Chapter 50: A Summer Belonging Only to Me

After successfully choosing a name, the next step was to select an avatar.

“Huh, did the QQ avatar library get an upgrade? There are so many options now—way better than before!” the boy exclaimed in surprise as a multitude of new avatars, all featuring handsome men and beautiful women, appeared before him.

“Maybe the reason QQ lost all its data this time was because of a major update that caused a bug!” The boy, who knew a thing or two about computers, came to this final possibility.

“But isn’t the loading speed of these avatars a bit too fast? Did my internet suddenly get better?” He also noticed that the avatars loaded instantly, a stark contrast to the past when he had to wait over a dozen seconds for just one avatar, forcing him to use only the default ones.

Here, all the avatars popped up instantly, without any waiting time. This connection speed was comparable to the internet speeds after 2010, and the boy couldn’t help but marvel at how quickly Tenda’s technology had advanced.

What he didn’t know was that these large sets of avatars were all bundled inside the installation package as local files on his computer, so naturally there was no delay.

Someone might wonder—wasn’t it said before that oversized installation files would affect the user’s download experience? Wouldn’t so many avatars make the installer huge?

Actually, that wasn’t the case. First, all these avatars had been specially compressed—three hundred avatars only took up about five megabytes, which wasn’t much. Secondly, the online download version of the installer didn’t include all three hundred local avatars; it only had thirty, keeping the entire package under ten megabytes, even smaller than QQ’s own installer. Only the disc version contained the full set of three hundred avatars—after all, with a CD, there were no network limitations.

The boy began carefully browsing through the avatar options, examining one after another until he finally settled on a small Charmander as his avatar.

Truthfully, he preferred Gyarados, but unfortunately, only the original three starters, Eevee, and Jigglypuff were available as Pokémon avatars.

After officially logging in, the boy found, as expected, that all his account data had been wiped—none of his previous friends remained, leaving his contact list completely empty.

But that didn’t matter. He quickly opened the friend search function and looked up the name Summer’s Snow, only to find a single username.

“How could there be duplicates? There’s only one ID!” he muttered. He checked the picture—it was indeed an Eevee avatar—then, summoning his courage, sent a friend request to the girl.

Because he’d obtained her information by eavesdropping, he didn’t dare reveal his real identity and could only pretend to be a curious stranger.

Unexpectedly, she accepted the friend request almost immediately. With the barrier of identity now gone, the boy no longer felt shy and began chatting enthusiastically; before long, they had exchanged over fifty messages.

“Sigh, I don’t know why my friends haven’t added me yet—even though they’re the ones who told me to download QQ!” Summer’s Snow complained.

“Maybe Tenda’s system glitched. They’re always doing stuff like that!” the boy replied. Since He Anrong didn’t have any other friends to talk to, she kept chatting with him, and the two ended up talking for two hours straight—until her mother burst in, feather duster in hand, and he was forced to leave the conversation.

The next day at school, the boy listened closely and overheard He Anrong complaining to her friends again, saying they hadn’t added her. But her friends all protested, saying they’d searched for her, but there were over six hundred users named Summer’s Snow, and not a single one had an Eevee avatar.

“What’s going on?” the boy wondered, recalling QQ’s strange behavior the day before. He hurried to the internet café to consult his older brother, who was in college and worked part-time as the café’s system administrator, hoping to get to the bottom of things.

“QQ crashed yesterday? You have to re-add all your friends and info? And your friends can’t find her, but you can?” His brother was surprised as well. Since he only worked every three days, he hadn’t been around for yesterday’s events.

He logged into the administrator’s main computer and double-clicked QQ.

“Hey, why does your QQ look different from mine?” the boy noticed the icons were a bit off.

“Oh, this is Coral QQ, an auxiliary program for QQ. It has a location feature and can show whether someone is invisible or online—very handy!” his brother explained, only to find that Coral QQ was now updating to a new version.

“Hm, a major update for Coral QQ? Hang on, I need to synchronize this to all the terminals!” he said quickly. As everyone knows, once a computer in an internet café is turned off, all settings and data are restored to default to prevent user information from piling up and slowing things down.

But since software and programs constantly update, one of the main duties of a system administrator is to keep the main computer’s software up to date so all the terminals run the latest versions.

Because of its convenience, many internet cafés installed Coral QQ in addition to the standard QQ.

The update took quite a while—almost ten minutes to download—slightly odd, but soon forgotten. Updating through the client itself rarely caused problems, so his brother logged into his own QQ account once it finished.

“Hey, how come all your friends are still there? Mine are all gone!” the boy asked in confusion after seeing his brother’s full contact list.

“Who knows? Maybe something’s wrong with your computer,” his brother replied offhandedly. Computers in those days were prone to all sorts of strange problems; his brother’s issue was odd, but not unprecedented.

“Let me see how many users named Summer’s Snow there are.” His brother typed in the name...

“Huh, there’s only one result!” he laughed. The result list showed a single user named Summer’s Snow—no others.

“That’s strange. Could her friends be lying, and they didn’t really search for her?” the boy said in disbelief.

“My dear brother, that’s where you don’t understand. The little intrigues between women are nothing like those between men. My girlfriend’s dorm has eight girls, but they’ve managed to split themselves into more than a dozen little cliques. We men will never figure out what goes on in women’s minds!” his brother said with the air of someone speaking from experience.

Neither the brother nor the boy realized that Coral QQ had already become Coral OO. Now, unless a user directly entered a friend’s QQ number, the friend search would only display OO accounts, not QQ accounts. Over time, many people’s Coral QQ contact lists became filled entirely with OO accounts.