Echoes in the Tariff Labyrinth
He, let us call him K, or more precisely, Archivist G/T 718, couldn't recall when he began working in the archives of the General Administration of Customs, a place as vast as the Library of Babel. The days were like impressions made repeatedly with the same stamp, blurred and identical. His duty was to receive, classify, and file the announcements concerning tariff adjustments that arrived like snowflakes from every corner of the world. These announcements, initially scattered whispers, gradually gathered into a clamorous torrent, eventually crescendoing into a continuous, deafening roar.
The archive itself was a labyrinth. Towering metal shelves reached the ceiling, stretching endlessly, corner after corner unfolding, as if space itself had shed Euclidean laws here. The shelves were densely packed with dossiers; new electronic screens flickered with an eerie glow, while old paper documents exuded a mixed scent of dust and time. K suspected this archive might contain every minute detail of world trade history, perhaps even foretelling transactions yet to occur. Rumor had it that the general catalog of cosmic trade was hidden here, and tariffs were merely its ever-changing footnotes.
Recent days had been particularly grueling. The frequency and magnitude of the announcements reached unprecedented levels. "Tariffs on all imported goods from the US increased by another 50%" – the ink on this document was barely dry when another, a harshly worded response stating "US maximum pressure and hegemonic bullying, China absolutely does not accept," followed close behind. Then came an even more dizzying numbers game: "84%", "104%", "25%" (from another distant continental community). Numbers covered K's desk like locusts, devouring his basic grasp of reality. Trump, a name frequently appearing in documents from across the ocean, was sometimes tough, yet sometimes "called for calm" after imposing tariffs, like a capricious deity arbitrarily manipulating the rules of mortal trade.
K's job was to input these contradictory, ever-escalating announcements into the system. This system, supposedly designed by a long-vanished genius programmer, possessed a logic profound and difficult to understand. Each input felt like placing a new brick in an invisible labyrinth, altering its structure. He often found that imposing a tariff on one commodity (like cars from the US – the news of Audi halting deliveries seemed to confirm this) would inexplicably affect another, entirely unrelated one (like the progress of a sanitary pad factory invested in by an Eastern celebrity, news of which also bizarrely appeared in his information stream). The system seemed to follow mysterious connections transcending economics, a universal law of tariff interconnectedness.
He began noticing strange phenomena. In the intervals between processing official, formally worded announcements, the system would push seemingly unrelated fragments of information: news of a drama series titled "Zhe Yao" getting scheduled, another surge in the price of gold, even a nonsensical phrase "Tuoluo tuoluo ni tuoluo tuoluo." Initially, K thought it was a system glitch, but he later discovered these fragments also seemed to be archived according to some rule, assigned invisible "tariff codes," weighted differently based on their "heat" in the information flow. Could it be that popular culture, financial fluctuations, even internet memes, were also part of this invisible war, another form of "imported goods," subject to an unseen hand levying a tax on attention or oblivion?
K felt a Kafkaesque absurdity. He was like the land surveyor wandering outside the Castle, forever unable to comprehend the inner workings, merely recording futilely the constantly changing, nonsensical directives. He tried to find patterns: next to the cold data on "US stock market" and "Nasdaq" fluctuations were notes of determination like "We will fight to the end"; amidst entries for "Risk advisory for Chinese tourists to the US" and "Study abroad warning" were sandwiched a certain actress's declaration of "never say goodbye" and another actor's meme about "Qi Guiren." All this coalesced into a vast, chaotic, yet faintly ordered tapestry. This order wasn't economic or political; it felt more like a linguistic or theological order, where words and numbers engaged in an eternal, self-generating game.
One day, while entering a new announcement about "tariffs on all US imports being raised again" (the numbers were already blurring, seemingly changing with each refresh), the screen flickered. A new entry generated automatically, without source or document number, just one line of text:
"Archivist G/T 718, for excessive interpretation or attempting to understand this system, a tax of oblivion is levied on its very existence. Rate: 100%."
K felt a wave of dizziness, as if the ground beneath him was dissolving. He looked around; the archive shelves seemed to be slowly rotating, the characters on the documents began to dissolve and rearrange. He heard echoes, not of announcements, but of the very numbers and words he had just input, colliding and morphing in the labyrinth's depths, generating new meanings he couldn't comprehend. "50%", "maximum pressure", "fight to the end", "Tuoluo tuoluo", "never say goodbye"... These sounds converged into a torrent that submerged him.
The last thing he saw was a massive mirror at the end of the archive. Reflected in it was not himself, but an expressionless archivist, designation G/T 719, currently inputting data. Then, the mirror's surface rippled like water, and everything returned to darkness, or rather, to a state of eternal, silent archiving.
The labyrinth still stood, announcements continued to pour in, the system ran ceaselessly. The clamor of the outside world – the trade war, tariffs, tough stances, public panic buying (like those reports about eggs), market tremors – were all just another batch of items in this infinite archive, waiting to be classified, labeled, and then forgotten. And everything about K, including his brief confusion and fear, had been completely erased by the invisible "Tax of Oblivion," as if he had never existed. The world kept turning, like a colossal game whose rules no one fully understood, yet everyone was forced to play.