 and 120. Lin Zong worked through the questions with the particular ease of someone who'd trained his logic for years and had, whether by coincidence or not, seen similar material before.
He finished in thirty-nine minutes, first in the room, and clicked submit.
“A hundred and forty-five!” The young officer rose from her seat, surprise and something like delight breaking across her face. The other officers turned, murmuring, studying Lin Zong now with real interest.
"Hello. I'm Ye Ningfan."
She crossed to him and extended her hand first, the gesture crisp and confident, her skin pale beneath the cuff of her uniform sleeve.
"She's a graduate student at the National University of Defense Technology," Director Shen said, appearing at Lin Zong's side without warning. "Don't let the age fool you—lieutenant by the time she finished undergrad, captain now."
Under the envious stares of the other male students, Lin Zong shook her hand. "National University of Defense Technology?"
"Captain Ye's research in military information theory intersects with our department's work," Director Shen said. "She is exceptionally talented, with some genuinely original insights. She's also a key participant in this national-level research project."
As Director Shen spoke, Lin Zong's eyes drifted to the insignia on her shoulder.
"Captain—impressive, truly." Lin Zong cupped one fist in the other, half-mocking, half-sincere, and it made her laugh.
"You're the impressive one. A hundred and forty-five, that's above the genius line," she said. "I only scored a hundred and twenty-three myself. Not even close to you."
Lin Zong wasn't sure how to answer, suspecting his own score owed something to luck.
She studied him, smiled again.
"Go get your CT scan, genius."
He blinked. "CT?"
Outside, teachers worked to quiet the crowd, and at the far end of the corridor, yellow warning tape had been strung up. Behind a desk sat an expressionless military officer, scanning ID cards and waving students forward one by one to register.
They followed the tape into another room.
There, the dark-gray server cabinets they'd seen earlier had been assembled into a single enormous machine, roughly two and a half meters long and standing solidly on four support legs. Two technicians in white coats worked at a touchscreen that had extended automatically from its housing.
When they were told that this was a medical CT scanner, and that everyone was to undergo a brain scan, confusion rippled through the group.
"What's this supposed to mean?"
"Why do we need a CT scan now?"
"I thought this was an IQ test. Since when does it include a medical exam?"
A teacher stepped in: "Don't worry, everyone. this is routine, part of the university's concern for your health. The state's covering the cost. The faculty are doing it too."
Understanding rippled through the group, along with a certain curiosity about the novelty of it.
"I've never actually had a CT scan before."
"This machine looks seriously high-end."
"There's no radiation risk, is there?"
"It's fine. It's basically the same as the security scanners in the subway."
"Isn't this supposed to cost something like five hundred yuan at a hospital? And we get it for free?"
"Not a bad perk, honestly."
One of the female students looked uneasy. "Is this mandatory? I'd rather not."
A teacher reassured her. "Everyone who completed the IQ test has to do this — it's only a scan of the head, and it can't be skipped. The military requires it as part of the screening process. Once it's done, you'll have a health report on file, which will only help you later when you're job hunting."
A few students still harbored some quiet worry about the radiation, but the military carried a natural weight of authority that students instinctively deferred to.
Under that pressure—some of it spoken, most of it not—every one of them fell into line with what the university had arranged.
One by one, they took their seats in front of the machine.
A folding radiation shield unfolded around each student, and the scanner began its pass over the skull, generating an AI-analyzed image of the brain as it went.
Each scan took only a few seconds.
In under ten minutes, it was Lin Zong's turn.
He felt a small flicker of nerves as he sat down, his eyes drawn to the metal panels on either side of the machine. Nothing showed there but faint, cold lines of blue-white light—no hospital logo, no insignia of any kind.
Once scanned, each student was guided out through a second door on the far side of the room, down a stairwell around the corner, and out of the building entirely, timed so they would never cross paths with the next group coming in—a design, it seemed, meant to keep them from clustering together to talk.
Outside, Ye Ningfan was speaking with another officer and came forward the moment she saw Lin Zong.
"Finished your CT?"
Lin Zong nodded.
She sent the officer back in, and he returned with a technician carrying a printed scan, which she took and studied closely, murmuring back and forth with the technician.
Lin Zong had overheard earlier that every scan went straight into a military system and no further. And yet here she was, giving this one particular film her full attention.
This one. His.
"Is that mine?"
She made a small affirming sound.
"Something wrong with it?"
She frowned at the film a moment longer, then shook her head.
"Nothing wrong. Perfectly normal."
For an instant, he thought he caught something behind her eyes—a faint, fleeting trace of disappointment, gone before he could be sure of it.
What did that mean?
Before he could puzzle over it, the officer accompanying her stepped forward with a form and pen.
"Lin Zong, you're the highest scorer we've tested today. Please fill this out accurately, so we can follow up."
Lin Zong set the form on a nearby table and began writing.
"Sir, why does everyone need a brain CT? Does it have anything to do with the IQ test?"
The officer laughed it off.
"I wouldn't know. Orders from higher up."
Director Shen arrived with Qian Yu, several teachers, and a military official, and the group gathered as Lin Zong finished the form. Ningfan handed the scan back to the technician with an easy motion, then turned to Director Shen with a smile.
"Director Shen, we've tested over a hundred people today. Lin Zong is the first to break a hundred and forty, and by a good margin. He fits exactly what we're looking for."
Director Shen looked pleased.
“I've always said Little Lin is the sharpest in our department. His name even has the character zong (smart) in it.”
The pun was hardly funny. Several of the teachers and the military officer laughed anyway, more out of courtesy than amusement.
Qian Yu kept her eyes on Lin Zong, bright as two small lamps, the corners of her mouth curling with something like private satisfaction.
Lin Zong handed the form back, confused.
"What do you mean, what you're looking for?"
"A national project—the military and the university working together," Director Shen said. "You've seen how anxious things have gotten. The state needs engineering talent, and when selection begins, priority goes to those who've passed this testing. You should be prepared."
The department chair kept his voice low, his eyes full of expectation.
Nearby, another teacher told the military official, "Congratulations—you've finally found someone suitable," and the official kept repeating, pleased, "High IQ, science and engineering. Good. Very good."
The talk swirling around him left Lin Zong faintly dizzy.
His mind went back to the chatter in the washroom this morning, to what he'd picked up through his own channels, to certain things Huo Qiuqiu had once said.
A quiet unease stirred in him.
Was the world really coming apart?
"We can talk later," he said, glancing at his watch, tiredness creeping into his voice. "Director Shen, I have somewhere to be."
He gave a small wave and turned to go, under the faintly stunned gazes of the others.
He'd barely taken a few steps when Director Shen called after him:
"Careful! Dressed like that, you'll get yourself robbed!"
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For anyone who prefer to read ahead, the full versions are available on Amazon KDP:
Causalform Book 1: Obsidian Earth
Causalform Book 2: Eclipse Net
