Mr. Lwin's funeral lasted six minutes.
It was all Utopia could safely give him.
At seven in the morning, his body lay beneath a clean university flag beside the western bus. His wife stood between two daughters while acid rain whispered against the plastic shelter above them.
Sleeping Man read his name.
Jihye read the names of the seventy-three people taken through the first safe corridor.
NC read the names of the twenty-six taken through the second.
When they finished, there were ninety-nine missing people and one dead bicycle repairman between us and the idea of normal life.
The countdown beyond the northern wall read:
51:57:11
The red-armband soldiers watched the funeral through rifle sights.
At eight, the General Strike began.
It did not look like a riot.
Factories stopped. City buses remained in their depots. University lecturers opened classrooms and found no students. Market owners lowered steel shutters but left bowls of clean water outside for protesters and street animals.
Railway workers parked engines across military supply lines and misplaced the keys.
Hospital staff continued emergency care, then refused to submit patient names to MALT's intelligence officers.
The streets outside the military checkpoints became quiet.
That frightened MALT more than shouting had.
State television called the empty roads proof that martial law had restored peace.
VT's accounts posted old photographs of crowded markets, bright shopping malls, and children playing beneath a blue sky. The images came from previous years. Some had holiday decorations visible in the corners. One showed a building demolished eight months earlier.
The captions were identical.
YANDONG RETURNS TO NORMAL. ONLY UTOPIA EXTREMISTS REFUSE PEACE.
At 8:27, a second group of accounts began posting something else.
GOLD SHOPS ARE UNGUARDED. TAKE BACK WHAT THE ELITES STOLE.
ATMS ARE OPEN AND POLICE HAVE ABANDONED THE BANKS.
FREE RICE AND SALT AT THE CENTRAL GRANARY. COME BEFORE SUPPLIES ARE GONE.
Every message used the same three hashtags.
Every cartoon profile pretended the information came from a different angry citizen.
The people behind the accounts had never missed a meal.
The people who followed the messages had children who had not eaten since yesterday.
Kitty's mother recognized the trap before most of the city did.
She contacted Utopia through a weak hospital radio link. JP's mother was already listening from another ward.
"They did this when we were teenagers," Kitty's mother said. "First came the message that the grain warehouse had been abandoned. Men nobody knew broke the lock. They carried bags out for the cameras and disappeared before the soldiers arrived."
"The soldiers were already there," JP's mother corrected. "They waited behind the warehouses."
The women went quiet.
They had told us the story before, but memory changed when the same message returned to their phones thirty years later.
"Hungry people came after them," Kitty's mother continued. "Parents. Laborers. Old women carrying bowls. The army fired at everyone and told the country it had stopped looters."
"My father told me it happened in his time too," JP's mother said. "Different warehouse. Same rice. Same cameras."
Three generations had inherited the same warning.
Do not follow the crowd toward food.
Do not believe an unlocked door.
Look for the soldiers waiting behind it.
Shinso recorded both women and sent the audio through the disconnected campus network. Runners carried written copies to every shelter. The city police transmitted the warning through old service radios.
It reached some neighborhoods in time.
It did not reach all of them.
At the Central Granary, eight men in civilian clothes arrived before the hungry families.
They wore work jackets without company names and carried iron bars wrapped in newspaper. One used a hammer against the outer lock while another filmed him from across the road.
Their faces were uncovered.
They expected to be recognized by the people who had sent them.
When the gate opened, they pulled sacks into the street and shouted that the government had fallen.
The first families appeared ten minutes later.
They did not look like a mob.
They looked tired.
One woman carried an empty cooking pot. An old man brought a bicycle with two baskets. Three boys shared a handcart and argued about whether they should take rice or salt first.
Red-armband soldiers waited inside refrigerated trucks on the next street.
Their machine guns were already loaded.
City police arrived first.
Two patrol cars blocked the granary road. Officers used loudspeakers to tell families to turn back and warned that the warehouse had been staged. Neighborhood residents opened side alleys and pulled people away from the main entrance.
The civilian instigators attacked the police line.
They needed the cameras to record resistance.
One struck an officer across the mouth with an iron bar. Another overturned the handcart and shouted that police were protecting stolen food.
Then the military trucks opened.
The red bands came out firing.
They shot the instigator holding the hammer first.
His usefulness had ended.
Then they fired toward the families.
Police shields covered the retreat. Residents dragged the fallen through narrow shop entrances. The old man abandoned his bicycle and carried one of the boys instead.
Seven civilians died before the street emptied.
State television called them armed thieves.
The broadcast showed the broken lock, scattered grain, and the iron bar striking a police officer. It did not show the machine guns waiting inside the trucks.
By noon, the same pattern had appeared near an ATM station, two jewelry shops, Ocean Mall, and a salt warehouse beside the river.
Some traps failed because citizens recognized the strangers who arrived first.
Some succeeded because hunger arrived before the warning.
VT called all of them evidence that the country needed martial law.
His cyber team called the operation Empty Shelves.
The name appeared on an internal dashboard beside maps of banks, jewelry streets, supermarkets, fuel depots, and grain warehouses. Each target had two prepared stories.
If citizens stayed away, order had returned under MALT.
If citizens gathered, violent mobs had forced the army to intervene.
There was no outcome in which the public was allowed to be hungry, frightened, and innocent at the same time.
An analyst reported that neighborhood warnings had reduced turnout at the Central Granary.
"The mothers' audio reached three districts," she said. "Police frequencies repeated it."
VT watched the recording of Kitty's mother until her voice identified the pattern from her teenage years.
"Label the audio foreign-generated," he said. "Find every account sharing it. Add their relatives to the questioning list."
"The embassy compounds may already have the original."
"Then the roads remain closed."
Another screen showed seven covered bodies outside the granary.
MALT entered the room and looked at the number.
"Too few."
Nobody reacted.
"The police removed the crowd before the unit arrived," VT explained.
"Then remove the police."
"Not yet. Their uniforms make useful evidence when we accuse Utopia of forming an armed faction."
MALT watched the instigator strike the officer with an iron bar. The video stopped before red-armband soldiers shot the same instigator.
"Broadcast that frame."
"It already aired."
For the first time that morning, MALT appeared satisfied.
The analyst marked the operation successful.
Seven dead civilians became seven media assets. One murdered instigator became proof that criminals had attacked police. The hungry families who escaped became uncounted because frightened people hiding inside shops did not fit any official category.
At the bottom of the dashboard, the Utopia countdown continued falling.
Empty Shelves had never been designed only to create looting.
It was designed to teach everyone inside The Walls what MALT could make the truth look like after they died.
The embassy district received no public warning.
Military barriers had sealed every road leading toward the foreign compounds. Red-armband soldiers searched embassy employees, photographed vehicle plates, and refused passage to diplomatic medical vans.
MALT claimed the restrictions protected foreign personnel from unrest.
In reality, the soldiers faced inward as often as they faced the city.
The embassies were being guarded from witnessing Yandong.
Inside one compound, the official who had met Utopia students during the Floating Village journey stood beneath a covered balcony and collected the rain in a sterile bottle.
Months earlier, he had asked whether we thought the strange weather was natural.
We had laughed, blamed the season, and returned to our bus before he could explain.
Now his environmental officer placed a test strip beside the sample.
"Three point six," she said. "Sulfur compounds are elevated again."
"Can you identify the source?"
"Not from rain alone. But it is industrial, and the concentration rose when the western military grid came online."
The official looked toward the helicopters circling beyond the compound wall.
Their secure internet had been cut that morning. Their satellite channel suffered deliberate interference. The landline connected only to a MALT operator who promised assistance after order returned.
They still had one emergency transmitter built into a vehicle the soldiers had not been permitted to search.
The report left Yandong as compressed text beneath routine diplomatic weather data.
Attached to it were photographs of blocked embassy roads, red-armband soldiers, the Central Granary shooting, and Utopia's countdown.
MALT controlled the streets around every embassy.
He did not yet control the sky above all of them.
Inside Utopia, the second day became a fight against arithmetic.
Clean water had fallen below twenty-four hours at the strictest ration. The kitchen could produce one more full meal or two smaller meals. The clinic had antibiotics but not enough sterile fluid. Three children developed rashes after playing near runoff before volunteers understood where the water had collected.
HS moved from building to building until his voice became too rough to carry.
"No rainwater on skin without washing afterward. Cover cuts. If your eyes burn, report it. Do not save symptoms because somebody looks worse than you."
People saved symptoms anyway.
An older woman hid her cough so a Nursing student would treat a child first. A police officer wrapped his own bleeding hand in cloth and kept his clean bandage for someone shot at the granary. Anna found both of them and became angry enough that they obeyed her.
At three, Mr. Kim turned the auditorium into a school for the children.
There were no lessons from the official curriculum. He asked them to draw places where they felt safe. Most drew houses. Some drew the university. One child drew a bus across a gate and wrote Mr. Lwin's name on its side.
The picture was placed on the library wall beneath his photograph.
The General Strike continued outside.
Every hour brought another report written on paper.
Dockworkers refusing military cargo.
Civil servants copying arrest lists before their offices were searched.
Monks sheltering wounded protesters.
University students marching without flags so VT could not claim they represented a foreign power.
The country had not returned to normal.
It had stopped cooperating with the lie.
Our second-night meal arrived in paper cups because washing bowls required water we no longer had.
Kitty sat beside the clinic entrance with her wrapped ankle resting on an overturned box. June tried to open her cup one-handed until NS took it from her.
"I can do it," she said.
"You have been able to do many things that hurt you," he replied. "That is not the same as doing them well."
She looked ready to argue.
Then she let him open it.
JP ate three bites and passed the rest to a child who had been staring at his cup. TZ pretended not to see because HS had ordered every patient to finish his ration.
"You are terrible at medical supervision," JP told him.
"I am supervising your moral recovery."
KM arrived from the western repairs covered in wet concrete dust. He placed a fresh helmet beside JP's wheelchair.
Mr. Lwin's name had been painted across the front.
"He said students needed it more," KM said. "So somebody should use it."
JP ran his thumb across the letters.
"You wear it."
"My head is stronger than yours."
"Your dormitory grades suggest otherwise."
KM almost smiled.
The moment lasted only until VT's loudspeakers switched on.
At sunset, the countdown read:
39:22:06
VT's loudspeakers began calling people inside Utopia by name.
They listed dorm rooms, majors, family addresses, old disciplinary records, medical conditions, and private messages taken from confiscated accounts.
"Your mother is waiting at home."
"Your scholarship will be canceled."
"Your younger brother will be questioned because of you."
"The leaders will escape. You will be left behind."
Each sentence came from information gathered by bots pretending to be friends.
Some students cried.
Some shouted back.
Most sat in the dark and listened because there was nowhere on campus the speakers could not reach.
Sleeping Man ordered the second-night patrols to continue without answering them.
My name appeared on the indoor communications shift.
I reached the administration lobby and managed twenty-three minutes before the numbers on the message board began moving.
Thirty-nine hours became thirty-nine floors.
The library wall became the edge of a rooftop.
Mr. Lwin's photograph looked down at me from a sky filled with black clouds.
Then the floor struck my knees.
JP caught my shoulder before my head reached the tiles.
"XH?"
His voice came from very far away.
The thermometer read thirty-nine point four.
Kitty and June helped lift me onto a clinic bed. NS pulled the blanket over my legs with his good hand. TZ argued with the generator team until they gave the room enough power for a fan.
"I can still take the shift," I said.
"You cannot currently identify the ceiling," JP replied.
"It is white."
"It is green."
I looked again.
The ceiling was green.
JP moved his wheelchair beside the bed.
"Sleep. I will wake you if anything happens."
"Something is already happening."
"Then I will wake you if it gets worse."
Outside, the second night settled over The Walls.
Thunder covered the movement of soldiers beyond the barricades. Weak acid rain ran down the clinic glass. The loudspeakers continued promising normal life to anyone willing to surrender.
I closed my eyes for five minutes.
Somewhere beyond sleep, the countdown reached zero.