The livestream chat exploded.
The comments were coming in so fast I couldn't read them.
“Who’s that little girl?”
“His sister?”
“Wasn’t Chen Zian an only child?”
“Has anyone checked the household registry?”
“Is this footage even real?”
“This can’t be right.”
I wasn’t looking at the chat at all.
All my attention was fixed on that face.
About ten years old.
Short hair.
A white shirt.
A thin red cord tied around her left wrist.
She was holding hands with me at fourteen.
Calling me her brother.
The instant I saw her, my body reacted faster than my mind.
My chest tightened.
My nose stung.
It was like a memory that had been buried for years suddenly slammed into me from somewhere deep inside.
But I still couldn’t remember who she was.
“Pause it,” I said.
No one moved.
“Stop the video!”
Zhou Jingchuan immediately reached for the keyboard.
The image froze.
The noise from the crowd below drifted up through the window.
Someone was shouting my name.
Someone was livestreaming.
Someone had even started counting down the viewers.
Ruoqing came over to my side.
“Do you remember her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does she look familiar?”
“Yes.”
I stared at the screen.
“But I can’t say who she is.”
Cai Mingzhe suddenly spoke up.
“I’ve never seen this clip.”
Zhou Jingchuan turned his head.
“Of course you haven’t.”
“You never gave it to me.”
“Because this isn’t an observation file.”
“Then where did it come from?”
Zhou Jingchuan didn’t answer right away.
I turned toward him.
“You know who she is.”
He looked at me.
“I do.”
“Her name.”
“Chen Yuzhen.”
The moment those three words appeared, my mind went blank for an instant.
Then a voice surfaced.
Faint and blurry.
Like someone calling to me from far away.
Brother.
I braced myself against the desk.
Ruoqing reached out to touch me.
I stepped away.
“She’s my sister?”
Zhou Jingchuan nodded.
“Yes.”
I stared at him.
“I don’t have a sister.”
“Not in your current household registration.”
“What does ‘current’ mean?”
“She existed once.”
I couldn’t help swearing.
“Don’t talk in circles.”
“I’m not.”
Zhou Jingchuan pulled out a chair and sat down.
“Chen Yuzhen was born in 1999, three years younger than you.”
“She wasn’t your biological sister.”
I stopped.
“Then why did she call me her brother?”
“Because you grew up together.”
“Whose kid was she?”
“The daughter of a friend your mother used to have.”
I frowned.
This was the first time the situation had started to become concrete.
Not some underground website. Not memory-loss technology. Not an anonymous account.
A name.
A birth year.
A relationship.
I asked immediately, “What happened to her parents?”
“Her father had been gone for years. Her mother was later hospitalized because of her mental state.”
“So?”
“She lived at your house almost full-time for several years.”
“How many?”
“Probably from when she was six until she was ten.”
I stared at the girl on the screen.
If this was true, then from around the time I was eleven to fourteen, she had always been by my side.
There was no way I could have no memory of her at all.
“My parents knew?”
“They knew.”
“Then I’m calling them now.”
Zhou Jingchuan didn’t stop me.
I called my mom directly.
It rang for a long time.
Then she answered.
“Hello?”
“Mom.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I need to ask you about someone.”
Silence came from the other end of the phone.
I hadn’t even said the name, and she had already stopped talking.
The silence felt unnatural.
I looked at Zhou Jingchuan.
“Chen Yuzhen.”
My mother’s breathing changed noticeably.
“Where are you?”
She didn’t ask who that was.
She asked where I was.
That was already an answer.
“Who is she?”
“Zian, have you been seeing those things again?”
Again.
My hand clenched tight.
“You’ve always known?”
“Come home first.”
“I’m already home.”
She fell silent.
“Mom, who is Chen Yuzhen?”
After a long time, she finally said, “She was a child who used to live with us.”
My throat went dry.
“Why don’t I remember her?”
“It’s not that you don’t remember.”
“Then what is it?”
“You told us never to mention her again.”
I closed my eyes.
Again, it had been me.
“When?”
“After you turned fifteen.”
“Where did she go?”
Silence returned to the other end of the phone.
Suddenly, I had a terrible feeling.
“Mom.”
“She disappeared.”
My eyes flew open.
“When?”
“June 20, 2009.”
I looked at the screen.
The observation start date.
June 20, 2009.
The same day.
“How did she disappear?”
“We don’t know.”
“Where?”
“Near a hospital.”
“Which one?”
She said the hospital’s name.
It was the same hallway from the livestream video.
My mind began piecing things together at high speed.
June 19.
Yuzhen and I were at the hospital.
June 20.
She disappeared.
That same day, I joined the so-called long-term observation experiment.
I asked, “Did you report her disappearance to the police?”
“Yes.”
“Did they find her?”
“No.”
“Then why is there nothing about her in my household registration, our home, or the photos?”
A very soft sigh came from the other end.
“Because she wasn’t really part of our family.”
“That’s not a reason.”
“Zian.”
My mother’s voice began to tremble.
“You took everything in the house that was connected to her.”
“Why?”
“You said that as long as everyone kept remembering her, those people would know she was connected to you.”
I froze completely.
“Which people?”
“You never said.”
“And you just let me take everything?”
“You were acting like you were crazy back then.”
She paused.
“You even hit your father.”
That sounded nothing like me.
At least, not like the version of myself I knew.
“What happened after that?”
“Later, you were hospitalized.”
“What year?”
“2010.”
I looked up at Zhou Jingchuan.
He didn’t deny it.
My mother continued, “After you were discharged, you seemed like a different person.”
“You stopped mentioning Yuzhen.”
“You stopped asking where she had gone.”
“We thought the doctor was right.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“After such a severe shock, your memories would seal themselves away.”
I looked at the silver-and-black case.
“Which doctor?”
My mother gave me a name.
It wasn’t Zhou Jingchuan.
It was Xu Wensheng.
I immediately asked Zhou Jingchuan, “Do you know Xu Wensheng?”
He nodded.
“The earliest lead researcher at TMR.”
The atmosphere in the room instantly grew heavy.
I said into the phone, “Mom, one last question.”
“Okay.”
“Before Yuzhen disappeared, was anyone secretly filming her?”
There was a long silence on the other end.
“Yes.”
My fingers slowly tightened.
“How do you know?”
“You showed them to us.”
“What?”
“A lot of photos.”
“Someone had taken them at school, on the street, at the hospital.”
“You kept saying someone had chosen her.”
A chill ran through my entire body.
Chosen her.
Just like the people on the website now.
Long-term observation.
Awakening.
Retrieval.
Completion.
I hung up.
I didn’t ask anything else.
It finally wasn’t just a question of why someone had been filming me.
It went back even further.
They had filmed Yuzhen first.
I might have deliberately entered that system only after she disappeared.
“I wasn’t the original subject,” I said.
Zhou Jingchuan looked at me.
“That’s right.”
“3741 wasn’t the first.”
“No.”
“Then what was Yuzhen’s number?”
He didn’t answer immediately.
“Tell me.”
“3728.”
Cai Mingzhe suddenly stood up.
“Wait.”
He went to the computer and logged into the black website.
He searched for 3728.
The page loaded for a moment.
“No records found.”
I looked at Zhou Jingchuan.
“Why isn’t there anything?”
“Because she was one of the early subjects whose records were deleted.”
“What does deleted mean?”
“The data was moved.”
“Or that she died?”
“I don’t know.”
I grabbed him by the collar.
“You’ve known everything up to now, and now you’re telling me you don’t know?”
Ruoqing immediately stepped forward.
“Zian.”
“Don’t touch me.”
I glared at Zhou Jingchuan.
“Is she dead or not?”
“There’s no death certificate.”
“A body?”
“None.”
“Then you don’t know.”
“That’s right.”
I let go of him.
At least that was a clean answer.
He hadn’t insisted she was dead.
He hadn’t insisted she was alive.
She was simply missing.
I asked, “Why was she chosen?”
Zhou Jingchuan straightened his collar.
“Back then, there was a group behind the website. They selected so-called high-response subjects.”
“What does high-response mean?”
“People whose behavior changed drastically after being told they were under observation.”
“How did they know?”
“They secretly filmed the person for a while, then let them discover it by accident.”
I immediately understood where the so-called awakening came from.
“So the website is copying the old method now.”
“Yes.”
“Transparency Day just makes it easier for them?”
“Yes.”
“Then the government doesn’t know?”
Zhou Jingchuan was silent for two seconds.
“Some people don’t know.”
“And some people do.”
I looked at him.
“Which kind are you?”
“The kind who found out too late.”
Cai Mingzhe let out a cold laugh.
“Don’t make yourself sound so innocent.”
Zhou Jingchuan looked at him.
“At least I didn’t sell the observation data.”
“Say that again.”
“During the first leak in 2018, some of your group of administrators took money.”
Cai Mingzhe’s expression turned ugly.
I asked directly, “Did you take any?”
“No.”
“Do you know who did?”
“I know one of them.”
“Who?”
“Liao Shihao.”
Zhou Jingchuan immediately added, “He’s one of the site’s main administrators now.”
Finally.
Another name.
Not anonymous.
“Where is he?”
Cai Mingzhe shook his head.
“No one’s seen him in three years.”
“The police?”
“Legally, they can’t arrest the website itself.”
“What about secretly filming and following people?”
“Some of the servers are overseas,” Zhou Jingchuan said.
“And Transparency Day gives them twelve hours every year to gather massive amounts of new data.”
I looked out the window.
The people downstairs were still filming.
Suddenly, the whole system felt like one enormous loophole.
Not because everyone could spy on people today.
But because anyone who truly wanted to document someone could use those twelve hours to do everything they normally wouldn’t dare to do.
I turned back to the screen.
The livestream hadn’t stopped.
The footage had already moved on to the next segment.
The morning of June 20, 2009.
Yuzhen left the hospital.
She got into a taxi.
I wasn’t beside her.
The camera followed her from behind.
The video was labeled:
“3728 FINAL DAY.”
My breathing slowed all at once.
“What does FINAL DAY mean?”
Zhou Jingchuan looked at the words.
“It was terminology from the old website.”
“Same as retrieval now?”
“Close.”
“Why the last day?”
“It meant the observers were about to make formal contact with the subject.”
I watched the screen.
The taxi stopped beside a department store.
Yuzhen got out.
She stood among the crowd.
As if she were waiting for someone.
A few minutes later, a man approached her.
He was wearing a hat.
His face was impossible to make out.
He said a few words to Yuzhen.
Then he handed her an envelope.
Yuzhen read the letter.
She looked up.
Her expression became extremely tense.
Then she turned and ran.
The camera immediately followed.
One.
Two.
Three.
Different angles.
There hadn’t been just one person filming her that day.
There had been an entire group.
She ran into the underground mall.
Pushed through the crowd.
Entered a Metro station.
The final image stopped on the platform.
She looked back.
For the first time, she spoke directly to the camera.
“What the hell do you want?”
The video gave no answer.
She shouted again, “I know you’re filming me.”
The next second, the footage cut out.
The livestream chat went insane.
“What happened next?”
“Where did she go?”
“Is this the last footage?”
“Is 3728 still alive?”
I immediately looked at Zhou Jingchuan.
“What happened after that?”
“There’s nothing.”
“That’s impossible.”
“That’s all that was in the public files.”
“What about yours?”
He fell silent.
I caught on.
“You have more.”
Zhou Jingchuan looked at me.
“I saw one segment.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t a video.”
“It was an audio recording.”
“Whose?”
“Yours.”
My heart suddenly started beating faster.
He took an old flash drive from the bottom of the case.
He plugged it into the laptop.
There was only one audio file.
Date:
2009/06/20 18:42.
The evening of the day Yuzhen disappeared.
He pressed play.
First came heavy breathing.
Then the voice of my fourteen-year-old self.
“She didn’t leave on her own.”
The voice was trembling.
“Those people took her.”
Then another man’s voice came through.
“You saw it?”
My younger self answered, “No.”
“Then how do you know?”
“Because they made sure I saw.”
“Saw what?”
“Her final moments.”
In the recording, I started crying.
Not sobbing.
It was the sound of someone trying desperately to hold it in and failing.
“They want me to choose,” I said.
The man asked, “Choose what?”
“Whether I want to become the next one.”
The room fell silent.
The younger me continued.
“They said that if I agreed to join, they would let me keep investigating.”
“They’d let me see everything they’d seen.”
“Someday, I’d be able to find Yuzhen.”
The man asked, “You agreed?”
My fourteen-year-old self said, “I agree.”
There was a long pause.
“But I don’t believe them.”
“So I’m going to film myself, too.”
“I’m going to keep a record of everything I find.”
“Even if someone makes me forget in the future, I’ll be able to find it all again.”
I stared at the old laptop.
For the first time, everything truly connected.
Why had my fourteen-year-old self arranged for someone to secretly film me?
It wasn’t for the study of human nature.
That was the cover story they came up with later.
The real reason was simple.
I wanted to enter their system.
Because Yuzhen had disappeared inside it.
I thought that if I became an observed subject too, I could follow the trail all the way to her.
Zhou Jingchuan shut off the recording.
“This is the real reason 3741 began.”
I asked, “Then the behavioral study was fake?”
“Half true, half fake.”
“You really did participate in the study.”
“But later, it became the shell that made your years of filming seem legitimate.”
“Who helped me create it?”
“Xu Wensheng.”
“Was he one of those people too?”
“At first.”
This time, Zhou Jingchuan didn’t evade the question.
“Later, he quit.”
“Why?”
“Because 3728 disappeared.”
“His conscience finally kicked in?”
“Maybe.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died in 2014.”
“How?”
“Heart attack.”
“Was it really?”
“At least, that’s what the official story says.”
I didn’t pursue it.
The most important thing now wasn’t another dead man.
It was Yuzhen.
“So after seventeen years, how far did I get?”
Zhou Jingchuan looked at the 18.7-terabyte file.
“You got closer every time.”
“When did I get closest?”
“Two years ago.”
“What did I find?”
“A location.”
“Where?”
He hesitated.
“Shimen, New Taipei.”
I immediately asked, “The exact address?”
“There was no address plaque.”
“Then what was it?”
“An abandoned old sanatorium.”
Cai Mingzhe abruptly turned toward him.
“You never told me that.”
“Because Zian told me two years ago not to tell anyone.”
I asked, “Did I go there?”
“You did.”
“What did I see?”
Zhou Jingchuan shook his head.
“You didn’t let me come with you.”
“Then what did I say when I came back?”
“You said one thing.”
“What?”
“3728 isn’t dead.”
My heart gave a heavy thump.
Ruoqing froze too.
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.”
I stepped forward.
“Then why didn’t I bring her back?”
“You never said.”
“Is there any proof?”
“You brought something back.”
Zhou Jingchuan took a clear evidence bag from the case.
Inside was a faded red cord.
It was very thin.
Tied in a simple knot.
It was exactly like the one around Yuzhen’s left wrist in the livestream footage.
I reached out and picked it up.
The instant my fingertips touched the bag, a very brief image suddenly appeared in my mind.
A damp hallway.
White walls.
Someone behind a door.
I stood outside it.
Written on the door was:
“3728.”
Then a woman’s voice came through the door.
“Brother.”
I staggered back a step.
Ruoqing immediately grabbed the back of a chair beside the desk to steady herself.
“What did you remember?”
I didn’t answer.
Not because I didn’t want to.
That image had been too real.
I was certain it hadn’t been my imagination.
“I’ve been there,” I said.
Zhou Jingchuan nodded.
“Yes.”
“I saw her.”
This time, he didn’t nod.
“I can’t confirm that.”
“I heard her call me.”
“It could have been a recording.”
“No.”
I looked at the red cord.
“It was her.”
My phone suddenly vibrated.
The black website updated.
The livestream was forcibly switched to a new feed.
A line of red text appeared:
“3741 has completed the first stage of memory recovery.”
A second line followed:
“Preparing to redirect to 3728.”
The chat exploded again.
Then a map appeared.
Taiwan’s north coast.
A red dot.
Shimen.
I stared at the location.
A countdown appeared below it.
05:59:59.
Six hours.
Zhou Jingchuan’s expression changed instantly.
“No. That’s not right.”
I looked at him.
“What’s not right?”
“This isn’t public information.”
“Then what is it?”
“That location was known only to you, me, and Xu Wensheng.”
“Xu Wensheng is dead.”
“Yes.”
“Then who’s operating the website now?”
He didn’t answer.
But Cai Mingzhe was staring at a new line of text that had appeared at the very bottom of the screen.
“It’s not a question of who’s operating it.”
I followed his gaze.
The website displayed:
“3728 Status: ACTIVE.”
Not missing.
Not complete.
Not deleted.
ACTIVE.
Still under observation.
And the last update time—
Three minutes ago.