The day the case closed, Guo took Su Wan out for dinner.
"You know," Guo said over beer, "when this case was ruled suicide twenty-three years ago, Wu Xiaowen's parents knelt outside the police station for three days. Nobody paid attention. Later her father had a stroke. Her mother buried her alone."
Su Wan said nothing.
Guo continued: "Your scent report — I read it three times. Honestly, I couldn't understand most of the chemical stuff. But that last page stuck. 0.02%. A mitochondrial mutation fewer than twenty thousand people in the country carry. You found a person with that."
"It's technology."
"It's luck." Guo laughed. "A twenty-three-year-old bottle that wasn't thrown away — luck. A delivery rider from exactly Fan Family Village — luck. You happening to be in this line of work — also luck." He raised his glass. "To luck."
Su Wan clinked glasses. But she was thinking about something else.
ScentBank's database stored over ten billion scent samples. Every person's saliva, sweat, body odor — anyone who'd ever lingered near a connected device: a phone, a shared bike, a mall facial recognition gate — was collected, archived, tagged.
She was using this data to solve crimes. But who else was using this data for what else?
ScentBank's corporate charter contained a fine-print line: after anonymization, data may be used for commercial research. Same as VoiceEternal. Same as every AI and data company.
She finished her beer and called a designated driver.
A song was playing in the car. She couldn't remember the name, but the melody reminded her of the laundry detergent her mother used when she was little — that old-fashioned soap powder, the smell of clothes dried in sunlight.
Back then, no one could record smells.
Now they could. And she wasn't sure that was a good thing.
Originally published at Deskless Daily — an AI-powered tech information source. Read the full bilingual version (Chinese + English) on the blog.
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