Old Zhou, Trapped in the System

Old Zhou turned fifty-three this year. He had been delivering takeout in this city for a full two years.

He was not a talkative man. At the morning meeting the station chief had called his name and said, Old Zhou, at your age you cannot outrun the lads in their twenties, but you are steady, you do not run red lights, and you draw few bad reviews. Old Zhou only nodded. In his own mind he kept a different ledger: the two mu of land back home yielded, after seed and fertilizer, less than two thousand yuan a year; his son was at a vocational college in the provincial capital, sixteen thousand a year; his wife minded another family's child in the township and earned just enough to feed herself. His old bones would run as many years as they could.

The rules of the platform Old Zhou learned only by being docked, again and again. The first month, a single order paid four and a half yuan and gave him time to spare. Later the orders multiplied but the time shrank. The same route, once thirty-five minutes, then twenty-eight, then twenty-two. The station chief sent a voice message in the group: the system had calculated it, the optimal route, even the wait at red lights figured in. Old Zhou did not know what optimal meant. He only felt that the old roads had been walked into being by human feet, while these new roads were measured out by a machine, and the measuring left a man breathless.

He lived in a basement in the village-in-the-city, three hundred and fifty a month, the walls so damp the plaster fell in flakes. Three other riders shared the room, all twenty years his junior. The young men came back at midnight with their phones still lit, the ping of new orders rising and falling like a litter of restless beasts that could not sleep. Old Zhou seldom stayed awake; he had reckoned it out. Forty orders a day, after rent, power, food, and charging the scooter, left him seventy or eighty yuan. Seventy or eighty yuan bought his son five days of meals at school.

Once he delivered a pot of pickled fish. The building's elevator was broken, and he climbed fourteen floors with the bag. By the time he had caught his breath and come down, the clock had run out. The customer cursed him down the phone: the fish was cold, half the soup spilled. Old Zhou apologized over and over, said the elevator really was broken, begged him to calm down. The customer hung up and still left a bad review. That order cost him fifteen yuan. Old Zhou squatted by the stairwell and smoked half a cigarette, then pinched the rest out against the wall. Even his smoking was rationed, three a day.

He came slowly to understand one thing: an appeal was useless. The system said you were late, and late you were; you said the elevator was broken, and the system did not hear. Someone in the group advised taking photos for proof. Old Zhou took them, uploaded them, and the next day the deduction stood. The station chief messaged him privately: Old Zhou, the rules are the rules, my hands are tied. Old Zhou sent back a single word, Fine, and put the phone away.

There was a young rider called Xiaoman, faster than Old Zhou and rougher. To beat the clock he once rode the wrong way and hit a guardrail, seven stitches in the knee. The platform paid nothing toward the medicine; he was gig work, no labor contract, and the three-yuan daily accident insurance did not count a guardrail as an accident. Xiaoman, limping, came to the station for an answer. The chief poured him a cup of hot water and said, brother, I will slip you a few extra orders to make it up, all right. Xiaoman said nothing that day, and the next rolled up his yellow helmet and jacket and left. Old Zhou never saw him again.

In autumn Old Zhou met his own trouble.

It rained that day and the roads were slick. One order ran from a mall in the west of the city to an estate in the east, and the system allowed twenty-five minutes. Old Zhou looked at it and knew it was tight, but orders were scarce and he could not bear to refuse. In the rain he rode his secondhand scooter to the crossing; at the instant the yellow light jumped to red he kicked down, meaning to dash across. A car turning right did not see him, and its bumper caught his rear wheel. He went down on the flooded road, the food box flying, the sour soup spreading, red oil running into the drain.

The driver got out and looked first at his own car, then down at Old Zhou. Old Zhou tried to push himself up; a pain like a needle drove through his left leg and he could not rise. The driver said, you ran the red, the fault is yours. Old Zhou opened his mouth and made no sound.

When the ambulance came, Old Zhou was still clutching his phone. The screen was lit with the order board; a new order had already been assigned, the countdown ticking: nineteen minutes left. Through the haze Old Zhou thought, this one will be late too.

The hospital took the driver's two thousand and the rest from his own pocket. Old Zhou's son phoned the platform for days. The service desk said his father was gig labor, no labor contract, and they carried only the three-yuan daily accident insurance. The son asked whether the insurance would pay for a fall like this. The desk said, gather your papers and we will run the process. The process ran three weeks and came back: at the time of the incident the rider violated traffic law, a clause of exemption, no payment.

Old Zhou lay in bed with his leg in a white cast. He had his son bring the phone and opened the green icon with white characters. His rank was still there, five stars still there, but the button to take orders was grey. His finger drew across it, as if feeling an invisible chain, and it was cold.

A roommate in the ward asked, does this count as a work injury. Old Zhou said, no. The man asked, then what is it. Old Zhou thought and said, call it bad luck.

The day he left, the sky was clear. Old Zhou limped out through the hospital gate and the phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out: a new notice from the platform, due to your recent drop in activity, the system has kept your account and looks forward to your return once healed, to take orders again.

Old Zhou stood on the steps in the white sunlight. He thought suddenly of the persimmon tree by his door back home, and how each autumn, when his son was small, he had carried him up to pick the fruit. The tree was still there; the son was in the provincial capital; he was in the city, with a broken leg.

He looked down at the phone. On the screen a red dot still blinked. Someone had placed an order. That order would never be delivered by him, or rather, it would always be delivered by someone. The system does not stop.

The next day, at the crossing in the east of the city, a line of yellow helmets stood as ever. At the front, the last digit of the worker number was three, the same as Old Zhou's.