When the law of conservation of isolation is broken

"What?" Zhang Luotuo said, his heart beating wildly, and he could feel his own voice being puzzled and eager.

He wanted to go to Joad, but Joad didn't even look back, but stopped as if he saw this move: "Don't follow me, it's right behind me. There is no R-63 here, but I'm not sure if there is any Other video surveillance."

Zhang Luotuo stopped walking.He thought for a while, and suddenly realized, he said suddenly, his voice stuttering: "The client's business is..."

"There is 24-hour audio and video surveillance in front of Lu Xing's house, and they may check it at any time." Joad answered coldly, "But...you might be leaving if you don't say anything else, so I made an excuse." He The voice walked down the small bridge with some difficulty, and stepped onto the gravel road surrounded by street lamps and artificial vegetation.A bird flew above the lake and twirled.

"They?" Zhang Luotuo stopped in his tracks and asked in confusion.

"It's us." Qiao De turned his head, and Zhang Luotuo understood that he was referring to the management department.

"What do you want to know about R-63's monitoring? I can answer you before leaving the gate of the community." Zhang Luotuo didn't even have time to figure out what his next sentence would be, when Joad's voice came again, his The tone was no different from the usual arrogant and indifferent feeling, like discussing a certain issue with Zhang Luotuo.

Zhang Luotuo's mind went blank: "Why...you suddenly decided to say this?" He was puzzled and stammered a bit.

Qiao De paused, Zhang Luotuo thought for a moment that he would not answer him.But after a long pause, Joad's voice sounded confused again: "I don't know either—it's just a voice in my mind telling me to do this."

The voice was hardly like Joad, but like a man who has been washed into an endless ocean and doesn't know where he is.

Zhang Luotuo pursed his lips and looked at Joad's profile.At the moment of staring at him, he could see that Joad's thin face seemed to be more confused than Zhang Luotuo's own, even more confused, as if caught in a fascinating mystery, but he could never find anything. answer.

At this moment, Zhang Luotuo couldn't help but feel that everything else seemed to have disappeared, only his heart was beating.

"It's only 5 minutes from here to the door, you'd better hurry up." Qiao De's voice sounded, reminding Zhang Luotuo again.In an instant, the confusion and confusion disappeared from Joad's voice, and he returned to his usual calm and indifference.

Zhang Luotuo raised his head blankly under his urging, and opened his mouth without even realizing it: "I want to ask you..."

Joad slowed down, as if ready to listen carefully to his question.

Zhang Luotuo thought for a while, and felt that there was only one question lingering in his mind, so he said it without thinking: "How long have you known about R-63?"

At this moment, Zhang Luotuo didn't even realize that he was asking a question, and his words leaked out naturally like the voice of his heart. This question had been covering his face lightly like a veil in the days when he and Joad hadn't met.

Joad hesitated for a moment, and then his voice slipped into Zhang Camel's ear like a bitter breeze: "... I knew it from the beginning."

This answer did not surprise Zhang Luotuo, but he still felt his shoulder blades throbbing, as if two existing wings were pulled away behind him.He swallowed his saliva, took a deep breath, lowered his head, and pretended nothing happened.

A bird passed through Joad's shoulder blade, going from blue to transparent and back to sequined blue.

"Because I participated in and decided the surveillance plan. To be precise, it was approved by the management department." Joad continued.

"The entire management department?" Zhang Luotuo looked up suspiciously, but immediately remembered Joad's warning about the monitor, maybe there would be a video of him staring at Joad, and lowered his head again.

"Yes." Joad said succinctly.

Zhang Luotuo frowned, almost incomprehensible, and he said inexplicably: "You mean the entire management department united to monitor me?——Why?" The management department spent a lot of time monitoring him. It's a fantasy, he is just a small employee inside, Eleven Company has too many competitors, each of them is ten thousand times more dangerous than him.

"For some reason." Joad shook his head and said without a trace of hesitation, "but I can only say so much, and this happens to be a question that I cannot answer. You don't need to know, and even if you know, it won't do you any good. But I can tell you that there will be no more monitoring in the future, it's all over."

His tone was unusually gentle, and even lost his sense of irony in the past, almost calm.

Zhang Luotuo frowned, he was not persuaded, but he vaguely realized that it was useless even to entangle this issue, because it seemed that Qiao De would not tell him no matter what.

A silence suddenly enveloped them.After an abrupt break in questions and answers, the visceral midnight silence of the community revived.

The cold rain glistened in the lights.

Zhang Luotuo let go of that thought, looked away from Joad, and looked at a lamp in the distance, which illuminated a corner of the courtyard.He pondered for a while in silence, opened his mouth involuntarily, and asked his second question of the night hesitantly - it just ran into his mind freely: "I noticed...the only ones recorded in the surveillance are me and Shouldn't you, if the administration wants to monitor, record more episodes of my life?"

Joad hesitated for a moment, Zhang Luotuo suspected that he would not answer, or asked him to skip this question as before, but after a few seconds, Joad broke the silence: "Because of purposeful surveillance, you can Getting information while talking to you directly, which is better than monitoring your trivial life without clues, helps to maximize and optimize information and monitoring content.”

His words were a bit convoluted, but Zhang Luotuo still understood.He clenched the inside of his mouth.

"I understand—" he thought about the words carefully, and slowly understood and translated, "You mean that only you and I are in the surveillance... because you have an agreement with the management department to monitor I."

He stared blankly at Joad, who nodded slightly under his gaze.

This question made Zhang Luotuo suddenly think of another thing, another picture: Qiao De came to him in the restaurant, talked to him, and said that he could help Mao Mao repair the parts.Then they met in a coffee shop, and Joad was unexpectedly friendly to him, and he was invited to Joad's house, and Joad even played him the song "Sweet Honey".He frowned slowly, feeling sparks flying, and something wrong was suddenly completely straightened out at this moment.

"So you came close to me for the convenience of monitoring?" He asked in a blink of an eye.Targeted conversation.He pondered the word.

He looked at Joad and hesitated, but only for a moment, Joad seemed to remember his promise that Zhang Luotuo would answer the question, and nodded again, calm as before, but shorter.

The wind with thick air came in gusts, but Zhang Luotuo felt the air in his lungs being sucked out.He also felt his thumb twitching constantly, though he didn't know why.

...for the convenience of monitoring.

From the corner of his sight, he saw the street lamp in the distance glowing quietly.

Suddenly, he remembered that he had seen a similar scene not long ago. It was the first night after he was discharged from the hospital. On the phone, he asked Joad to go to the old man's record store. While looking out the window, he found a dim lamp. Dim lights illuminate a pole in front of the apartment building.

He had been looking at the lights and poles uneasily until his eyes were sour, and Joad answered on the phone, Monday afternoon.He was glad to hear that, and thought maybe that was the beginning of a friendship.

But now he suddenly realized that maybe that was not an unintentional or thoughtful answer, the answer was destined at that moment, because there was an R-63 outside the window watching them.

And those Joad dates and outings.He remembered suddenly—they were picking out records together in the record store, reading old world maps, Joad giving him peanut-free candy, the discussions and conversations about astronomy in the old man's record store, the shining stars and Imagine the Pacific Ocean.They talk about themselves, past, present, future and maybe each other.Those seemingly substantial friendships and smiles, walking under neon lights—are those actually for surveillance?

Those gorgeous holographic images that camels thought were all extinguished, and everything was empty like the gray sky after the entire city was extinguished.

"But not later—not long after touching you." But suddenly, in the gray sky, a voice sounded firmly, interrupting his thoughts, which were sinking more and more , almost fell four kilometers into Qianhui Market, the site of those bounty hunters and gamblers.

Zhang Luotuo looked up in surprise and saw Joad looking at him, his gray eyes focused on his face.

"I didn't finish," Joad said.

"In the beginning, I just agreed with them that being close to you and talking to you like in real life helps the management to keep an eye on you up close and get the natural messages that come from when you're completely relaxed. But, not anymore. I found that I was wrong, it was a terrible idea." His voice was the same as usual, cold but resolute.

Zhang Luotuo looked into Joad's eyes, and he saw endless gray in it, like an overly vast Internet, and the gray flickered like an endless holographic image.

"...In the end, I didn't see you as an object of surveillance." Joad paused, and said awkwardly in a not-so-Jode tone.

Zhang Luotuo stared blankly at Qiao De's eyes, completely unable to recover, as if the holographic image had locked him in a city cage.After he realized that he had been staring at Joad for too long, he lowered his head at a loss.He didn't expect Joad to say that at all.He felt a strange sensation that slowly melted him from top to bottom, even his thoughts.He opened his mouth, but only tasted brightness.

They walked on, the gravel paths and the images of the birds fading away behind them.

In the following time, Zhang Luotuo didn't speak any more, and he didn't ask any more questions, but it wasn't because he didn't have any questions to ask Joad again, but because of Joad's words, and the strange feeling that enveloped him and his thoughts, he felt that he Unable to speak again, the brightness melted them.

Complete silence surrounded them.

He saw the gate getting closer and closer to them, gradually only one step away.

They walked to the door together and stopped, as the slightest cold wind came in through the tiny crack in the door.Zhang Luotuo looked at the gap in the door that was almost invisible to the naked eye in a trance.The wind from the crack of the door brushed his hand like a thin chip.

"Do you have any questions?" Joad lowered his head and asked him softly before he was about to open the door.

Zhang Luotuo shook his head.

Joad held out his hand, ready to open the door.

"Why did you tell me this?" Zhang Luotuo suddenly asked before his hand knocked on the door.His voice was so soft and fleeting that he couldn't even guarantee that Joad had heard the question.

Joad's hand stopped in mid-air.

He turned his head.

Zhang Luotuo looked up at Joad. He had never looked at him so closely tonight. Just now they answered one after the other, like two robots or ghosts who couldn't see each other, but when they were about to leave the metal gate, When they went home, they finally found each other and looked at each other.Qiao De lowered his head, he looked at Zhang Luotuo with a special expression.Zhang Luotuo didn't know what it was, because he had never seen such an expression on Qiao De's face before.But that look was very familiar, and Zhang Luotuo felt that he might have seen it somewhere else, maybe when it was raining in the modern city of Chongqing, maybe when he passed by the game square and looked up at the Dunhuang God Buddha, or maybe not long ago. Before, in his broken memory.The expression took root in Joad's eyes, and then spread to the entire face like a software virus.That expression has nothing to do with Zhang Luotuo's problem, nor has it anything to do with everything they have encountered now.

Joad sighed softly.

"Because I found out that I don't understand anything either," he said, his gray eyes flickering slightly, and he held out his hand.

Zhang Luotuo instinctively raised his head and looked into those eyes.He felt a slight and gentle touch across his face.

Joad's thumb lightly brushed against Zhang Camel's cheek, like the first raindrops falling on the spaceship.

Zhang Luotuo's heart beat, and the gray color spread in his heart, turning into a flickering light and shadow.

Three seconds later, Joad stretched out his hand and gently pushed the door open.

There was a loud cry from the door, and the dummy security sensed the door's movement, turned around, and bowed to them.Behind him, the night view of the road and the city is extremely bright, and the spaceship and pedestrians share a three-dimensional space.

In the middle of the night, the bustle of the day tries to revive.