Collected from interviews, journal entries, and overheard conversations.
Compiled [date unspecified].
I didn't sleep until nearly dawn. My husband went to check the boiler and didn't come back for two hours — that Auntie Nie woman was blocking the door, screaming about water waste. He fixed the boiler anyway. We lay down on pushed-together desks in a classroom. He fell asleep immediately. I stared at the ceiling and counted the tiles. Forty-seven. I counted them three times to make sure.
I couldn't stop crying. From the afternoon all through the night. Gary Li told me to pull myself together. Thomas the German patted my shoulder and said something in English I didn't understand. My mother makes me congee every morning before class. Who's going to make congee now?
I joined the outdoor club to lose weight. My mother said fresh air would be good for me.
I smoked every cigarette I had. One after another. Sat against the wall in the corridor, watching people walk past in the dark. Some going to meetings. Some coming back from meetings. Some just walking because they couldn't sit still.
By 3 AM the pack was empty. I crushed it and put it in my pocket. Didn't want to litter. Funny — worrying about littering in the apocalypse.
I am not a patient man. By midnight I was ready to walk out alone. Erik told me that was suicide. Thomas told me to respect the group. I told them both: sitting in a classroom doing nothing while there is an entire unknown continent outside is not respecting anything.
We argued until Joseph — the Kenyan — said: “Brother, even lions rest at night. We go at dawn.” Joseph is the only one who makes sense.
He sat in the same chair from dinner until dawn. People came. They all had plans. They all needed him to execute their plans. A startup founder explained market strategy for resource allocation — twenty minutes, twice, because Michael Li's expression suggested he hadn't understood the first time. A woman from the finance bureau asked him to issue water rationing orders. An alumnus told him he wasn't qualified to lead and should step aside for someone with vision. Another alumnus told him he was the only legitimate authority and must act decisively.
He said “I hear you” forty-seven times. He lost count after that. His thermos was empty. He'd already thrown away his last Longjing leaves. By 4 AM he was fantasizing about a governance structure where people would vote instead of cornering him. Not out of democratic idealism. Out of survival.
I followed orders on the patrol. I noted the terrain. I checked my weapon. I filed a mental report. I did everything correctly. But I did not believe any of it was real. I went to my assigned classroom, sat on a desk, and waited for the hallucination to end.
At some point someone from the military liaison — Harrison Hao — tried to discuss tomorrow's security plan. I nodded. I said yes to everything. I don't remember what he said. Around 2 or 3 AM, I looked out the window and saw stars I didn't recognize. That's when it became real. I don't remember what happened after that. I'm told I sat very still for a long time.
We moved from the cafeteria to a classroom around 8 PM. The military people were at the next table and they came too. Someone brought a whiteboard. William Zhang drew diagrams. We argued about measurement methods until someone — a student whose name I don't remember — proposed a way to determine the year using star positions. Professor Zhang got very quiet and then said: “That's actually brilliant.”
We worked on the math until 9 PM, then people drifted off to wash up. The student stayed. By midnight he had a preliminary method. By 2 AM he was asleep on the whiteboard marker. By dawn the military people were asking when we could give them a year.
She started burning up after her bath. 38.9. I didn't know who to ask. I didn't know where the medical people were. I held her and walked the corridors until I found someone in a white coat — a student, not a doctor. She gave me children's fever medicine from a kit they'd prepared.
I asked her: will my daughter be okay? She said: yes, the medicine will bring the fever down. She was lying — she didn't know. I knew she was lying. I took the medicine anyway. My daughter fell asleep around midnight. I did not.
The assembly was a circus. No structure, no agenda, no procedure. I watched Michael Li fumble and the students shout and I thought: I can do better. After dinner, I found two of the vice-deans. We talked for several hours. By 1 AM we had a roadmap. Governance structure, department reorganization, skill allocation.
Helen He told me later: “It was last night that I was willing to get involved in all this scheming.” He meant it as criticism. I took it as confirmation.
Everyone else was afraid. I was... not afraid. This is terrible to say. But somewhere between counting rice bags and estimating diesel reserves, I felt something I hadn't felt in years. Purpose. In my old life I managed a team of forty engineers on projects that had been approved three years ago. Nothing surprised me. Nothing challenged me. Here, everything is a problem that needs solving.
I walked the campus perimeter at 11 PM, alone, notebook in hand, measuring the boundary by stride count. 427 meters on the long axis. I wrote it down. I went to bed — three desks, coat for blanket — and slept better than I had in a decade.
I kept calling my mother's number. I knew it wouldn't connect. I called anyway. Sixteen times. Then the battery died and I held the dark phone against my chest like it was her hand.
A red-haired American nearby said we were Adam and Eve. I told him to shut up in Portuguese. He didn't understand. He shut up anyway.
At some point past midnight, someone turned the PA system back on. Not a message — music. A guzheng piece, very old, very slow. Nobody had requested it. Nobody stopped it. It played for perhaps ten minutes and then someone turned it off.
In the silence afterward, you could hear the insects for the first time. They were not Chinese insects. They sounded wrong. Not frightening. Just wrong.