Chapter Fourteen: The Hearing
The power outage ended at the thirty-sixth hour.
The moment the electricity came back, all the lights in the workshop lit up, and the circulation pump resumed its low hum. Lily came out of the tank, pale, clutching a thin silver object in her hand. A Yin did not follow her out.
Three days later, the district held a hearing on the old industrial heritage.
Mr. Chen also came. He had changed into a more expensive suit and brought a lawyer and a planner. His proposal was beautiful: move Tank No. 3 entirely into a new industrial museum, enclose it in glass, equip it with lighting and explanatory plaques, and make it part of "Nangang's Industrial Memory."
"Move the tank away, and the land can be developed," Mr. Chen said. "This is good for everyone."
Andy stood up: "If the tank is moved away, what about her?"
The meeting room fell silent for a moment.
Mr. Chen's lawyer pushed up his glasses: "Mr. An, we understand your attachment to old equipment. But as far as we know, your wife has never worked at Tank No. 3. Her ID card was only issued last year, and her records before that are completely blank."
People began to whisper.
Lily stood up. Today she wore a white shirt, her hair tied back, and in her hand she held the photo of Lin Xiu.
"I indeed have no past," she said. "My ID is new, and my name was given by someone else. But I know every current in this tank, I know when it needs its filter changed, I know it runs half a beat slow in winter. You want to move it away, that's fine. But please tell me first: after it's moved, will it still remember who it is?"
No one in the meeting room spoke.
A Yin, sitting in the last row, suddenly stood up. She looked at Lily, her voice not loud, yet everyone heard it: "She's not human. She's something raised by Tank No. 3. You're discussing a machine, but this machine can walk, can talk, can marry a plating master."
The whole room erupted.
Lily did not flinch. She looked at A Yin and said calmly: "Yes. I wasn't born from a person. But now I get hungry, I get cold, I cry. Would you like to try being called by a name too?"