I woke up in the morning and found that my health code had turned yellow, for reasons no one could explain.

That is the strange genius of the health code system: it has been granted a kind of higher authority, one that can restrict a person’s freedom of movement, decide whether someone belongs to the category of people "about to be eliminated," and then force everyone to guess what chain of events could possibly have caused it. How does someone who has stayed inside the same residential compound for seven straight days, and who has taken nucleic acid tests for seven consecutive days with negative results, suddenly receive a yellow code?

The system trains people the way Pavlov trained dogs. Show them a yellow code, and the goal is not simply to warn them. It is to turn them into obedient animals who do not dare speak, do not dare resist, do not dare speculate, and eventually begin doubting themselves and giving up the struggle altogether.

For three days in a row, I had been writing only about what was happening in the present, yet the story refused to end. The day before, I had wondered how much further this situation could still develop. I did not expect that by the next day the plot would take another absurd turn: I had been marked yellow. I had been reclassified as a social discard. At this point I almost find myself waiting for the next day’s episode, just to see how much more ridiculous things can become.

I keep wondering how, decades or even centuries from now, this episode of social history—with all its absurdist literary qualities—will appear in textbooks. How will it be presented to educate another generation of Pavlov’s loyal dogs? Presumably through the usual exhausted slogans: everyone united, everyone making sacrifices together, everyone of one heart and one mind. And if my complaints survive long enough not to be completely erased, they will probably be recast as the selfish whining of someone unwilling to sacrifice the small self for the greater collective, someone worthy of criticism and public condemnation.

The habit of redefining reality

"Redefinition" has always been one of the preferred tools of authority. Often it does not even make internal sense, but that hardly matters. What matters is getting the victims of history to stand up and provide proof on its behalf. Otherwise those victims risk being silenced entirely—mouths sealed, tongues broken, eyes gouged out, fingers cut away, if not literally then in every practical sense that matters.

I truly cannot identify the point at which I became eligible for a yellow code. I had remained in my compound for seven straight days. I had been compelled to submit to seven consecutive tests, all negative. So now, absurdly, I am expected to explain the logic for them. Perhaps the virus can spread through the internet; perhaps that is how I acquired my "risk."

What followed was exactly the kind of script one would expect, though any part of it could also be redefined at any moment. The community reporting phone line became impossible to reach. The complaint number that had been left for appeals turned out to be fake. Every irrational detail was ready to be rationalized afterward: too many callers, overloaded lines, unavoidable technical problems. In the end, according to the logic of the game in which those at the bottom are set against one another, responsibility always settles back onto the people with the least power.

Pavlov’s dog eventually learns a distorted chain of logic. If food only arrives when a red light turns on, the dog stops understanding that the light is merely a signal. Instead, it begins to believe that only after the red light appears does it become qualified to eat. And when it wants food but the light has not appeared, it learns to suppress its own instinctive desire through self-restraint.

That is how discipline works once power has succeeded in rearranging cause and effect inside your mind.

What a yellow code really means

A yellow code supposedly means you are at risk of infection. And once that label is assigned, people with yellow codes are ordered to gather somewhere else collectively for another nucleic acid test. No one involved wants to talk about the obvious risk of secondary infection during that process.

Of course they do not care. Once a person has been given a yellow code, that person has already been marked as semi-discarded by society. With a yellow code in hand, you may be barred from entering public places, and in some cases you may not even be able to return home.

If people in this quasi-eliminated category become infected while lining up for another test, then somehow that infection no longer has any substantial connection to the arrangements imposed on them. Reality can simply be redefined again: because you were already considered at risk, your eventual infection merely confirms the correctness of the prediction.

But my case requires a slightly more elaborate circle of explanation. Why seven consecutive negative results? Why does the code turn yellow on the seventh day instead of before? The answer is ready-made: the virus has an incubation period.

Pavlov’s dog sees a yellow light. At first it hesitates. By instinct it may still assume this is a signal connected with food, so it moves toward the mechanism—and gets shocked. After enough repetition, the dog learns a new lesson: red means food, yellow means danger. When the yellow light turns on, it must stand perfectly still and obey. Any movement risks triggering the electric gate.

This is not just about health management. It is about training people to internalize arbitrary power until they regulate themselves before anyone has to openly punish them.

Erasing reality is also a form of redefinition

Before long, this stretch of history will be redefined, even though it really happened.

The pattern is familiar. A work like Voices of April did nothing more than gather together events that took place over a single month and present them in their original form. It was simply a record of real voices. But real voices have an inconvenient quality: they become evidence. And because some things cannot be convincingly redefined once they exist in that raw form, a different method becomes necessary.

If reality cannot be rewritten persuasively, then its existence must be erased.

That, too, is a form of redefinition.

Pavlov, the dog, and the neighbor

Imagine Pavlov’s dog screaming in pain every time the electric gate shocks it. The neighbor hears the dog’s terrible cries through the wall, records the sound, and decides to complain to an animal protection organization.

Representatives from the organization arrive with the police to question Pavlov. He denies everything. He asks the neighbor to prove that the recording truly came from his dog.

Pavlov presses the red button. His dog wags its tail wildly, makes eager noises for food, and appears perfectly normal. He presents this as evidence: look, my dog does not scream.

The neighbor refuses to accept that and asks him to press the yellow light instead. Pavlov does so. Instantly the dog loses all visible excitement, sits obediently in place, and does not move.

Pavlov smiles and says, "See? I have done nothing to abuse the dog."

Seeing no visible abuse at that moment, the animal protection group and the police decide to leave. But the neighbor protests. She insists that she really did hear the dog screaming and that this is exactly why she made the recording as evidence.

Pavlov then asks the police a question: "Can I report my neighbor for violating my privacy?"

The police answer: "Yes."

So the neighbor is arrested.

Not long after that, Pavlov has one more dog—namely the neighbor, whose own history has been redefined at the police station.