Wang Miao

Wang Miao has four visitors at his apartment, two cops and two PLA officers, and the older cop, a thickset smoker in a dirty leather jacket, irritates him at once. Wang will not let the man smoke inside, and the cops want to know about his contacts with the Frontiers of Science. After they leave, a car sent for him drives him out to a suburban compound that he judges to be military.

A countdown has begun to show up in the photographs Wang takes, and only he can see it. When he hands his six-year-old son, Dou Dou, a Kodak and shoots beside him with his Leica, the boy's pictures come out clean while Wang's own negatives carry the numbers. His wife, caught among the flashes, starts to cry.

At his lab he refuses to shut the machine down for maintenance until a third set of molecular combinations is done, so the technicians keep piling makeshift fixes onto the main reaction chamber.