Hangzhou — Day Fifteen
Hangzhou welcomed its fifteenth morning since the beginning of the phenomenon with a heat that could no longer be described as merely unusual. It had become part of the daily lives of the city's residents. From the earliest hours of dawn, sunlight reflected off the glass facades of the buildings with an unfamiliar intensity, making the white light seem closer to the glow of metal heated in a fire than to the warmth of the spring sun people had known for so many years. As for the air, it had completely lost its usual coolness and turned into a heavy mass that seemed almost to cling to the skin, carrying with it the smell of hot asphalt and dust whose movement had not calmed for days. Meanwhile, the small generators scattered throughout the alleys added a continuous hum to the city's noise, after power outages had become part of a routine that no longer surprised anyone.
In the streets, things moved as usual, but they no longer carried the same vitality. Cafés were packed with customers searching for any place that still had a working air conditioner, while shops selling fans and cooling appliances had become increasingly crowded since morning. Meanwhile, maintenance vehicles belonging to the power company moved from one neighborhood to another as though they were taking part in a race they could never win. People were not talking about the end of the world, but about rising bills, broken air conditioners, food spoiling inside refrigerators, and the summer that had arrived early this year. Only the news broadcasts continued repeating the same phrase, again and again:
"Unprecedented solar activity is under study."
With each passing day, this explanation became more acceptable to everyone, because it seemed more comforting than searching for a truth no one could even imagine.
On the third floor of one of the old buildings on the outskirts of the city, Liu Shao sat on the edge of his bed early in the morning, several minutes before his alarm was due to ring. He had slept for no more than three hours, yet he did not feel sleepy so much as he felt a cumulative exhaustion inside his head—an exhaustion caused neither by studying nor by exams, as he had been accustomed to throughout his university years, but by that green bar that had begun following his thoughts wherever he went. Even when he managed to keep the phone out of sight, he could still picture it clearly: that quiet rectangle steadily progressing at a fixed rate, as though it did not acknowledge the anxiety or pleas of human beings.
He remained seated for a few moments, staring at the wooden floor in front of him before reaching for the bottle of water beside his bed. The water was lukewarm, even though he had put it in the refrigerator before going to sleep. He drank it anyway, then slowly got up and walked toward the window. The moment he opened it, a wave of hot air rushed inside, making him unconsciously take a step backward. He looked at the sky, which was almost completely free of clouds, then raised his eyes toward the sun, but he could not look at it for long. It was not only the light that had changed, but also the feeling that accompanied seeing it. For fifteen days, it had no longer been merely a celestial body illuminating the sky. It had become a gigantic countdown, gradually approaching the moment when everything would end.
He closed the window and returned to his desk, where the phone had remained since the previous night. He did not need to open the application to know what would appear on the screen, but he did so anyway, against his own will, as he did every morning, as though searching for the absurd hope that he might find the number had stopped at the previous day. The screen lit up quietly, and the green bar appeared in its usual place.
ꪤ Solar Collapse — Module Loading – 15%
He stared at it in silence until it seemed to him that time itself had stopped inside the room. It was not the number that frightened him, but its consistency. It had never been late, never advanced faster than it should, and never made a single mistake since the moment he had accepted the first ending. It moved with the precision of a clock whose maker he did not know, as though what was happening was not a program inside a phone, but a new law of the universe that could not be violated.
He turned off the screen and gently placed the phone on the desk, then pulled out the notebook he had bought the previous day specifically for this purpose. The first page remained blank for a long while as the pen rotated between his fingers without touching the paper. It was not time that he lacked, but an idea. Ever since he had discovered the possibility of replacing the current ending with another that was "greater or more creative," he had been reconsidering every catastrophe humanity had known throughout its history. Yet whenever he came close to writing one down, he discovered that it did not live up to what that mysterious entity wanted, or that it simply contained loopholes he could not ignore.
After several minutes of hesitation, he wrote at the top of the page in clear handwriting:
"Possible Endings."
He stared at the title for a moment, then wrote the first idea that came to mind beneath it:
An asteroid colliding with Earth.
As soon as he finished writing it, he set the pen aside and leaned back in his chair, trying to look at it from a different perspective—not as a university student, but as the application itself. He silently asked himself: Is this a guaranteed ending? Yes, perhaps. But it was not new, not astonishing, and not the kind of thing the application would describe as more creative than the collapse of the sun. After a few moments of thought, he drew a single line across the sentence until it disappeared beneath the ink, then moved on to the next idea, feeling for the first time in years that the hardest examination he had ever faced in his life was not in a university classroom, but on a blank page waiting for him to decide how the world should end.
....
The taste of turmeric was exactly as he remembered it: a slight bitterness appearing with the first sip, then slowly fading and leaving behind a warmth spreading through his throat and chest. He had never grown accustomed to the taste, even after so many years of drinking it, but at the same time, he had never tried to stop drinking it either. It had become more of a habit than a choice, something repeated every morning and evening until it gradually lost its meaning. He stood in front of the kitchen window, holding the cup with both hands, while sunlight reflected off the opposite glass in a harsh white color, closer to the light of a giant lamp than to the sunlight he had known since childhood. The city outside was moving at its usual rhythm. Cars crossed the streets, people hurried toward their workplaces, and the voices of vendors reached him intermittently with the hot air. Yet all of it seemed distant, as though he were looking at another world separated from him by a glass barrier that could not be broken.
He watched the street for a few moments before turning his gaze back to the cup. He did not know why an old image suddenly came to mind, one dating back more than ten years, when he, Chen Yu, and two other children had been sitting in the school courtyard after classes, each of them holding a similar cup. Back then, they had competed to come up with tricks for getting rid of the drink without their grandmother noticing. One of them would pour it beneath a tree, while another hid the cup behind a wall, and then they would all stand there with innocent expressions, pretending they had drunk every last drop. Liu Shao smiled faintly as he remembered how those attempts had always ended in failure, and how Grandma Su had somehow discovered the truth in a way they had never understood. The memory seemed simple to the point of foolishness, yet it brought with it a sense of reassurance he had missed since the appearance of the application, as though it belonged to a time when the world had not needed someone to save it.
He slowly returned to his room and placed the empty cup at the edge of the desk, then sat among the papers that had begun piling up around him since morning. Torn pages covered a large portion of the floor, some containing only a single line before he had crossed it out violently, while other pages were filled with drawings, arrows, and scattered words that had no connection to one another. He ran his hand over one of them, then read aloud in a low voice:
"An asteroid collision..."
He smiled sarcastically before folding the paper and throwing it away. The problem was not a lack of ideas, but the fact that the deeper he thought, the more he discovered that every idea had some kind of loophole. Some could not guarantee the complete extinction of humanity, some depended on probabilities that might never occur, and others seemed so repetitive to him that he doubted the application would accept them at all. He was trying to think as though he were the application itself, anticipating its objections before writing a single word, but this only narrowed the circle of his ideas further and further.
His hand reached for one of the virology textbooks on the nearby shelf, not because he expected to find an answer in it, but because when the mind could no longer think, it instinctively searched for something familiar to cling to. He opened the book to a random page and found an explanation of the mechanism by which a virus reproduces inside a cell. He read with concentration for a few moments, then moved to the next page, and then the one after that, before finally closing it in frustration. The book explained how disease began, how it spread, and how the body attempted to resist it, but it did not answer the only question occupying his mind:
How could an ending be enough to wipe out all of humanity while at the same time being understandable enough for him to know every detail of it?
So that he could survive it for long enough.
Suddenly, he felt that everything he had studied over the past years was worth nothing in front of a blank page demanding that he invent the end of the world.
His eyes unconsciously drifted toward the phone lying beside the notebook. He did not need to open it; he had memorized what he would find inside. Nevertheless, he reached for it as though responding to a hidden call. The application opened to the familiar blank page, displaying the same question that had not changed since the first day:
"How do you see the end of this world?"
The cursor blinked inside the text box, waiting for the first letter, while Liu Shao continued staring at it for a long time without moving his fingers. He felt that the whiteness surrounding the sentence was no longer merely a background, but a vast space mocking his helplessness, as though it were saying that the problem was not a lack of words, but a lack of imagination.
He closed the application again and got up after feeling that the room was closing in around him. He needed to go outside, not because he believed the street would give him an idea, but because staying between those walls had made him go around the same circle for hours. When he opened the building's door, a wave of hot air greeted him, forcing him to stop for a moment before continuing on. The sidewalks radiated the heat so clearly that the air above them seemed distorted, while signs of exhaustion had spread across the faces of passersby—signs that were not familiar at this time of year. People were not talking about the end of the world, but about electricity bills, air conditioners, power outages, and the rising prices of ice and bottled water. To them, what was happening was nothing more than a series of unfortunate coincidences that would eventually come to an end. To him, however, everything was moving according to a strict timetable that had begun the day he wrote that absurd sentence on his phone screen.
Liu Shao continued walking without a specific destination, allowing his feet to choose the road while his mind was drowning in a whirlpool of thoughts that could no longer distinguish between reality and possibilities. The streets he was accustomed to crossing every day looked familiar in their details: the same stone sidewalks, the trees stretching along both sides of the road, the small cafés beginning to fill with university students and employees, even the smell of coffee drifting from a nearby shop remained unchanged. And yet, he felt that everything had lost something he could not name, as though the city itself had begun looking at the sun with caution without realizing it.
At one intersection, traffic suddenly came to a halt after the traffic lights malfunctioned for the second time that day. The scene was not as strange as it had been two weeks earlier. The drivers did not look surprised; they merely honked their horns in annoyance, while one police officer stepped into the middle of the street, attempting to direct traffic with his hands. On the opposite sidewalk, a maintenance worker opened a small electrical box, sweat pouring down his face as he muttered words Liu Shao could not hear. Beside him stood a truck bearing the logo of the electricity company. It looked like part of the new daily routine—a routine that had not existed fifteen days ago but had now become familiar enough to be worrying.
He continued walking until he reached a commercial street that was bustling at this time of day. Many shops had left their doors wide open, not to welcome customers, but in an attempt to let some air inside after their air conditioners had become less effective with each passing day. He stopped in front of an electronics store whose display window was filled with dozens of screens broadcasting the same news channel. The presenter was speaking calmly about the "continuation of unprecedented solar activity," while graphs and colored curves behind him showed the rising temperatures in different parts of the world.
The presenter said that a number of astronomical observatories had confirmed an increase in solar flares over the past few days, and that governments were considering precautionary measures to protect power grids and satellites. He then interviewed an expert who appeared confident as he repeated that there was no need to panic, and that such phenomena had occurred throughout history before, even if this was the first time they had reached such a scale since modern records began.
Liu Shao continued staring at the screen until the report ended. The news was not false, but it was not the truth either. He had come to realize more than anyone else that human beings, regardless of how many devices and observatories they possessed, would never be able to see the real reason behind what was happening, because they were searching in the sky while the beginning had been written on a phone screen in a small room no one knew existed.
He turned his back on the screens and continued on his way, but he had not gone far when a small gathering outside a pharmacy caught his attention. A middle-aged man was sitting on the sidewalk while his wife tried to fan him with a piece of paper. His face was pale, and he was sweating abnormally. One of the pharmacy employees came outside carrying a bottle of cold water and then helped him to his feet, while several passersby cast quick glances before continuing on their way.
What he had witnessed was not an extraordinary incident, but one of many scenes that had begun repeating throughout the city. Human bodies had not been created to endure this amount of heat, and every additional day in which the sun imposed its presence in this manner meant more exhausted people, more breakdowns, and more faces that no longer smiled as they once had.
He felt a tightness in his chest and unconsciously pulled his phone from his pocket. For a few moments, he stared at its black screen before pressing the power button and opening the application interface. The green bar appeared as expected, motionless at fifteen percent, neither increasing nor decreasing. He knew it would not move before the following morning, yet he could not resist the urge to look at it again and again, as though watching it might give his mind the illusion of control over something he no longer possessed.
He put the phone back in his pocket and headed toward the riverbank, which he visited from time to time whenever he felt that the city was closing in around him. The water flowed calmly, reflecting the sunlight in brilliant ripples that made looking at it painful after only a few minutes. He sat on one of the wooden benches beneath a large tree, but its shade was no longer as cool as it had once been. The heat had begun seeping even into the places that had once been refuges for those escaping the sun.
There, amid the relative quiet, he returned to the question that had stayed with him for days.
Why was he unable to think?
He was not ignorant, nor was he stupid. He had been among the top students in his class in more than one subject. He had spent years studying microbiology and viruses, memorizing complicated names and chemical pathways that most of his classmates forgot as soon as the exams were over. Yet when he sat before a single open-ended question, he discovered that all that knowledge had not helped him at all.
Perhaps the problem was that he was trying to think like a student.
He was searching for the correct answer, while the question had no answer in the first place.
Most of what he had written so far was nothing more than catastrophes he had learned about from books, news reports, and documentaries. He had not invented anything new. He had merely rearranged old ideas into different forms, then rejected them himself before giving the application a chance to reject them.
Liu Shao left the riverbank as evening approached, while the sun still hung above the city as though it refused to acknowledge the approach of sunset. Its light had lost some of its harshness, but the heat had not receded as people were accustomed to at this time of day. Instead, it remained suspended in the air, clinging to the asphalt, walls, and glass facades, so much so that passersby continued wiping sweat from their faces despite the arrival of evening. It was not normal, and this had become clear even to those who did not follow the news or care about what astronomers were saying. The entire city could feel that something had gone wrong, even if the explanations differed.
On his way back, he passed one of the public parks where children usually played every evening. There were fewer of them than usual, while most of the parents sat on stone benches carrying bottles of cold water or waving small handheld fans. On the other side of the park, an ambulance stopped for a few moments before paramedics rushed out toward an elderly man who had lost consciousness beneath a large tree. People gathered around him curiously. Some tried to help, while others merely watched, and the usual guesses began to rise.
"Heatstroke."
"His blood pressure is low."
"This heat is going to kill us all."
One of the bystanders said it while shaking his head, then walked away with a short laugh, as though he had said it merely as an exaggeration.
Liu Shao stopped at those words without realizing it.
Kill us all.
How strange it was that a passing sentence spoken by an unknown man on a crowded street could become an accurate description of what awaited all of humanity.
He lowered his head and continued walking.
He no longer felt that the city was moving around him. Instead, he was the one walking inside a gigantic hourglass, its grains of sand flowing slowly in a way that could not be stopped. Each passing day was not merely another day on the calendar, but one of the hundred days the application had given the world before the ending finished loading. He did not have the luxury of dwelling too long on any idea, nor the luxury of waiting for a miracle he did not even know was possible.
He reached the building as night fell. The lighting in the entrance was dim, and the elevator had stopped because of a power outage, just as it had on the previous two nights. He climbed the stairs slowly, each floor hotter than the one before it, until, as he took out the key to his apartment, he felt that the air in the corridor was too heavy to breathe.
The moment he closed the door behind him, he took off his jacket and threw it onto the sofa. He did not turn on the lights immediately. Instead, he walked toward the window and opened it wide, hoping a cool breeze might slip inside. But what entered was nothing but warm air carrying the noise of the city and the sounds of generators scattered throughout the neighboring districts. He stood there for a few moments, then closed the window again, realizing there was no point waiting for a coolness that no longer came.
He sat at his desk, where the phone had remained since morning. He slowly reached for it as though handling something fragile that might break at the slightest touch, then opened the application interface. Nothing had changed.
ꪤ Solar Collapse — Module Loading – 15%
The same number.
The same bar.
And the same silence.
The blank page he knew by heart appeared. The cursor blinked inside the text box, waiting for new words, but this time his fingers did not move. He was not afraid of rejection. He was afraid of writing an incomplete ending, an ending that left behind a tiny loophole for the application to fill with something he had never imagined. From the beginning, he had been trying to control every detail and make the ending he wrote so clear that it allowed no other interpretation. But the harder he tried, the more he discovered that his ignorance of what the world could do was far greater than his knowledge.
He closed the application and pulled out the notebook whose pages were filled with crossed-out ideas. He slowly flipped through the pages, reading what he had written during the past several hours, until he felt that the words themselves had begun mocking him.
Asteroid collision.
Nuclear war.
Collapse of the magnetic field.
Earth freezing.
Time stopping.
So many phrases, yet they had all been born dead, as though they were nothing more than desperate attempts by a mind searching in the wrong place.
He placed the pen over the final page, then continued staring at the emptiness for a long time.
For the first time since the application appeared, he did not try to write an ending.
Instead, he wrote a question.
"Who can imagine an ending that I cannot imagine?"
He read the question once, then twice, before smiling faintly, not without a touch of self-mockery. He had spent the entire day searching for an answer in books, lectures, and everything he had memorized throughout his years of study, but he had forgotten that imagination was not taught in university classrooms, nor measured by exam results. There were people who lived among another kind of books—books that did not explain reality, but created entirely new worlds.
And suddenly, he no longer needed to think any further.
The name appeared clearly in his mind, as though it had been waiting for this moment from the very beginning.
Chen Yu.
That lazy guy who spent half his time arriving late to lectures and the other half immersed in novels no one knew how he found the time to read. He was the only one among them capable of talking for hours about fictional civilizations, creatures that had never existed, or endings authors invented for their worlds. Liu Shao had always mocked him for it, seeing it as nothing more than a strange hobby.
But now...
He found himself looking at that hobby from an entirely different angle.
He remembered him sitting in a café with a novel open in his hands, completely indifferent to the noise around him. He remembered how he could talk for hours about the events of a single novel, and how he would criticize the author whenever he found the ending "boring" or "predictable," then suggest an alternative ending while laughing, as though his imagination knew no boundaries.
Liu Shao lowered his head slightly and let out a long sigh.
"Maybe..."
he whispered to himself.
"Maybe I've been looking in the wrong place all this time."
He quietly closed the notebook and placed it on the desk, while the pen remained between its final pages, where only one name had been written.
Chen Yu.
He did not know whether he would get what he was looking for, nor how he would ask his question without arousing suspicion, but he was certain of one thing.
He had exhausted everything his own imagination could offer.
And tomorrow...
he would borrow someone else's imagination.