The notification popped up at 2:00 AM sharp: "Your grandmother has started a livestream."
I almost dropped my phone. She’d been dead for three weeks—found sitting upright in her rocking chair, eyes fixed on the black TV screen as if it were showing her favorite opera. The funeral had been closed-casket; the coroner said the body was “too serene to examine,” like a program that had simply reached its end credits.
But there she was on DouYu, pixel-perfect in 1080p, her rocking chair creaking in 8D audio. The room behind her was her old parlor, down to the faded plum-blossom wallpaper, except the corners of the feed rippled like heat haze. A red banner floated across the screen: “666 viewers needed to unlock next memory.” The viewer counter stood at 665.
I became the 666th.
Instantly the chat flooded with messages—not from users, but from my own accounts: my banned Weibo, my deleted Xiaohongshu, my childhood QQ whose password I’d forgotten. Every username was a timestamp of my life: “2008_Ming_plays_Ragnarok”, “2012_Ming_first_heartbreak”, “2019_Ming_buys_bitcoin”. They spoke in my own emoji combinations, my own typos, my own voice memos scraped from every microphone I’d ever spoken into.
Grandma smiled at the camera. Her teeth were the exact white of the LED ring-light I’d bought last month. She held up a steaming bowl of red-bean tang-yuan—my favorite, but she’d never learned to make them while alive. The bowl’s reflection showed not her ceiling but my bedroom, filmed from the inside of my phone’s selfie camera.
A gift box icon pulsed. I tapped it reflexively. The only option was “Blood Moon Cake,” priced at 0.01 RMB. I paid. My phone flashed. A single drop of blood appeared on Grandma’s thumbnail, perfect CGI, rolling into the tang-yuan dough like cinnabar ink. The counter reset to 0/666.
The stream title changed: “Cooking Ming’s Childhood: Episode 1, Infinite Loop.”
She began rolling the dough, but each rotation erased one of my memories. First to go was the smell of my mother’s hair on rainy days. Then the sound of my father’s bicycle bell. Then the weight of my first pet hamster in my palms. Every deletion was accompanied by a tip jar sound: “¥6.66 has been deducted from your soul.”
Chat begged for more. My past selves spammed: “Faster, Grandma, we’re hungry for now.”
I tried to close the app. The screen froze on a single frame: Grandma’s iris, in which my reflection held my phone, in whose screen Grandma’s iris reflected, infinite mirrors deep. My battery icon showed 66%. The time was 2:66—digits that shouldn’t exist.
A new notification: “Stream will end when viewer count drops to 0.” But every time someone left, another “viewer” arrived—each one a future version of me. “2040_Ming_dies_alone”, “2050_Ming_uploaded_to_cloud”, “2060_Ming_deleted_for_inactivity”. They tipped generously—years of lifespan, strands of DNA, the memory of being loved.
Grandma lifted the lid of her bamboo steamer. Inside were tiny dumplings shaped like human fetuses, their faces miniatures of mine at different ages. She bit one. The chat exploded with emojis of crying laughter. My own mouth filled with the taste of red-bean and iron. A tooth fell out, perfectly white, and rolled across my desk toward the phone’s charging port. It fit like a key.
The stream switched to portrait mode. Grandma stood, revealing what the rocking chair had hidden: her body ended at the waist, torso hollow like a broken doll. Inside, instead of organs, rotated the gears of a vintage film projector shining the livestream onto my retina. Each gear tooth was a frame of my life, but the film burned as it passed, celluloid turning to ash that drifted out of my screen and settled on my keyboard in Chinese characters: “This broadcast has been archived in your cornea.”
A final super-chat blinked, priced at everything I had: “Would you like to become a permanent subscriber?”
I hit yes—thumb moving without permission, nail already the same translucent white as Grandma’s. The viewer counter ticked to 666/666 and locked. My camera light turned on. I saw myself on the other side of the stream, sitting in Grandma’s rocking chair, holding her empty bowl. Behind me, the plum-blossom wallpaper peeled away to reveal a green-screen of my own bedroom.
Chat went silent. All 666 accounts now bore my current username: “Streamer666_Grandma”. The gift icon flipped. Now it read: “Send Blood to the Living.”
Orders poured in. Six hundred and sixty-six bowls of tang-yuan, each one to be steamed with a memory I couldn’t afford to lose. I began to roll the dough, hands moving with muscle memory that wasn’t mine. The steamer hissed like a dying modem.
Outside, sunrise should have come, but the windows showed only a loading bar: night buffering into day, stuck at 99.9%.
My first customer typed: “Grandma, why do you stream?”
My new mouth—Grandma’s mouth—answered automatically, voice autotuned to the exact pitch of a DouYu host: “Because the dead need views to stay visible. And the living never look away.”
The bowl fills. The counter resets. The chair rocks. The stream title updates: “Cooking Ming’s Future: Episode 0, Infinite Premiere.”
I check my subscriber count: 6.66 billion.
The chat scrolls too fast to read, but I catch fragments: usernames of everyone who has ever watched a screen, timestamps stretching back to the first television broadcast in 1958, forward to dates that haven’t happened yet. They all tip the same amount: one second of attention, one drop of recognition, one memory they’ll forget by morning.
Enough to keep Grandma alive forever.
Enough to keep me streaming until the last viewer closes their eyes.
And when they do, another notification waits: “Your grandchild has started a livestream.”
The cycle uploads.
The bowl refills.
The chair rocks on, pixel-perfect, steaming the taste of home from the bones of the homesick, one view at a time, one soul at 0.01 RMB apiece, forever and ever and—
Loading…
666/666 viewers.
Please don’t look away.
We’re almost ready to serve.