FADE IN: A NOTE ON LANGUAGE: Mandarin dialogue is indicated with parentheticals. All other dialogue is in English. INT. STATE CYBERSECURITY CENTER, CHEN WEI'S WORKSTATION, BEIJING, 11:47 PM Two monitors. A mechanical keyboard. A terminal window filled with scrolling hexadecimal: packet captures flowing like a river of numbers that most people would see as noise and that CHEN WEI (31) reads like prose. He is slight, sharp featured, wire frame glasses that sit slightly crooked because he has adjusted them ten thousand times and never once taken them to be straightened. He wears a blue oxford shirt, the same blue oxford shirt he wore yesterday and will wear tomorrow. His posture is a question mark: shoulders forward, chin close to the screen, the posture of a man whose body has conformed to the shape of his work. A cup of tea beside the keyboard. Cold. The tea has been cold for two hours but he has not noticed because the traffic on his screen is more interesting than the temperature of anything in the physical world. The room is dim. Overhead fluorescents turned off by building automation at 10 PM. The only light is the monitors: blue white, clinical, painting his face in the colors of a world that exists nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. He scrolls. Pauses. Highlights a sequence. Studies it. His fingers move to the keyboard and type a command. The terminal responds. New data. He reads. Types again. The conversation between Chen Wei and