Chapter 49: The Boy and the Girl

[PS: There will be another chapter later, but it might be after midnight]

July 27, 2001—a day that seemed utterly ordinary to everyone, no different from any other. Yet, from a historical perspective, this was a day worthy of remembrance for the entire Jiangnan Group and even the whole internet industry.

Because on this day, after more than a week of delays, Jiangnan OO was finally launched across the entire internet. The official website of Jiangnan 00 went live, and the download package appeared on all the major platforms.

But in reality, the launch of Jiangnan 00 barely caused a ripple. Even at Tenda in Shenzhen, they had no idea a new competitor had appeared.

It wasn’t because Tenda was incompetent, but because over the years, too many had tried to challenge Tenda and ended up losing everything. The consensus within Tenda was that, aside from MSN, nothing could threaten their hold on the market.

On this same day, near the gates of a middle school—

"Boss, do you have any new games today?" In a little audio-visual shop, a boy of about fifteen or sixteen, still brimming with excitement after class, eagerly asked the shopkeeper.

“Of course! You’ve come at just the right time—today, we just got a batch of brand-new game CDs, all major titles released overseas!” The shopkeeper grinned, placing a shoebox filled with game discs in front of the boy.

“Let me take a look!” The boy began carefully sifting through the box, but found that most were old games. Only a handful were truly new to him.

Still, he quickly found one that caught his fancy—a shooting game called "Counter-Strike 3," which looked quite promising.

Just as he was about to hurry home and dive into his new game, he suddenly stopped in his tracks. A figure entered the shop—a beautiful girl, dressed all in white. Her presence made the boy feel as if his eyes were filled with springtime peach blossoms.

She was, of course, the campus beauty—the white lotus of his three years at junior high.

But she was so dazzling, so out of reach, and he felt so ordinary. All he could do was secretly harbor a crush without daring to express it.

“Excuse me, do you have a software called... QQ? It looks like a penguin?” Her voice was sweet and fragrant—so much so that it left the boy utterly entranced.

“Yes, yes! We just got the latest QQ installation CDs!” the shopkeeper replied eagerly, handing her a few brand-new CDs. She glanced at the cover, saw that it indeed said QQ, and nodded, handing over five yuan.

“He Anrong, you know, you could just download it from the internet for free!” The boy, ignoring the shopkeeper’s threatening glare, finally mustered the courage to speak to her. It was the perfect opportunity to talk to his secret crush.

“I don’t know how to download things…” She hesitated, furrowing her brow. “I only know how to install from a CD.”

In 2001, that was entirely normal. A girl who could download software from the internet was a true rarity. In fact, anyone who could install from a CD was practically a computer expert.

“I could come over and help you install it!” the boy wanted to say, but lacked the nerve. He could only force a smile, then fled the shop in embarrassment.

“If only I knew her QQ number!” he muttered as he ran home. But then he realized—if she’d just installed QQ, she wouldn’t have registered a number yet. How foolish of him.

At home, he turned on his computer by habit. After more than a minute’s wait, the desktop appeared, filled with various program icons—among them, QQ. He was already a QQ user.

He logged in, hoping to chat with friends, but none of his close contacts were online. The ones who were, he wasn’t close to. He kept opening the ‘add friends’ window, fantasizing about adding the girl as a friend.

“I’m such an idiot!” he said to himself after a few minutes of daydreaming. Then he took out his newly purchased "Half-Life: Counter-Strike" game discs and began the long process of installation.

This was a massive game—890MB in size, requiring three discs to install. Back then, that counted as a blockbuster. Installation alone took over an hour and a half.

Generally, you couldn’t use the computer for anything else during installation, or it would freeze and fail. So, apart from changing discs, the boy left the computer alone. He ate dinner and, under his mother’s supervision, finished his homework before finally returning to the computer—by now, it was already ten o’clock. He just did a few final steps, then shut off the computer, never noticing that the penguin on his desktop had been replaced by a panda.

The next day, he went to school as usual. There, he overheard his goddess telling her friends, “I’ve installed that QQ you mentioned, but when I entered your QQ numbers, I couldn’t find you!”

“Oh no, maybe you installed the wrong thing?”

“Or maybe you typed the number wrong?”

Her friends chirped and chattered, while she, looking helpless, said, “How about this—you add me instead. My name is ‘Snow in Summer.’”

“Oh wow, ‘Snow in Summer’—so poetic as always, Rongrong!”

“Yeah, no wonder you’re our resident literary girl.”

“But isn’t it supposed to be a string of numbers, not a name?”

“I only saw my name, not any numbers!”

“Looks like you’re not very good at using QQ. But don’t worry, you can search by name too. It just might not be unique. What’s your avatar and what location did you put in? That’ll help us find you.”

“My avatar is an Eevee from Pokémon—the unevolved red one. I didn’t fill in my location; I was afraid someone might track me down!”

“Oh, come on, no one can find you online unless you know them in real life!” As her friends reassured her, the bell rang for class. But the boy’s mind was no longer on his lessons. He wore an excited, lovestruck smile, counting down the seconds until class ended so he could rush home and log into QQ.

“Huh, that’s weird—my desktop icons have moved around,” he noticed. But that sometimes happened after installing new programs.

Sometimes, icons would shift for no reason at all.

He searched the desktop and finally found the QQ icon at the very end of the list. He hurriedly double-clicked it.

At first, everything seemed normal, but upon logging in, he was prompted to re-enter his username.

“Damn, what’s wrong with Tenda’s servers? Did they lose my data?” He had no idea his QQ had been swapped out. He simply thought the servers had lost his information.

Back then, it was common for programs like QQ to lose user data. Usually, it would come back, but sometimes it would act up for a while.

With no other choice, the boy entered a new username.

"Snow in Summer... then I'll be Light in Winter."

"No, that's too obvious. He Anrong will definitely realize I picked a matching name on purpose. I need something a little different—still literary and unique!"

After pondering for a while, he solemnly chose a name that was both artistic and subtly similar: "Momo."