Digital Ghost

When I got the call, I was debating whether to eat dinner at the malatang joint downstairs, the one likely using gutter oil, or go home and boil myself a bland bowl of instant noodles. On the other end, my mother's voice sounded like it had been sanded down – rough, dry, carrying an unnatural calm. She said, "Your brother... he's gone."

Gone? What was gone? The first thing that leaped to mind was the latest model phone he’d just bought on installment last month. Or maybe his cat, "Bug," the one skinny as a piece of wire? My mother paused, as if mustering all her strength, before forcing out the words: "Him. He's gone. Sudden death. At the company."

I stood on the street at six in the evening, surrounded by surging crowds, car horns, vendors' cries – everything so alive, piercingly alive. And my brother, five years my junior, the young man with messy hair who always looked sleep-deprived on video calls, yet whose eyes occasionally glinted with a strange fervor for code and the future – he was just "gone." Like a faulty line of code, mercilessly deleted by the system, without even the option of a recycle bin.

His name was Li Mo, but inside that giant machine called "Yuanfudao," he was more like an ID, a workstation number, a digital ghost whose screen glowed late into the night. He once told me enthusiastically about his work, using jargon I barely understood, describing data streams, user growth curves, algorithm optimization. He'd say, "Bro, we're changing the world, or at least changing education." Looking at his face, flushed with excitement, all I could think was that the energy-saving light hanging above his head seemed as stark white as the light in a morgue.

He worked relentlessly; that was the consensus among everyone who knew him. Every time my mother called, she’d remind him, "Don't push yourself too hard, money can't all be earned." He'd always laugh and agree, "I know, Mom. I'm young, I can take it." Then he'd hang up and return to his screen, tapping out what seemed like an endless stream of characters. We called it striving, ambition, embracing change. Looking back, those words feel like sugar-coated poison – sickeningly sweet, piercingly toxic.

People from his company arrived, dressed in crisp suits, their expressions looking carefully rehearsed, hovering somewhere between grief and professional detachment. They handed over a document outlining terms for "humanitarian care" and "compensation," the figures precise to two decimal places. Staring at that string of numbers, I suddenly felt sick. A living person, someone who laughed and cried, complained about late nights, secretly bought expensive collectibles online – reduced, in the end, to this cold sequence of digits. As if he hadn't died from exhaustion, but from a miscalculation after the decimal point.

Beside me, my mother wept silently. My father stood like a mute stone statue, fists clenched, knuckles white. I heard the representative in the suit say, in a perfectly professional tone, "Li Mo was an excellent employee. His departure is a great loss to the company. We express our deepest condolences." His voice was level, betraying no emotion, as if he were reading a weather forecast.

I suddenly wanted to laugh. Laugh at this damned "excellence," laugh at this damned "loss." So excellent he burned himself to ashes; a loss valued down to two decimal places. I remembered my brother sending me a message late one night, saying he felt like a perpetual motion machine – couldn't stop, didn't dare to stop. He'd said, "Bro, sometimes I feel like I'm not living in reality, but inside a huge program, just running every day until the system crashes."

I never thought his words would prove prophetic. Relatives began speaking out online, lodging complaints, raising questions. Their words felt like dull knives carving into one's heart. In the comment sections, there was sympathy, anger, numbness, and also those cold, dismissive remarks: "Young people nowadays are just too fragile," "You get paid what you work for," "If you don't want the job, you can leave." Reading those comments, I felt like I was seeing countless spectators from Lu Xun's writings, craning their necks, their expressions varied, but a fundamental chill emanating from them all. The world didn't seem to care about the loss of a young life; it only cared about clicks, about fodder for conversation, about the next trending topic.

I began to sort through my brother's belongings. His room wasn't big, piled high with technical books, a few wrinkled t-shirts, a basketball gathering dust. The computer screen still displayed the last lines of code he'd typed, like silent final words. I opened his computer; inside were countless folders, project documents, study notes. There was also a hidden folder titled "Dream." Clicking on it, I found scattered writings – thoughts about the future, about technology, about a small utopia he envisioned, a place where one could live a good life without having to drain it away.

One passage went like this: "Sometimes I feel like us internet folks are like monkeys trapped in a cage, banging away desperately on keyboards every day, thinking we're creating something magnificent. People outside toss us bananas (our salaries), and we just bang harder. What’s outside the cage? We don't know. Maybe it's just a bigger cage."

I shut down the computer and walked to the window. Outside, dense clusters of office buildings stretched out, lights blazing, like a vast, sleepless graveyard. I knew that within those illuminated squares, countless young people like my brother were burning themselves out, chasing after things that seemed brilliant but were ultimately ephemeral. They are the fuel of this age, the cogs driving this enormous machine. The machine thunders onward, and no one seems to notice what gets crushed beneath its wheels.

My brother's death is like a pebble tossed into a lake – it creates ripples, but the water quickly settles back to stillness. The news will fade, the hot search topics will change, people will move on to discuss the next sudden death case, or the next internet success story. And I, the brother left behind, will carry this emptiness, these questions, forever.

That representative from "Yuanfudao" called a few more times, tone earnest, promising the company would "handle the matter properly." I didn't pick up. I knew that this "proper handling" was just another cold, bureaucratic process. Faced with this enormous system, individual grief and joy seem utterly insignificant, almost absurd.

Night deepened; the city remained restless. I thought of my brother’s eyes, bloodshot but still shining, thought of him saying he wanted to "change the world." Maybe he did change something. The price, however, was his entire life. And we, the living, remain trapped in this immense, absurd maze, like a throng of lost digital ghosts searching for an exit. I picked up my phone, intending to write something, but only managed two words: "Good night." Then I deleted them, turned off the screen, and switched off the last light in the room. In the darkness, I thought I could hear the tapping of innumerable keyboards, coalescing into a silent, suffocating moan.