Chapter 3: Getting Acquainted

Ye Wuyou never imagined that as a hacker he would one day have to give up computers and use primitive paper and pen to communicate with someone, but that was exactly the kind of exchange he had been desperately searching for, day after day, without success.

For the past month, every evening he had watched the young woman walk along the marble path by Tianxin Lake, and every evening he had heard the crisp click of her slender heels on the white pavement.

Day by day, those footsteps came closer to his seat, but with Song Mozhu's loyal android maids in their maid uniforms following her, there was always an unbridgeable line of approach between the lakeshore and the ginkgo tree. Ye Wuyou slowly suffocated in that hopeless stalemate until, on the first day of the second month, Song Xuan finally found a way through.

On the first day after the first month of summer break, she secretly stole a collector's fountain pen and stationery from her mother's study. Such writing was rare in this day and age; after all, the last registered paper mill had shut down completely and gone out of business twenty years earlier. She wrote a paper letter that seemed ancient by 2044 standards.

She tucked it into her skirt and came to the bench under the ginkgo tree at 5:45 p.m. ahead of time. The android maids would only watch her back from a distance, so there was no need to worry about small gestures being noticed.

After pressing the letter down with a stone from the ground, she hurried home, then stared excitedly through the observation glass as the mysterious boy came from afar carrying a book, clearly seeing the letter she had left on the bench.

Song Xuan's handwriting was tiny and delicate, each character looking as if it had been printed. Although almost no one in this era still wrote with books, writing had been preserved as an art form at the Ladies' Academy; every girl had to write a large number of words every day, either copying text or creating literary work. She began by asking him bluntly who he was and why he came to see her every day.

She also told Ye Wuyou that because of special circumstances at home, she could not communicate by email or messages. Any exchange she took part in over electronic communication would very likely, in fact certainly, be monitored by her school uniform, the Ladies' Academy, and her mother and aunt.

For reasons she did not understand, her mother had protected her in every possible way since childhood, willing to do almost anything for her, yet there were a few iron rules that seemed to have been set even before she was born and could never be negotiated. Contact with strangers was the core of those rules.

Although Song Xuan could clearly feel that her mother's excessive behavior came from protection rather than surveillance, from maternal love rather than malice, she understood her mother well enough to know that if their communication were exposed, they would never again be given the chance to see each other.

So, with no other option, she could only pin her hopes on paper-based communication. At the end of the letter she also said that her outings around Tianxinyuan were being watched by the android maids produced by Europa Android and Robotics Co., Ltd., so besides hoping he would write back soon, she also instructed him to hide his reply in the yoke of the old bronze statue of Laozi leaving the pass by the lakeside, and in that letter specify a different hiding place for when she replied next time.

And so, for the next month, they never saw each other again. Their secret hiding places for letters shifted from the cracks in the bronze statue to the hollow of a plane tree, and then to the top of the old tower.

Every day, after retrieving the letter she had left at the spot specified in the previous day's message, he would return to the dormitory and read it carefully a dozen times until he had memorized every word, and only then would he begin writing back.

Even though the letters hidden in all sorts of unexpected places kept their communication alive under the tight surveillance of Song Mozhu's machine servants, it still felt far too slow.

They did adopt a few methods to improve efficiency, for example agreeing that each letter would be divided into three parts: the first part for the questions they wanted to ask the other person; the second part for answering the questions from the previous letter; and the third part as a love letter for whatever they wanted to say.

But even at best, it took two days to complete one exchange of letters. In nearly fifty days, the two of them exchanged barely a dozen letters, and when Tianxinyuan changed the entry password for the compound, the continuity of their correspondence was interrupted for a full week. Song Xuan once thought he would never write back again, and her gloomy heartbreak flared fast, leaving her shut in her room for several days.

Because of that, Song Mozhu brought in the most famous psychologist in the city, only for He Ziying to laugh him out of the room after the doctor finally concluded that Song Xuan was probably suffering from lovesickness.

Then one day, Song Xuan suddenly saw what seemed to be Ye Wuyou's figure in the garden on the balcony, and she ran like the wind to the ginkgo tree. Sure enough, she found an envelope left on the bench. Another time, for one reason or another, a letter was lost, but in the end they reestablished contact at the bench under the ginkgo tree all the same.

Through thirty letters passed back and forth, the two of them each used their imaginations to build the other person's image in their minds. Although the resulting phantom was extremely false because it rested on too many idealized assumptions, neither side cared at all, even as those images drifted farther and farther from reality.

From her letters, Ye Wuyou learned that he was the first man besides her uncle to have spoken to her so much, and even more, the first man to arouse such strong interest in her that she wanted to understand him.

He poured every side of himself into those letters, the good and the bad alike, but Song Xuan automatically filtered out the flaws he described and kept only the afterimage of his strengths.

She asked him why he had waited for her under the ginkgo tree every day back then, and he replied that he liked the way she looked in her school uniform.

So the next day, when Ye Wuyou received her reply from a secret tree hollow by the lake, there was an electronic photo enclosed. It looked no different from a paper photo, but once picked up it could loop the image and sound from the picture for dozens of seconds.

It had been taken in the Ladies' Academy gymnasium. In the image, Song Xuan had just finished a match and come down from the tennis court, a tennis racket in her pink-gloved hands. Having just come off intense exercise, the pair of breasts that had only recently begun to develop and were approaching a B cup were visibly rising and falling. When she saw someone was about to photograph her, she put both hands behind her back and pressed her legs together. Her hair was damp with sweat from the passion of the court just moments before.

The full pink latex bodysuit she wore made the entire Ladies' uniform gleam. Tiny crystal beads of sweat clung to it as well, some of them sliding by gravity across the mask and down the girl's pink neck, then continuing along the surface of her latex-clad body from her chest to her waist and lower abdomen. Finally, guided by the woman's own sensual curves, they gathered at her mons, slid down between her thighs, ran all the way to her calves, and at last dropped to the ground from her pink high heels.

From her pale lower eyelids and high straight nose down to the high heels at her feet, the pink ladies' uniform had a single wrinkle or seam in sight, as smooth as bare skin and yet even more alluring than simple nakedness, because the uniform clung to every inch of the girl's flesh while shaping that female body in the most fitting, most beautiful, and most flattering way.

Behind her, on the distant athletic field, he could also see many other girls in pink latex bodysuits doing strenuous exercise. Like Song Xuan, they wore nothing but the unremovable ladies' uniform.

In the letter, Song Xuan confirmed that in the entire Ladies' Academy, whether teachers or students, every girl lived in a state close to nakedness like hers. But being wrapped in a ladies' uniform did not really count as being naked, did it?

Ye Wuyou later placed that photo together with the lock of hair she sent afterward and kept them side by side.

Even as he silently got a nosebleed, Ye Wuyou was stunned that the girls at the Ladies' Academy could play tennis in high heels. It was practically torture for their feet.

Song Xuan, with a clearly amused tone in her writing, explained that the ladies' uniform heels had a morphing function and required no manual control at all. As long as she stood within the tennis court area, the heels of the ladies' uniform would automatically transform into air-cushioned sports shoes, and once she left, the sneakers would turn back into high heels on their own.

The same design existed in many other parts of the Ladies' Academy. Once you entered the cafeteria, the mask would automatically activate its camouflage function without needing an application, seeming to vanish; after leaving the cafeteria, the mask would automatically turn camouflage off and reappear on the face. The same was true in class. If you needed to ask a question, you only had to raise your hand, and the ladies' uniform would automatically lift the restrictions on the student's speakers, allowing her to use the signal from her vocal cords through the ladies' uniform collar to make her voice heard without having to disable the mask and gag. Once the conversation with the teacher ended, the speaker in the gag would quickly switch off again, solving the problem of noisy students in class at the source, one hundred percent.

In swimming class, once you entered the pool area the entire ladies' uniform would go invisible, the mask would activate camouflage, and only the bra and panties would remain on the girls' fair bodies, forming a pink latex bikini swimsuit. Unfortunately, Song Xuan did not like pink swimsuits very much. During swim class she often looked longingly at the senior girls from the high school division in the distance, whose latex bikini swimsuits were glossy black. When Song Xuan went home during vacation and played in the pool there, she always liked having the maids use the guardian wristband to set her ladies' uniform into the same glossy black latex bikini swimsuit style as the senior girls in the academy's high school division.

Between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., the high heels would automatically transform into latex stockings, and the mask would expand into an opaque hood covering the entire head. Unless something unusual happened, all five senses, including sight, smell, and hearing, were completely sealed off during that stage. Between 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m., the latex stockings would automatically turn back into high heels, and everything on the hood except the mask would return to its daytime invisible state and become the mask again; sight, smell, and hearing would recover as well. At first she had also thought this design, with no way to control it herself, seemed to take away a great deal of freedom, but after years of deep experience she had learned that it was actually much more convenient.

After Song Xuan's reminder, when Ye Wuyou looked back at the photo, he indeed noticed that the other girls playing tennis in the background were all wearing pink full-coverage latex bodysuit uniforms and masks, but on their feet they were clearly not in high heels at all, only sports shoes.

After that, whenever he had free time, he loved to pick up the backup copy of the photo and play the scene over and over again, imagining what kind of world the Ladies' Academy really was, where every girl lived wearing nothing but what seemed to be an almost nonconcealing latex bodysuit. As for the original photo Song Xuan gave him and the first backup, he carefully treasured them in an exquisite frame.

After the first few exchanges of letters, he began slipping small gifts into the envelopes. Once he sent a few pieces of refined candy, and Song Xuan liked them very much.

The first line of the next reply was a starred line, asking him to include a few candies with every letter from then on. She had loved sweets since childhood, but the Ladies' Academy did not provide any sweets in the cafeteria for health reasons. There was no convenience store on campus, so she could not buy any either. At home, although anything she wanted that was on her mother's banned list would always be delivered by a maid within a day, and she never even had to ask out loud, simply sending a message to the smart maids at home through the ladies' uniform operating system would automatically assign the appropriate maid from the household servant system to handle the purchase, maximizing intelligence and automation in every possible way.

Candy and sweets were unfortunately at the very top of the banned list. No one, living or android, ever defied Song Mozhu's will, not even her aunt He Ziying. Among everyone she could actually reach, only her uncle Ai Beihai would secretly help her break the rule, but since early last year Ai Beihai had been sent to Mars on a sublight ship from Solar System Transport Services for work, and he still had not come back.

So this was the first time in three semesters that she had tasted candy. The accidental treats she had received before had left her satisfied for days, so in the envelope of the next letter he put a huge handful of candy...

In her reply about the pile of candy, Song Xuan stopped Ye Wuyou from putting a huge handful of sweets into every letter. Her ladies' uniform monitored blood sugar. If she took in too much sugar, the data would show abnormal glucose readings. She did not need much at all; just three to five grams of candy would be enough to trigger the probe inside the uniform's blood sugar monitor. If the Ladies' Academy informed her mother, she could not even imagine the consequences.

Also, because she was afraid she would see so much candy every day and be unable to resist the temptation, she had thrown it all away. Going forward, she hoped he would put only two small candies in each reply. That would be just enough for her to secretly eat one or two after lunch, covering any blood sugar abnormality under the cover of a normal meal while still letting her enjoy the pleasure candy brought every day.

In thanks, she cut off a lock of her own hair and sent it to Ye Wuyou as a gift. According to Song Xuan, it was the only thing she could decide for herself, because ever since childhood she had studied at the Ladies' Academy. There was no supermarket at school where she could buy supplies; everything she needed for daily life was provided by the academy in fixed forms embedded into the apartment walls and floors. The cafeteria provided food to each student on a fixed schedule and in fixed quantities, customized privately by nutrition experts one on one, so there was nowhere to use money. And after leaving the academy she was always accompanied by her aunt, her mother, her uncle, the butler, or mechanical maids. Whatever she needed, there were specialized maids in maid uniforms to serve her, so all these years she had never truly held a single cent in her hands. She really had no way to get any other kind of gift for him, and hoped he would not dislike it.

When he asked in a letter what she wanted him to bring as a gift to school after the term started, Song Xuan could only pour cold water on his hopes and tell him there was no way for her to bring his gift, any gift, into the school, because the Ladies' Academy forbade students returning to campus with any personal items whatsoever, clothes included. All daily living and study supplies were provided entirely by the school.

Once a student entered the gates of the Ladies' Academy, she first went into a security screening building. Every girl returning to campus had to hand over all belongings and clothing for the academy to hold in safekeeping, and then undergo another round of security screening stricter than an airport's. In truth, it was even stricter than a prison search, only far more humane and respectful. Only after confirming that she was not carrying in any hidden items could she leave through the other side of the screening facility, and only then did she truly count as having entered the Ladies' Academy.

Because once she stepped through the academy gates, the ladies' uniform would, under the control of the academy network, automatically return to its default sealed-mask state, a seamless latex bodysuit covering the whole body. After such strict screening, every girl coming out of the security facility was completely alone, like a newborn baby, with no possibility of concealing anything.

Three months of summer break flew by in secret letter exchanges. Ye Wuyou had once thought that after Song Xuan went back to school they could keep in touch through the old postal service, but Song Xuan reluctantly told him that, first, any mail he sent to her would be recorded by the Ladies' Academy, and second, even if she received a letter from him, there was no way for her to secretly bring in postage stamps because the academy had none. There would be absolutely no chance of replying by mail.

The only possible times were once or twice a month, when her aunt or uncle came to take her home from the Ladies' Academy on the weekend.

So once school started, the connection between them, which had been one exchange every two days, might be stretched to one exchange every two weeks. Seeking a breakthrough, the two young hearts began to stir restlessly.