“I was originally from Third Space as well,” said Lao Ge. “We’re practically from the same hometown! So you don’t need to be so careful with me. I still have a bit of authority, and I won’t give you up.”
Lao Dao let out a long sigh, congratulating himself silently for his good luck. He recounted for Lao Ge his experiencing of going to Second Space and then coming to First Space, but omitted the details of what Yi Yan had said. He simply told Lao Ge that he had successfully delivered the message and was just waiting for the Change before heading home.
Lao Ge also shared his own story with Lao Dao. He had grown up in Third Space, and his parents had worked as deliverymen. When he was fifteen, he entered a military school, and then joined the army. He served as a radar technician in the army, and because he worked hard, demonstrated good technical skills, and had some good opportunities, he was eventually promoted to an administrative position in the radar department with the rank of brigadier general. Since he didn’t come from a prominent family, that was about as high as he could go in the army.
He then retired from the army and joined an agency in First Space responsible for logistical support for government enterprises, organizing meetings, arranging travel, and coordinating various social events. The job was blue collar in nature, but since his work involved government officials whose affairs he had to coordinate and manage, he was allowed to live in First Space. There were a considerable number of people in First Space like him—chefs, doctors, secretaries, housekeepers—skilled blue-collar workers needed to support the lifestyle of First Space. His agency had run many important social events and functions, and Lao Ge was its director.
Lao Ge might have been self-deprecating in describing himself as a “blue collar,” but Lao Dao understood that anyone who could work and live in First Space had extraordinary skills. Even a chef here was likely a master of his art. Lao Ge must be very talented to have risen here from Third Space after a technical career in the army.
“You might as well take a nap,” Lao Ge said. “I’ll take you to get something to eat this evening.”
Lao Dao still couldn’t believe his good luck, and he felt a bit uneasy. However, he couldn’t resist the call of the white sheets and stuffed pillows, and he fell asleep almost right away.
When he woke up, it was dark outside. Lao Ge was combing his hair in front of the mirror. He showed Lao Dao a suit lying on the sofa and told him to change. Then he pinned a tiny badge with a faint red glow to Lao Dao’s lapel—a new identity.
The large lobby downstairs was crowded. Some kind of presentation seemed to have just finished, and attendees conversed in small groups. At one end of the lobby were the open doors leading to the banquet hall; the thick doors were lined with burgundy leather. The lobby was filled with small standing tables. Each table was covered by a white tablecloth tied around the bottom with a golden bow, and the vase in the middle of each table held a lily. Crackers and dried fruits were set out next to the vases for snacking, and a long table to the side offered wine and coffee. Guests mingled and conversed among the tables while small robots holding serving trays shuttled between their legs, collecting empty glasses.
Forcing himself to be calm, Lao Dao followed Lao Ge and walked through the convivial scene into the banquet hall. He saw a large hanging banner reading THE FOLDING CITY AT FIFTY.
“What is… this?” Lao Dao asked.
“A celebration!” Lao Ge was walking about and examining the setup. “Xiao Zhao, come here a minute. I want you to check the table signs one more time. I don’t trust robots for things like this. Sometimes they don’t know how to be flexible.”
Lao Dao saw that the banquet hall was filled with large, round tables with fresh flower centerpieces.
The scene seemed unreal to him. He stood in a corner and gazed up at the giant chandelier as though some dazzling reality was hanging over him, and he was but an insignificant presence at its periphery. There was a lectern set up on the dais at the front, and behind it, the background was an ever-shifting series of images of Beijing. The photographs were perhaps taken from an airplane and captured the entirety of the city: the soft light of dawn and dusk, the dark purple and deep blue sky, clouds racing across the sky, the moon rising from a corner, the sun setting behind a roof. The aerial shots revealed the magnificence of Beijing’s ancient symmetry, the modern expanse of brick courtyards and large green parks that had extended to the Sixth Ring Road, Chinese-style theatres, Japanese-style museums, minimalist concert halls. And then there were shots of the city as a whole, shots that included both faces of the city during the Change: the earth flipping, revealing the other side studded with skyscrapers with sharp, straight contours; men and women energetically rushing to work; neon signs lighting up the night, blotting out the stars; towering apartment buildings, cinemas, nightclubs full of beautiful people.
But there were no shots of where Lao Dao worked.
He stared at the screen intently, uncertain if they might show pictures of the construction of the folding city. He hoped to get a glimpse of his father’s era. When he was little, his father had often pointed to buildings outside the window and told him stories that started with, “Back then, we…” An old photograph had hung on the wall of their cramped home, and in the picture his father was laying bricks, a task his father had performed thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands of times. Lao Dao had seen that picture so many times he’d thought he was sick of it, and yet at this moment, he hoped to spot a scene of workers laying bricks, even if for just a few seconds.
He was lost in his thoughts. This was also the first time he had seen what the Change looked like from a distance. He didn’t remember sitting down, and he didn’t know when others had sat down next to him. A man began to speak at the lectern, but Lao Dao wasn’t even listening for the first few minutes.
“…advantageous for the development of the service sector. The service economy is dependent on population size and density. Currently the service industry of our city is responsible for more than eighty-five percent of our GDP, in line with the general characteristics of world-class metropolises. The other important sectors are the green economy and the recycling economy.” Lao Dao was paying full attention now. “Green economy” and “recycling economy” were often mentioned at the waste-processing station, and the phrases were painted on the walls in characters taller than a man. He looked closer at the speaker on the dais: an old man with silvery hair, though he appeared hale and energetic. “… all trash is now sorted and processed, and we’ve achieved our goals for energy conservation and pollution reduction ahead of schedule. We’ve developed a systematic, large-scale recycling economy in which all the rare-earth and precious metals extracted from e-waste are reused in manufacturing, and even the plastics recycling rate exceeds eighty percent. The recycling stations are directly connected to the reprocessing plants…”
Lao Dao knew of a distant relative who worked at a reprocessing plant in the technopark far from the city. The technopark was just acres and acres of industrial buildings, and Lao Dao had heard that all the plants over there were very similar: the machines pretty much ran on their own, and there were very few workers. At night, when the workers got together, they felt like the last survivors of some dwindling tribe in a desolate wilderness.