Vagabonds

Full novel expanding the world of Hugo Award-winning 'Folding Beijing' (2012). The story depicts a city that physically folds into three temporal layers to segregate its social classes: the wealthy exist for 24 hours, the workers for only 8. The city runs its own algorithm of exclusion, recycling the same population through compressed time — a spatial metaphor for the circular reference problem. A system that folds back on itself, recycling inputs without genuine renewal, maintaining an appearance of dynamism while repeating the same structural pattern. The AI-adjacent theme — algorithmic management of human time and possibility — makes it a precise fit for Article 2's concerns about closed information loops.