Chapter 1 — Wind Village Robot Team

The engine room light went off just as Nguyen Khanh Dan finished typing the first line of command on the board. The six working machines in the room — out of a total of fourteen — simultaneously went "click" and then fell silent, the screen shrank into a dot of light and then turned off completely. Outside in the yard, the wind was gusting through the casuarina trees, the wind that the people of Long Phong commune directly called "pass wind" - blowing from dawn to dusk, strongest in September, strong enough to make the electric wires touch each other on the poles.

"The power is out again, ma'am." A boy sitting at the last table shouted as if it was the happiest news of the day.

Thirty-eight students of class 8A stood up at the same time, the sound of chairs being rustled echoed throughout the room. Khanh Dan raised her hand to her forehead, not because she was angry, but because she was trying to remember how many power outages this was in her first three teaching sessions. Fourth time. She arrived in Long Phong for exactly nine days.

"Okay, okay, sit still." She clapped her hands together, the sound was dry in the hot room because the ceiling fan had just died with electricity. "The electricity may come back in five minutes, maybe half an hour. While waiting, anyone who hasn't finished writing down the syntax of the IF command should continue writing it in their notebook."

No one recorded. They rushed out into the hallway to find a place with wind, spilled into the yard, some of them ran straight to the almond tree to escape the heat. Khanh Dan stood in the middle of the empty computer room, looked at the row of black screens lined up like small graves, and thought, not for the first time in the past nine days, that she had signed a teaching contract in a place where "computer room" was a generous term for six barely alive corpses.

She was about to turn back to the hallway to call the students in when she heard a clicking sound behind her.

In the corner of the room, where a few broken computer cases were kept that no one had bothered to dispose of, there was a boy squatting, head bowed close to a disassembled computer mouse, the parts spread out on the table lid like a surgery. He didn't pay attention to the whole class rushing out, nor did he notice Khanh Dan standing three meters away.

"Who are you?" She asked, her voice not yet serious.

He looked up for exactly half a second, enough for her to realize that this was not a student from class 8A - she knew the faces of thirty-eight students after three roll calls. He was taller than his age, his hair was cut short close to his scalp like he cut himself at home, his gym uniform was wrinkled, and a black grease streak stretched from his wrist to near his elbow.

"Ngo Nhat Nam." He answered curtly, his eyes returning to the mouse. "Class 9B."

"Do I have to study PE now?"

"The teacher gave me leave to manage myself." Nam said, not looking up again. "Besides, the computer room has an outlet."

Khanh Dan stepped closer, intending to ask what the socket had to do with it, but then she looked down at the table and the question disappeared by itself. The mouse in front of Nam was not removed to play with. It had been carefully opened with a small knife sharpened flat to use as a screwdriver. The two original screws were placed separately in a corner not to be confused with the other screws he had just removed from somewhere, and in the middle, the mouse switch with its broken lever was being held in place by a tiny piece of copper wire, skillfully wrapped around the base of the switch like a jeweler adjusting a ring.

"Is this from the engine room?" she asked.

"Mine." Nam replied. "Collected from the pile of electronic waste behind the commune health station. People threw away whole bags. If you see what can be repaired, fix it, if you can't, get the spare parts."

"Fix it for what?"

Nam paused for the first time, as if that question was more strange than a new teacher watching him fix a mouse in the middle of another class's lesson. He looked at her, his eyes a bit wary, the wariness of someone who is used to being asked "what for" in a suspicious voice, not a truly curious voice.

"It's not for anything." he said. "If it can be fixed, then fix it."

At that moment the power turned back on. Six machines simultaneously beeped to start up, the ceiling fan squeaked and rotated, and the sounds of students from the yard squealed and rushed into the hallway. Nam stood up, stuffed the screws into his pocket, took the reassembled mouse - the mouse switch now clicked neatly like new - stuffed it into his briefcase, then walked straight out the door without saying another word.

"This." Khanh Dan called out, not really intending to say anything, just the reflex of someone who just saw something and didn't want it to disappear too quickly.

Nam stopped at the door frame and turned to look at her half-faced.

"What are you going to do with that mouse?"

"Sell." He spoke frankly. "The original wireless mouse in the box is now two hundred thousand. This repaired one is sold for thirty thousand. But thirty is still money."

He went away, leaving Khanh Dan standing in the middle of the noisy computer room, still holding the chalk before writing the unfinished command line on the board. She looked down at the corner of the table where Nam had just sat. There remained a tiny screw, a four-sided screw rarely found in school supplies, and a piece of leftover copper wire curled up like a metal question mark.

She stood for a moment longer, then brought the fallen screw and piece of copper wire to the staff room, intending to ask if anyone knew the student in class 9B. The person who answered was Ms. Hien, homeroom teacher of 9B, who was grading papers at the corner of the table.

"Male?" Ms. Hien looked up, her voice a bit cautious, as if that name automatically brought up a list of things that had to be explained further. "I just got home so I don't know. Last year that boy was warned in front of the whole school for fighting with upperclassmen, and was almost suspended. Average academic performance, often skipping classes, but never missing a day of school - that's strange. Why are you asking?"

"I think he's very good at fixing electronics." Khanh Dan said. "It's not like mischief, it's about correcting."

Ms. Hien looked at her for a moment, her eyes half surprised and half considering whether to believe her or not. "His dad fixes motorbikes at the market. He probably learned it from there. But don't pay too much attention, he's very difficult to discipline, the more you pay attention, the more likely he is to get into trouble."

Khanh Dan nodded and did not refute, but in her mind she recorded the opposite: a skilled child like that, who has not been given any decent work during the three years of school, will of course find work to do in another way. She folded the piece of paper with the screw inside, put it in her pocket, and went back to the dormitory for lunch.

***

At noon, Khanh Dan ate alone in the teacher's dormitory - a twelve square meter shared room she was temporarily assigned to live in, with a bunk bed, a rickety wooden table and a window overlooking the slope leading down to the commune market. The boxed lunch she bought from the restaurant across the alley was cold, the fried tofu was as hard as rubber, but she finished it all without complaining, because this was the only meal of the day where she didn't have to think about anything.

At least that's what she intended. But her mind kept going back to the scene of the mouse being assembled with a hand-wound copper wire, precise down to each turn.

She once sat in the hardware design room of NovaTech Vietnam, watching the company's best mechanical engineers modify a prototype of a gripper for an autonomous transport robot - a project called Falcon that she poured into for two years without taking a full day off. She remembers the feeling of looking at a skilled worker holding a welding torch, his hand not shaking, his eyes not blinking, and immediately knowing that it was the hand of someone who had done this job thousands of times in his head before doing it in real life.

The same goes for Nam's hand. It's just that he's fifteen years old, and what he fixed was a two hundred thousand dong computer mouse salvaged from a pile of electronic waste behind the commune health station.

The phone in my pocket vibrated. A text message from Hanh - her university friend, who pulled her into this "Young Intellectuals Return to the Commune" program with just one sentence over the phone three months ago: "Dan, I'm not asking if you're okay, I'm asking if you want to do something else." At that time, Khanh Dan was sitting in an empty apartment in District 7, ten days after cleaning her desk for forty minutes in the morning, and her answer was "yes" before she could think carefully.

Hanh's text message had only one line: "What's going on, have you been able to teach yet or are you planning to run away?"

Khanh Dan typed a reply, deleted it, then typed again. Finally, she sent: "The computer died six times out of fourteen, and the electricity went out every half an hour because of the wind. But I just saw a student repairing a computer mouse with a copper wire like a professional microchip technician. So, I'll stay a few more days."

She pressed send, then sat quietly looking out the window. The wind was still blowing outside, dragging red dust into small swirls on the slope down to the market. In a corner of the schoolyard below, she saw the shadow of a boy sitting alone under an eagle tree, his school bag next to him, his hand still caressing something - perhaps a mouse that had just been repaired, perhaps another item she didn't know the name of.

She didn't know that student's full name, she could only remember the name he had just said briefly - Ngo Nhat Nam. She also doesn't know that nine days from now, a month from now, she will still remember the names of many other students this way: not because they are good at IT, but because their hands know how to do things that textbooks never teach.

But right now, she only knows one thing for sure: today's lesson, the unfinished IF command line on the board, in the end no one in class 8A could copy it in time. And she, for some reason she couldn't name yet, didn't feel sorry.