Of course, I understand, but I don’t dare to believe this nightmare is real. Coins and paper money stopped circulating three years ago. Even buying a pack of cigarettes from a kiosk on the side of the street requires a card reader. In this total information age, what is wealth? Ultimately, it’s no more than strands of pulses and magnetic marks inside computer storage. As far as this grand office building is concerned, if the electronic records in relevant departments are deleted, even though a company holds title deeds, no one will recognize its property rights. What is money? Money isn’t worth shit. Money is just a strand of electromagnetic marks even smaller than bacteria and pulses that disappear in a flash. As far as the IT Republic is concerned, close to half the IT workers in the physical world are its citizens. Erasing those marks is extremely easy.

Programmers, network engineers, and database managers form the main body of the IT Republic. They are a twenty-first-century revival of the nineteenth-century industrial army, except physical labor is now mental labor, and gets more and more difficult. They work with code as indistinct as thick fog and labyrinthine network hardware and software. Like dockworkers from two hundred years ago, they bear a heavy load on their backs.

Information technology advances in great strides. Except for those lucky enough to climb into management, everyone’s knowledge and skills grow obsolete quickly. New IT graduates pour in like hungry termites. The old workers (not actually old, most are just over thirty) are forced to the side, replaced and abandoned. The newcomers, though, don’t last long either. The vast majority of them don’t have long-term prospects…. This class is known as the technology proletariat.

Do not say that we own not a thing. We’re about to reformat the world! This is a corrupt version of “The Internationale.”

A thought strikes me like lightning. Oh, no. My money, which doesn’t belong to me but will buy me over two hundred years of life, will it be deleted? But if everything will be reformatted, won’t the result be the same? My money, my Gene Extension, my dreams … It grows dark before my eyes. My chest grows tight and I stumble away from my desk.

Zheng Lili laughs then, and I stop. She stands near me.

“Happy April Fool’s Day,” a sober Liu Wei says, glancing at the network switch at a corner of the office.

The office network isn’t connected to the outside world. Zheng Lili’s laptop is sitting on the switch, acting as a server. That bitch! She must have gone to a lot of trouble to pull off this April Fool’s joke, most of it to produce that news footage. An in-house designer, though, could have used 3-D software to produce that footage. It wouldn’t have been that hard.