The USB drive sat on Lin Xi's kitchen table like a grenade with the pin pulled. She had not slept. The cold blue light of her laptop screen was the only illumination in the apartment, painting her face in pale, ghostly hues. Outside, the city of Haizhou was quiet—the kind of quiet that was not peace, but terror holding its breath.
She had spent six hours combing through the files Chen Mu had given her. The psychological profiles of the thirty-seven latent threats were exhaustive: childhood behavioral reports, adult psychiatric evaluations, social media sentiment analysis, financial transaction patterns, even geolocation data that tracked their movements across the city. Each profile was a life dissected, pinned to a digital corkboard, and labeled with a probability of future violence.
Wang Jian, the history teacher. His profile contained the parking lot altercation with the abusive father, but it also contained data Lin Xi had no idea existed: a series of online searches for "how to control anger," a prescription for mild anti-anxiety medication that he had never filled, and a flagged comment on a news forum where he had written, "Sometimes I understand why people snap." The algorithm had weighted these fragments and produced its verdict: 89.2. Likely future offender.
Huang Mingde, the retired accountant. His profile was a catalog of quiet desperation: a divorce decades ago, a single incident of workplace harassment reported by a female colleague but never pursued, a pattern of increasingly bitter letters to the editor of the Haizhou Daily. The algorithm had seen a trajectory, a slow arc toward a breaking point.
Lin Xi wanted to reject it all. She wanted to find the flaw, the mistake, the hidden bias that would prove Chen Mu wrong. But the data was relentless in its coherence. The algorithm didn't judge based on what people had done. It judged based on what the data suggested they were capable of doing. It was, she realized with a creeping horror, a form of statistical predestination.
She picked up her phone and dialed the number of the only person she could think of who might understand the technical architecture behind the algorithm. Dr. Wen Yuan was a professor of computational psychology at Haizhou University, a woman in her late fifties whose career had been built on the uncomfortable intersection of data science and human behavior. Lin Xi had interviewed her years ago for a story about predictive policing, and they had kept in sporadic contact ever since.
"Dr. Wen," Lin Xi said when the professor answered, her voice hoarse with exhaustion. "I need your help. I have access to something... something I can't explain over the phone. Can I come to your office?"
There was a long pause. "Is this about The Verdict?" Dr. Wen asked quietly.
"Yes."
Another pause. "Come now. I'll meet you at the side entrance. The main campus is... not safe anymore."
Haizhou University was a sprawling complex of red-brick buildings and manicured gardens, but when Lin Xi arrived, it looked like a campus under siege. Students hurried between buildings with their heads down, their backpacks clutched tight. Security guards had been posted at every entrance, their faces grim. The hotline had reached the university, too. Students had begun reporting each other for suspicious behavior, for "dangerous" political opinions, for the contents of their dorm room bookshelves. A philosophy professor had been reported by his own graduate student for "teaching nihilistic concepts that could incite antisocial behavior." The professor had been placed on administrative leave pending a psychological review.
Dr. Wen met Lin Xi at a nondescript door near the computer science building. She was a small woman with steel-grey hair cut short and practical, her eyes sharp behind thick glasses. She led Lin Xi through a labyrinth of corridors to a cluttered office filled with stacks of papers, old mainframe terminals, and a whiteboard covered in equations that Lin Xi couldn't begin to decipher.
Lin Xi handed her the USB drive. "This contains the source code for The Verdict's algorithm. And the psychological profiles of the people they're targeting. I need you to tell me if it's real. If it actually works."
Dr. Wen plugged the drive into her computer. For a long time, she simply scrolled through the files, her expression unreadable. The only sound was the hum of the computer's fan and the distant, muffled noise of a campus trying to pretend everything was normal.
"This is remarkable," Dr. Wen said finally. "And deeply, profoundly terrifying."
She turned the monitor so Lin Xi could see. The screen displayed a complex flowchart of data inputs and analytical frameworks. "The algorithm is based on the Social Harmony Index, the predictive policing project the Haizhou PSB developed and then abandoned. But whoever built this—Chen Mu, you said?—has refined it far beyond what the Bureau ever intended. He's integrated psychological trait analysis with machine learning models trained on criminal recidivism data. The system doesn't just predict who might commit a crime. It predicts who, according to its parameters, has the fundamental psychological architecture of a criminal."
"But that's not the same thing," Lin Xi said. "Having a bad temper isn't the same as being a murderer."
"No," Dr. Wen agreed. "But the algorithm isn't looking for murderers. It's looking for patterns. And the patterns it finds are statistically correlated with future violence. The correlation is real. The science, in a narrow sense, is sound." She paused, removing her glasses and rubbing her eyes. "But there's a problem. A fundamental one."
Lin Xi leaned forward. "What problem?"
"The data that trained this algorithm came from a specific population: convicted criminals. The Bureau's original study analyzed psychological profiles of people who had already committed violent crimes and then projected those profiles onto the general population. The assumption is that the latent criminal and the actual criminal share the same psychological markers. But that assumption has never been empirically validated. Because you can't validate it without waiting to see if the latent criminal actually commits a crime."
Lin Xi felt a cold, sharp clarity. "So the algorithm is circular. It defines criminal potential based on traits found in actual criminals, then identifies people with those traits as potential criminals. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy."
"Precisely," Dr. Wen said. "And there's something else. Look at this."
She pulled up a specific set of data points. "The algorithm places heavy weight on what it calls 'suppressed rage indicators.' These are behaviors like online arguments, hostile workplace complaints, even private journal entries that express violent fantasies. But suppressed rage is also a common symptom of depression, of trauma, of social isolation. It's a marker of suffering, not necessarily of dangerousness. The algorithm is pathologizing pain."
Lin Xi stared at the screen. She thought of Huang Mingde's bitter letters to the editor. Of Wang Jian's unfilled anxiety medication. Of the nurse who had slapped an abusive father. Their pain had been quantified, analyzed, and judged. Their suffering had become evidence of their guilt.
"Why would Chen Mu give me this?" she asked. "He has to know I'd find the flaws."
"He doesn't see them as flaws," Dr. Wen said. "He's a true believer. He sees the thirteen percent error rate as acceptable collateral damage. And he gave you the data because he genuinely believes you'll agree with him once you understand the logic. He's not hiding anything. He's evangelizing."
Lin Xi left the university with a copy of Dr. Wen's analysis and a growing sense of dread. The algorithm was flawed, but not in a way that would be obvious to a public already terrified and hungry for vengeance. The flaws were subtle, technical, and required a level of expertise that most people didn't have. Chen Mu had built a weapon that looked like science, and the city was eager to believe in it.
Back at her apartment, Lin Xi began compiling her findings into a report. She would expose the algorithm's circular logic, its pathologization of pain, its statistical sleight of hand. She would show that The Verdict was not delivering justice but conducting a massacre dressed in the language of data.
But when she opened her laptop, she found something waiting for her. A new email, sent from an encrypted address she didn't recognize. The subject line read: "Your Contribution to Phase Three."
She opened it. Inside was a single document, a psychological profile. Her psychological profile. There were her online search histories, her social media posts, her professional articles. There was a record of an argument she'd had with a colleague years ago, a heated exchange that had nearly come to blows. There was a log of her visits to the prison where Zhao Xiong had been held. There was her obsession with the case, quantified and graphed. And at the bottom, a score: 87.4.
Below the score, a note: "Subject displays high empathy index, mitigating factor. Score under review. Contribution to Phase Three may reduce score below threshold. Non-contribution will trigger recalculation. Time remaining: 36 hours."
Lin Xi's blood ran cold. She was on the list. She had been on the list all along. Chen Mu hadn't given her the data because he trusted her. He had given her the data because he was testing her. If she published her exposé, her empathy index would no longer protect her. She would be purged.
She reached for her phone to call Old Chen, but before she could dial, a sound from outside her apartment made her freeze. Footsteps. Heavy, deliberate footsteps in the hallway. Then a knock at her door.
"Lin Xi?" a voice called. It was Officer Deng Kai, her police source. His voice was strained, tight with fear. "Open the door. Please. Something's happened."
She opened the door. Deng Kai stood in the hallway, his uniform disheveled, his face pale. Behind him, the corridor was dark—the lights had been smashed, the bulbs dangling from their sockets like dead eyes.
"They hit another one," Deng Kai said. "But this time it's different. This time the victim fought back. And we found something. Something that might lead us to Chen Mu."
Lin Xi grabbed her jacket. "Who was the victim?"
Deng Kai's face twisted. "A teacher. Wang Jian. He's alive. Barely. He managed to wound one of the attackers before they escaped. The wound left a trail. We're tracking it now. But Lin Xi..." He hesitated. "They left a message for you. Written on his classroom blackboard. It said: 'The witness must choose. Phase Three begins with or without her.'"
Lin Xi looked back at her laptop, at the profile with her name and her score. The countdown was real. The choice was real. And somewhere in the city, a bleeding attacker was leaving a trail that might lead her straight to Chen Mu's door—if she was willing to follow it before the clock ran out.
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