SOP CH6: A Fleeting Day

Baota was one of the Time Entropy Group’s time cleaners.

He customarily wore a glass Venetian carnival mask with two round eyeholes and an upturned lower lip, paired with a black cloak, resembling a guest attending a formal banquet. Every gesture and step he took was precise down to the millimeter. Every harvest of human life was calculated to the exact decimal, and slicing open a single excess blood vessel was considered a personal disgrace.

He was no longer a novice, holding some renown among the cleaners. Recently, he had accepted a special assignment: the Group’s chief time cleaner, “Quicksand,” had vanished without a trace in the year 2026, and Baota needed to take over and complete Quicksand’s unfinished matters.

The mission of time cleaners was to shuttle across various timelines, eliminating any unfavorable factors that hindered the development of the Time Entropy Group. However, because each time jump consumed a staggering amount of energy, cleaners always operated single-handedly, balancing multiple pending tasks at once.

Baota made a sweep of the lower tier, casting his gaze about. He saw people climbing up and down, hanging signboards, and painting walls like busy ants foraging for food, clearly repairing the aftermath of a recent battle. It seemed Quicksand had indeed passed through these places.

Thus, he decided to complete the other tasks on hand first, eliminating a list of individuals detrimental to the Group. Half a day later, he made his way to the slums.

Just as he was about to strike his next target, a figure abruptly barred his way.

“Wait,” the newcomer said.

Cleaner Baota looked up, only to see a young man standing before him: tall in stature, his face smeared pitch-black with makeup paint, decorated with crooked clusters of drawn flames, draped in star-patterned pajamas, and clutching an iron shovel in his hand. The entire ensemble radiated a cobbled-together, comical absurdity. Baota stopped dead in his tracks, staring straight at him. The young man stared back. The two machine-like figures seemed to be competing to see who could go longer without blinking, as if prepared to remain silent until the end of time.

“I am your colleague. What are you doing here?” the young man finally blurted out stiffly, his words disjointed, sounding like the result of being translated twenty times through a machine translator. Baota scanned him several times with his eyes. “Which colleague?”

“Quicksand.”

A knife-sharp glint flashed across Baota’s gaze. “The Time Entropy Group’s chief time cleaner, Quicksand?”

“Yes,” the young man stated. “I am him.”

Was the pajama-wearing oddball before him really the target he was seeking? Baota swiftly cross-referenced this person against the portrait in his database, finding a 70% match, except for the fact that the original subject’s fashion sense was never this bizarre. To be safe, Baota used the camera installed in his prosthetic eye to capture the young man’s iris image. After processing the match, he discovered that this person truly was Cleaner “Quicksand.”

“Mr. Quicksand, I have come under orders from the Group to search for you, and to complete a few local tasks along the way,” Baota explained.

Quicksand showed no reaction. His mind was a blank slate, and he naturally could not comprehend why the other party was so easy to deceive. Just minutes ago, the fraudster Diamonds had ordered him to cozy up to this cleaner, smearing his face pitch-black with cosmetic paint taken from a female patron, before staring blankly at his work.

Quicksand had heard Diamonds muttering to himself: “How did Cleaner Quicksand’s face mask look again?” Quicksand didn’t know, obediently letting himself be manipulated. Diamonds then uncapped a tube of lipstick and doodled freely across his face, remarking as he drew: “Can’t remember, so let’s just paint a black-faced Zhang Fei.”

Thus, Quicksand went to strike up a conversation sporting an exceedingly hideous Zhang Fei mask. According to Diamonds, “Cleaner Quicksand” also wielded a long-handled axe as a weapon. Lacking an axe, they used a shovel as an imposter’s substitute. In the end, he took the stage before Baota in a wild visual-kei rockstar aesthetic. Even the usually laconic Baota could not help thinking that the chief cleaner’s style leaned even closer to a carnival masquerade than his own.

Quicksand stood rooted for a moment, picking up where they left off, and asked Baota with feigned casualness, “What tasks?”

“Eliminating individuals who will affect the Group’s interests. I presume Mr. Quicksand is exceptionally well-versed in this.”

“Does the individual you speak of happen to be the girl behind you?”

They spoke in quiet tones, inaudible to onlookers. Baota nodded. Quicksand asked again, “Why kill her?”

“In the future, she will become a sanitation worker for the Time Entropy Group. During a gas pump cleaning, she will commit a regulatory violation that triggers an explosion, inflicting an economic loss of up to 96,360 hours on the Group. We must eliminate her.”

Quicksand said, “There is no need to kill someone. Couldn’t you simply jump to a point in time before she makes the mistake and mend the gap she leaves? At worst, just don’t hire her into the Group as a cleaner.”

Baota replied impassively, “Because killing is far more efficient.”

Quicksand fell silent.

Baota continued: “Mr. Quicksand, you are well aware that every time jump consumes massive amounts of energy, and time possesses a degree of stubborn inertia. Even if a risk is avoided once, as long as she is not pulled up by the roots, she remains a latent danger to the Group. We cannot conduct multiple time jumps for the sake of a single sanitation worker, but we can easily dispose of her while fulfilling our tasks in this era.”

His cold eyes stared at Quicksand from behind the carnival mask.

“Besides, even if she does not lose her life right now, she will be blown to pieces years later while cleaning the Group’s gas pump. Death is the outcome either way; what difference does early or late make? All events harmful to the Group’s interests must be purged. That is the consensus among cleaners. Mr. Quicksand, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”

Quicksand watched helplessly as Baota turned around and rested a finger on the laser sword’s hilt switch. A plasma beam surged from the hilt, illuminating the horrified faces of the scrawny children.

Sensing the murderous intent radiating from this uninvited guest and recognizing him as a cleaner here for unwarranted slaughter, the children scattered in terror. The decrepit-looking girl, however, failed to scramble to her feet. Her frail limbs gave out, tumbling her to the dirt, her chest heaving violently like a bellows.

Baota raised the laser sword and thrust it toward the girl. The girl looked up, powerless to dodge, her clouded eyes gazing at Quicksand like cattle awaiting slaughter. Quicksand’s mind went blank for an instant. From those eyes, he seemed to look into an abyss, piercing through the dense fog of bewilderment, dread, and agony. At the end of that abyss, he saw himself from many years ago.

In that split second, as though a string snapped inside his head, his body reacted faster than his brain. Baota felt a tremendous force strike from the side. The laser sword could not advance another millimeter, because Quicksand had firmly parried the hilt with his iron shovel.

“Mr. Quicksand, what is the meaning of this?”

Quicksand’s pupils were a nearly translucent gray, seemingly devoid of any flowing emotion. “I was thinking: according to your crooked logic, if every person in this world will die eventually anyway, why bother being born at all? Judging only the outcome while ignoring the process is fundamentally biased. When you watch a movie, do you skip everything just to listen to the ending theme song?”

He applied more strength through his hands. “Besides, I believe that girl does not want to die.”

Baota seemed surprised that he would speak so much. After a brief silence, he spoke in a flat voice: “Mr. Quicksand, do not let emotions compromise your judgment. For a time cleaner, killing is a mission, time is an address, and emotion is an obstacle. Our brains are implanted with emotional suppression chips. If your chip is malfunctioning, please report to the Group promptly for a replacement.”

“I am completely fine. You are the one with a broken brain,” Quicksand stated.

“In Norse mythology, the world is a great tree named Yggdrasil. We time cleaners are like gardeners tending the World Tree. To ensure it grows towering and magnificent, we must prune away useless branches and leaves. The girl behind you is precisely a noxious weed harmful to the world. This is also a duty. By killing her, we earn credit points, secure greater authority within the Group, and perhaps even participate in world-altering events one day.”

Right at that moment, an amused voice drifted over from beside the two men, gentle and clear, like pearls rolling across a jade plate:

“If that’s the case, why not catch a big fish like me instead? I guarantee it will propel you straight into the ranks of Group executives.”

Baota whipped his head around, only to see a figure standing smiling before them: dressed in a crisp white suit, sporting a white top hat, with a red diamond stud gleaming on his handsome face. The moment he appeared, all brilliance seemed drawn to him, making him look like the grand finale headliner. Baota let out a rare sound of surprise:

“Who are you?”

“Update your database,” the man smiled. With lightning speed, he drew his Mauser pistol. His swiftness was such that the cleaner had no time to react. The shot rang out, and Baota crashed to the ground instantly. He watched helplessly as the young man in white strolled up to him, blew across the steaming muzzle, and offered a cunning smirk. “You don’t even recognize your chief’s target? Your wanted posters are far too outdated.”

It was the fraudster Diamonds! Baota’s eyes widened. On the Time Entropy Group’s wanted posters, Diamonds never possessed a fixed appearance; the photograph on the last bounty notice showed the face of a rugged man. If the person before him truly was the fraudster, he was undeniably a massive catch that could not be overlooked.

With the bullet lodged in his joint, Baota seemed incapable of feeling pain. He rapidly ripped his cloak, secured his wrist joint, and charged at the fraudster! Even at point-blank range, Diamonds remained unfazed, raising his hand to fire several more lead bullets right into the existing wound.

Baota lost his balance, but in an instant, he toggled the laser sword’s hilt switch, mercilessly piercing his own shoulder blade to drive the plasma beam straight toward Diamonds’s face. Yet he found the beam could not advance in the slightest. Diamonds smiled deceitfully, holding a stasis bubble between his teeth that froze the tip of the blade, halting even the dissipation of thermal energy.

In that instant, Baota immediately let go of the beam hilt, flattening his hand like a blade to chop at the fraudster. Diamonds dodged with effortless grace, only to notice a strange grin spreading across Baota’s face.

The next second, Baota twirled in mid-air, his body unfolding like a flying carpet as he lunged toward the decrepit girl. He was taking advantage of the opening to assassinate the target!

Diamonds’s eyes flickered; Baota’s move had caught him off guard. Just as the cleaner was about to snap the girl’s neck, an iron shovel swung violently from the side, packing immense weight and crashing heavily onto Baota’s skull!

Electric sparks scattered. Cleaner Baota crashed to the ground. Very little flesh and blood remained on his head, mechanical components scattered across the dirt, and his cranial chip was completely shattered. Quicksand stood beside him, shovel in hand, glaring down icily.

“Mr… Quicksand… why…”

“No reason,” Quicksand stated coldly. “You ill-mannered thing. I was in the middle of talking to you, so why did you suddenly try to murder someone?”

Baota spoke intermittently: “You have… rebelled? Betraying the Time Entropy Group… you will regret this.”

Quicksand rested a hand on his hip, playing the act to the end. “That’s right, I’ve already jumped ship. The benefits here are better, and I only have to work night shifts.”

Baota’s gaze flickered before finally dimming, like an old television losing power. Standing nearby, Diamonds bent down, looted all of Baota’s belongings, and tucked them into his coat. He then patted Quicksand’s shoulder and sighed admiringly, “Truly worthy of an employee I hand-picked. Utterly loyal to this boss, and your impression of a cleaner was vivid and lifelike, leaving your colleague unable to discern your identity until the very end.”

“The size of my loyalty to Boss is entirely determined by my wages,” Quicksand remarked. Diamonds gasped, “Then we’re finished! You have no heart.”

Quicksand glanced at the fallen cleaner on the ground, adding glumly, “I am not his colleague either. He murders innocent people indiscriminately, and I look down on him.”

Diamonds smiled. “Right, you just rid the people of a menace. Seems your martial skills are quite something, taking down a cleaner with a single shovel. Why not join the rebel army? With you around, Clepsydra will surely become a formidable force.”

Quicksand remained silent, looking down at the mess on the ground. A sudden pang of pain shot through his head. Baota’s face felt familiar, and the name “Quicksand” rang with an intimate echo. He felt waves of memories roaring in the depths of his mind, as if he were on the verge of remembering something.

Right at that moment, he felt a tug at his sleeve. Turning his head, he saw the aged girl looking up at him.

“Gege, thank you for saving me,” the girl said timidly. She had the appearance of someone in her sixties or seventies, yet her voice was tender and childish.

The headache suddenly subsided. Feeling somewhat awkward, Quicksand blinked and stood in a daze.

“No need for thanks, just wire the gratitude fee to this account.” Diamonds swiftly pulled out a pen, jotting down a string of numbers on a playing card business card. But before he could hand it to the girl, Quicksand hit him with a heavy punch.

The girl said uneasily, “I don’t have… spare money, but I can give gege… a gift I treasure deeply.”

Bending down, she fumbled through her nylon bag for a while, carefully retrieving a scrap of paper from among the rags: an animated sticker of Ace Clown. The edges were slightly yellowed and curled, a dirty scrap of paper wealthy children would never look twice at. The girl peeled it off gently and smoothed it over the back of Quicksand’s hand, handling it like a newborn infant.

“What is this, Ace Clown?”

“Gege, have you seen the Ace Clown animation too?” The aged girl smiled, her eyes curving into crescents. “I’ve only seen clips on mall screens. He drives away bad guys and shares food with people like me. Every night I dream of meeting him.”

She self-consciously touched the sticker with a wrinkled fingertip, then withdrew her hand as if feeling unworthy. “And today, I finally met him! Even though you aren’t Ace Clown, gege, you are just like him: you are our hero.”

Quicksand looked at the sticker, blinked again, and was momentarily at a loss for words. In the end, he shook his head and said, “I am not a hero.”

“Then what are you?”

“I am Poker Bar’s…” Quicksand poked his own cheek, striving to tug a smile onto his expressionless face. “…ordinary employee.”

A light drizzle fell from the sky. Looking out from the terrace of Poker Bar, the near and distant scenery of the lower tier blurred as if out of focus.

Diamonds and Quicksand had delivered the remains of Cleaner Baota to Hearts. Hearts was greatly astonished and stated he would have members of Clepsydra handle the cleanup, covering up the location and traces of where the cleaner had disappeared. Baota wasn’t dead, merely plunged into a dormant state after his cranial chip was destroyed; the rebels planned to pry more intelligence about the Time Entropy Group out of him.

Once everything was settled, Diamonds invited Quicksand to the bar’s terrace for a drink. A parasol was opened on the terrace, shading two small sofas. A candle flickered on the round table. Looking beyond the railing, heavy fog blanketed heaven and earth like a veil, with scattered lights shimmering within it.

Quicksand sat upright beneath the umbrella, cradling the back of his hand. Diamonds strolled over, placed a glass of vintage tequila on the rocks in front of him, sat down opposite, and asked with a smile:

“How did today feel?”

Quicksand said, “Not great.”

“Yet I feel this day off was exceptionally fulfilling,” Diamonds arched an eyebrow. “Toured the lower tier, drank a cup of coptis concentrate, impersonated a cleaner, and even saved a life.”

Quicksand stroked the back of his hand where the aged girl’s Ace Clown sticker was affixed. He held his hand close, as if terrified the rain might wet it. Taking note of his small gesture, Diamonds observed with keen interest, “I didn’t expect you to take down a cleaner so cleanly and decisively. Perhaps you used to be a ruthless underworld figure; keeping you here as a waiter and pretty boy is truly a waste of your talents.”

Quicksand felt a throb in his head and quietly shut his eyes. Once the pain subsided slightly, he picked up the glass and swallowed a large gulp.

Setting down the glass, he saw Diamonds watching him with a smile, asking, “Remember anything?”

Quicksand looked at Diamonds’s face. It was like a missing puzzle piece tugging at the nerves in his brain: both familiar and distant. Ultimately, Quicksand said:

“I remembered that you used my wages to tip a mugger.”

Diamonds burst into hearty laughter. Quicksand stared at his fair neck, where faint blue veins were visible, exuding an allure that provoked a strange urge to strike. Having laughed his fill, Diamonds set down his glass and asked, “So what do you think of this place? In the end, were you originally a resident of the lower tier?”

Quicksand said, “Actually, I am the Sheikh of the Upper-Tier Emirates of Spiral City. Once I remember, I will punish you severely. For every lie you told me, I will lash your backside with a whip.”

“Then do your best, Sheikh,” Diamonds brushed it off playfully.

Quicksand repeated a question he had asked before: “Are all time cleaners bad people?”

“You witnessed it yourself today. Whether they are good or bad, I’ll leave that for you to judge.”

Quicksand added, “I feel the time here is somewhat different from what I imagined. For us, is a looped timeline… a blessing or a curse?”

The drizzle descended, pattering softly against the terrace edge like plucked notes on an ancient zither, lonely and desolate. Diamonds looked up, exhaling a faint white puff of breath. “In the past, time treated everyone equally, flowing in a linear state. Everyone walked a one-way journey from birth to death, unable to turn back. Now it offers us a chance to regret, turning one group of people into gods, while another group remains trapped in hell forever, unable to rise.”

Quicksand noticed a faint, wispy sorrow flitting across the depths of Diamonds’s eyes like cloud shadows, and asked, “Is this place hell?”

Diamonds raised his glass and smiled. “No, this is Poker Bar, a place to share a drink and laugh with friends. I don’t have many friends, so I have to inconvenience my black-hearted employee to drink with me.”

With a crisp clink, Quicksand held up his glass in a daze, touching it against Diamonds’s. He suddenly realized that, not just Diamonds, he himself had almost no memory of clinking glasses with anyone; even if he did, it belonged to a very distant past.

Diamonds leaned back, sinking into the sofa cushions. “Let me say a couple more words. Time in the past was like air: although ubiquitous and bound to our lives, we often turned a blind eye to it.”

“If a human life is calculated at seventy years, the total time spent actually looking at clocks adds up to only three days. Only during those moments are we conscious of time’s presence. Right now, time has simply jumped right before our eyes, clamoring about its own importance.”

As he spoke, a melodious bell tolled from afar. The reverberations flowed like water, washing across every inch of the lower tier. Midnight had arrived. On this chaotic, filthy, yet vibrant land, time advanced in a state that was both disorderly and structured. Quicksand lifted his wrist terminal, reading his lifespan balance under the dim candlelight. This long day had finally drawn to a close.

Quicksand said with mock spite, “And I wasted twenty-four precious hours spending a whole day with you.”

The misty rain blurred heaven and earth, neon lights shifting and flickering, as if the only constant in the entire world was the monotonous patter of rain. Beneath the massive shadows of towering structures, Diamonds fixed his gaze on Quicksand and smiled. That smile was coated in candlelight, nightfall, and colored lights: both elusive and shifting, yet like an eternal frame stamped onto vintage celluloid film. Quicksand suddenly felt the world he inhabited was a dream, with only the person before him being real; or perhaps Diamonds himself was the dream, a fleeting trick of light cast across the movie screen.

“Then I ought to feel deeply honored.”

Diamonds raised his glass with a smile, touching it against Quicksand’s once more as the floating ice slowly dissolved into the liquor.

“Because out of 8.2 billion people in the entire world, you alone chose me to waste this day with.”