Chapter 7: Eighty Thousand

Tang Yu spent Thursday counting strangers.

Lin Jie ran the queries in the corner of the empty office, with the lights half off.

The cleaners' vacuum hummed down the hall.

Tang Yu wrote down what came back, in plain sentences, because plain sentences were the only kind that did not get argued with.

At six that evening she had one page.

The dashboard said Hongxian had 120,000 users.

Of those, 80,214 had signed up between three and four in the morning.

They had no messages sent and no messages received.

They had never logged in a second time.

All 80,214 profile photos came from the same small set of stock pictures, cropped four different ways.

"They're not users," Lin Jie said quietly. "They're furniture."

"Who made them?"

"A script. On the production server." He looked at his shoes.

"I found it a month ago. I took it to my team lead, and the next week my team lead was gone."

Tang Yu printed the page and folded it in thirds.

"You don't have to be in this," she said.

"I'm already in it."

"I'll say it came from my staging copy."

"He'll know."

"Then he'll know I'm the one who said it."

On Friday morning she carried the page into Zhou's office and put it on the glass desk.

He read it standing up.

She had expected shouting, or denial.

What she got was the long, slow sigh of a man shown a stain he already knew about.

"Seed accounts," Zhou said.

"Every launch has them. A dating app with no people in it is a dead room. You fill the room."

"The investor deck says 120,000 real users."

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