What Are They Doing 2022 Chapter 15

1

Wang Guo looked at the phone. He had called thirty times but no one answered.

His wife looked at him, feeling at a total loss. Wang Guo was holding the new autopsy data that had just arrived.

Then, Wang Guo gave up and looked at his wife.

“I have to find him.”

“You can’t. If you leave the hospital right now, you’ll have to be brought back in an ambulance.”

“I’ll go slow.”

“I’ll find him for you.” Wang Guo’s wife stood up, her eyes red-rimmed.

“It’s too dangerous for you to go.” Wang Guo looked at his wife.

“It doesn’t matter,” she argued. “If something happens to him, it’ll weigh on your conscience for the rest of your life.”

Wang Guo sighed; he knew his wife’s character well.

The two had an arranged marriage and hadn’t seen each other much before they got married. Their families had forced them into it, and neither could do anything about it.

As a result, they didn’t have any children. Like him, his wife had also been a top student, but after returning to their hometown, she also had to follow the town’s rules.

This woman’s character was relatively rigid. After so many years, she had developed feelings, but she was probably unwilling to admit to herself that she had fallen in love.

The affection between a husband and wife was still considered love, so it didn’t really matter whether they had romantic feelings for each other or not.

Wang Guo felt his heart soften and said to her, “No, I’ll be uneasy the rest of my life if something happens to you.”

His wife looked at him, completely blindsided by this sentence.

When Wang Guo slowly started to get out of bed, his wife went over to help him. “Ask Xiao Wang and Xiao Li to come here,” he said to her. “They’ll drive. I’ll sit in the car and have them buy a radio ad to play on repeat when the traffic station is broadcasting. We’ll get all the radio stations to broadcast it.”

“What will the ad say?”

“There’s more than one murderer. That’s all.”

2

Wang Meng squatted in front of the huge grid, thinking about what was going on here.

There was no doubt about it—this was Minesweeper; he could see it clearly as soon as he got closer. But even though he knew how to sweep for mines on the computer, he didn’t know the logic behind doing it in reality.

At this time, an LED screen suddenly lit up on the side. The screen, which was about as tall as a person, had originally been sitting in the dark in the distance. After it lit up, Wang Meng saw that a red timestamp had appeared on it.

00:00

“Sir, we can talk it out!” Wang Meng shouted. Since there was a lot of space here, his shouts burst into a chorus of echoes. “Big Brother, I don’t know what I did to offend you, but we can talk it out. I don’t want the money.”

Just as he finished speaking, a voice suddenly came from the ground right beside him.

“Say ‘Little Seven, Little Seven’. Use your voice to activate service.”

Startled, Wang Meng turned his head and saw that a cell phone was lying on the ground nearby.

The phone was on, and when he walked over, Wang Meng realized that it was receiving an incoming call. The person’s voice he had heard just now turned out to be the phone’s ringtone.

By the time he walked over and picked up the phone, the caller had already hung up.

When he turned the phone on, he found that there was a WiFi signal but no cell service.

He tried surfing the internet, but nothing worked—this WiFi signal was probably an intranet signal.

That phone call just now was an intranet call made with special software.

There was only one app on the phone, which had a red fingerprint-like icon that read: Little Seven Escapes.

Wang Meng looked around and then clicked on it.

An animated mouth appeared and then started moving, “Welcome to Little Seven. Just say ‘Little Seven, Little Seven’ and tell us your needs.”

Wang Meng said, “Little Seven, Little Seven. What’s going on?”

The phone made a Siri-like prompt and then the artificial voice said, “You have been sold. You can only be returned if you complete the task. Otherwise, you will remain here.”

The artificial voice said each word one at a time.

Wang Meng paused for a moment, wondering about the task, but instead of asking about it, he casually asked, “Where is this place?”

“You are on the ground floor of an abandoned military facility. All the people in the world who know about this military facility have passed away. No one knows about it now.”

“This thing is in Hangzhou?”

“This thing can be anywhere,” Little Seven said.

Wang Meng wasn’t smart enough for this. He pondered over this statement for a while but found that he couldn’t make anything of it.

After about two minutes, Little Seven said, “Hello, Little Seven’s battery power is limited. If you do not hurry up, Little Seven will not have any power before you complete the task. There is no charger for Little Seven here.”

Wang Meng turned the phone over, looked at the bottom of it, and found that it didn’t even have a charging port.

Breaking out in a cold sweat, he looked at the Minesweeper field in front of him and asked, “What should I do now?”

“Do what you do best, play Minesweeper! But be careful. If you do trigger a mine, there really will be an explosion.”

“What? What mines?” Wang Meng asked.

“The name of the mine is Bouncing Mary.⁽¹⁾ As long as you make one mistake, all the bouncing Marys that have not been discharged will bounce up and explode, and you will die.”

When Little Seven finished saying this, her words were accompanied by the sound of fake applause.

“Why should I play this Minesweeper game? I don’t have to,” Wang Meng said.

But as soon as he spoke, Little Seven’s animated mouth suddenly laughed coldly.

Then, a video appeared on the cell phone’s screen. Wang Meng’s father was in the video, stuck in a brick barricade with only his head exposed. The camera slowly zoomed out, and he could see a strange thing sitting in the space opposite his father.

It was a Xiali car. It was on a slope, and there was an iron block sitting on its hood.

“It is time. If you do not complete the task, the handbrake will be released automatically, the car will slide down the slope, and the iron block will hit the old man’s head. The iron block and car together weigh seven tons. His head will shatter like a watermelon. So awful.”

After Little Seven finished speaking, the timestamp on the LED screen suddenly started counting.

00:01

00:02

Wang Meng stood there frozen.

<What Are They Doing 2022 Chapter 14><Table of Contents><What Are They Doing 2022 Chapter 16>

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TN Notes:

(1) I wasn’t finding anything for Bouncing Mary mines so I think the author either made it up or he meant to call them Bouncing Betty mines. Bouncing Betty mines (also called S-mines) are bounding mines. When triggered, these mines are launched into the air and then detonated at about 1 meter (3 ft) from the ground. The explosion projects a lethal spray of shrapnel in all directions. The S-mine was an anti-personnel mine developed by Germany in the 1930s and used extensively by German forces during World War II. Info here.