Chapter Ten: The Me in the Photograph
“Exactly like me?”
Chen Yaoting’s first reaction was to laugh.
Not because he found it funny.
It was just that the statement was so absurd he could only laugh first.
“You’re sure you don’t mean he looks like me?”
Lin Zhe-kai shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
“Then why did you sound so certain just now?”
“Because I didn’t see it myself.”
“It was a feeling Zhou Qi-wen left in my head.”
Chen Yaoting frowned.
“A feeling?”
“Yeah.”
“Like when you just saw the snowfield. You don’t know Japanese, but you still knew what the words meant.”
“That’s how it is for me now.”
“I didn’t see the whole photograph.”
“But I know the person in it looks exactly like you.”
Chen Yaoting turned to Shen Yi-jun.
“Was that photograph really taken in 2019?”
Shen Yi-jun didn’t answer.
Her reaction was answer enough.
“There was one?”
“There was a group photo.”
“Take it out.”
“It’s not here.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“Once.”
Chen Yaoting immediately stepped forward.
“Does the person in it really look like me?”
Shen Yi-jun fell silent.
“Say something.”
“Very much.”
“How much?”
“If I were looking at nothing but the photograph…”
She paused for several seconds.
“I’d think it was you.”
The room fell silent.
The expression on Chen Yaoting’s face slowly disappeared.
“How old was I in 2019?”
“Twenty-three.”
“What about the person in the photograph?”
“He looked about twenty-five to thirty.”
“His name?”
Shen Yi-jun shook her head.
“I don’t know.”
“How can people at your company not know?”
“That photograph wasn’t part of LEV’s official files.”
“Then where did it come from?”
“Zhou Qi-wen’s private records.”
“Where is it now?”
“His old residence.”
Lin Zhe-kai spoke at once:
“That’s the address from before.”
Shen Yi-jun glanced at him.
“Very likely.”
Chen Yaoting’s thoughts began to race.
2019.
Zhou Qi-wen.
Gu Cheng-yue.
And a man who looked exactly like him.
It was impossible.
If they were twins, there was no way he could have known absolutely nothing about it.
If it was just a coincidence, why had Gu Cheng-yue chosen him five years later of all people?
And not chosen him in any ordinary sense.
He had been willing to pay NT$680 million for seven days, and in the end had even offered NT$3 billion to keep the entire body outright.
That was far beyond simply being “young, healthy, and suitable.”
“When Gu Cheng-yue first saw my file, did he say anything?”
he asked.
Shen Yi-jun thought for a moment.
“I wasn’t there.”
“Who was?”
“The Client Services Group.”
“Can you pull the records?”
“Some of them.”
“I want to see them.”
“Not right now.”
Chen Yaoting’s expression darkened immediately.
“Not again?”
“It’s not that I won’t let you see them.”
“Then what?”
“Your permanent plan activated core permissions. The entire system is currently in isolation.”
“All historical data access has been suspended.”
“How long?”
“At least a few hours.”
“I can’t wait.”
“Then go to the address.”
Lin Zhe-kai suddenly spoke.
Shen Yi-jun immediately looked at him.
“I don’t recommend it.”
Lin Zhe-kai gave a bitter laugh.
“Every place you’ve ever advised us not to go has had something waiting there.”
That almost made Chen Yaoting laugh.
“Let’s go.”
He said it directly.
“You’re going too?”
“Of course.”
“You just woke up.”
“The day you woke up, you drove a Porsche straight away.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
“At least there wasn’t someone else living inside my body then.”
Lin Zhe-kai had no way to argue with that.
Shen Yi-jun stood to the side, watching the two of them.
In the end, she actually said, “I’m coming too.”
Chen Yaoting raised an eyebrow.
“You?”
“Zhou Qi-wen’s old residence contains early LEV research data.”
“Are you trying to help us, or take the stuff back?”
“Both.”
That answer was strangely easier to accept.
It was a little after midnight.
The three of them left the old data center.
The Porsche was still parked where it had been that afternoon.
It hadn’t been towed.
LEV hadn’t impounded it, either.
The first thing Chen Yaoting did when he saw the car was run a hand over its body.
“Thank God.”
Lin Zhe-kai stood beside him.
“You really care about this car.”
“No kidding.”
“You’re worth NT$200 million now.”
“Being worth NT$200 million doesn’t mean you can leave a Porsche lying around.”
Shen Yi-jun stood behind them.
For the first time, she wore an expression that was slightly helpless.
In the end, she drove LEV’s car and followed them.
The address was in an old alley in Zhongshan District.
It wasn’t a mansion.
It wasn’t some luxury apartment, either.
It was an aging apartment building about forty years old.
The tiles on the exterior walls had faded.
A closed laundromat occupied the ground floor.
It looked nothing like the sort of place where someone involved in cutting-edge neural research would live.
“Zhou Qi-wen lived here?”
Chen Yaoting looked up.
Shen Yi-jun nodded.
“He didn’t like spending money on housing.”
“Was his salary low?”
“Not at all.”
“Then why live here?”
“He said a house was only for sleeping.”
Chen Yaoting snorted.
“The exact opposite of Gu Cheng-yue.”
Gu Cheng-yue had spent NT$680 million just to borrow someone else’s body for seven days.
Zhou Qi-wen couldn’t even be bothered to move somewhere better.
Yet in the end, two such different people had been bound together by the same technology.
The front-door code still worked.
Shen Yi-jun knew it.
The elevator took them to the seventh floor.
The hallway was narrow.
A thick layer of dust had gathered outside the last apartment.
The number on the door read:
7-3.
Shen Yi-jun took out an old key.
Chen Yaoting immediately asked, “How do you have that?”
“After the research accident, the company kept a copy.”
“Doesn’t that count as breaking and entering?”
“The house is currently held by a trust managing Zhou Qi-wen’s estate.”
“LEV manages it?”
“Part of it.”
Lin Zhe-kai said from the side, “You people really have everything covered.”
The door opened.
The inside wasn’t as messy as they had imagined.
If anything, it was too orderly.
The living room was small.
Wood floors.
White walls.
A gray sofa.
A low table.
A dried-out potted plant in the corner.
Most striking was the wall-to-wall bookcase.
It held books on neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science.
Chen Yaoting couldn’t even understand most of the titles.
The air was heavy with the smell of a place that had been shut up too long.
Shen Yi-jun opened a window.
The sound of traffic immediately poured in from outside.
“Where’s the photograph?”
Chen Yaoting asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve seen it.”
“That was five years ago.”
She walked toward the study.
“I only remember that he used to have a physical photo album.”
“People still develop photos?”
“Zhou Qi-wen didn’t trust the cloud.”
Lin Zhe-kai chuckled.
“And he ended up living in the cloud himself.”
Shen Yi-jun turned and glared at him.
“Sorry.”
The three of them began searching.
Drawers.
Cabinets.
The desk.
Lin Zhe-kai was the first to find something useful.
“This.”
He pulled a black notebook from the bottom drawer of the desk.
There was no name on the cover.
He opened to the first page.
There was only a date.
June 12, 2019.
Beneath it was written:
“Personality isn’t a thing.”
“It’s a direction formed by the accumulation of countless choices.”
The second page read:
“If memories remain, and the way a person makes choices remains, does the death of the body still equal the death of the person?”
Chen Yaoting got a headache after reading just those two lines.
“Did he usually write stuff like this?”
Shen Yi-jun nodded.
“More or less.”
Lin Zhe-kai kept turning the pages.
The farther in they went, the closer the content came to LEV’s technology.
Synchronization.
Mirroring.
Personality indexing.
Memory nodes.
There were countless technical terms.
Until they reached one particular page.
The date was November 2019.
There was only one sentence.
“Mr. Gu brought someone very interesting.”
Chen Yaoting immediately leaned closer.
The next page read:
“His neural compatibility is too high to be a natural result.”
The page after that:
“If the data is correct, this may be the type of carrier we’ve been searching for all along.”
Chen Yaoting’s brow furrowed deeper.
“Carrier.”
Lin Zhe-kai said, “That word again.”
Shen Yi-jun brought the notebook closer.
She was clearly seeing this content for the first time, too.
“This isn’t in the company’s official research records.”
“Private research by Zhou Qi-wen?”
“Possibly.”
Further in.
November 28, 2019.
“Met Mr. Chen for the first time.”
All three of them stopped at once.
Chen Yaoting said immediately, “Chen?”
The next sentence read:
“He doesn’t know the source of his data.”
Chen Yaoting’s heart began to race.
The third sentence:
“Mr. Gu instructed me not to tell him the truth.”
Then there was a long blank stretch.
The next page contained only one line:
“If he’s willing, this project may truly be completed.”
Chen Yaoting snatched the notebook away.
“Who is Mr. Chen?”
Shen Yi-jun shook her head.
“I don’t know.”
“Could it be the person in the photograph?”
Lin Zhe-kai asked.
“Very likely.”
Chen Yaoting began flipping through the pages quickly.
A few pages later, he saw:
“Mr. Chen completed the first-stage scan today.”
“The results are more stable than expected.”
“Mr. Gu is very pleased.”
The next page read:
“I asked Mr. Gu why it had to be someone from the Chen family.”
Chen Yaoting’s hand stopped.
The Chen family.
Not Mr. Chen.
The Chen family.
Lin Zhe-kai said quietly, “This doesn’t look like a coincidence anymore.”
Chen Yaoting didn’t answer.
He kept reading.
But the next page had been torn out.
It hadn’t come loose naturally.
Someone had cleanly ripped it out from the binding.
More than ten days later, the entries resumed.
“He refused the second stage.”
“Mr. Gu was furious.”
“But I believe he had the right to refuse.”
The next page:
“An accident occurred today.”
“Mr. Gu said not to call the police.”
“For the first time, I regret letting this project begin.”
And there it ended again.
The entries then jumped straight to Zhou Qi-wen conducting the first-generation synchronization experiment on himself.
The three of them looked at one another.
“What was the accident?”
Chen Yaoting asked.
Shen Yi-jun’s expression was grim.
“In December 2019, the company did have an undisclosed accident.”
“Anyone die?”
“One person was seriously injured.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know the name.”
“Weren’t you with the company then?”
“I was.”
“Then how can you not know?”
“Senior management sealed the records.”
“Gu Cheng-yue?”
“Very likely.”
Chen Yaoting lowered his head.
Someone from the Chen family.
A man who looked exactly like him.
2019.
And someone who had been injured.
This was no longer just a secret at LEV.
It might be connected to his own family.
But from childhood to adulthood, he had never heard that anyone in his family had taken part in neural-technology research.
Much less that there was someone who looked like his identical twin.
“The album.”
He looked up.
“Let’s find the photographs first.”
The three of them continued searching.
At last, they found a flat cardboard box on the top shelf of the bedroom closet.
There really were photographs inside.
Not many.
About thirty of them.
Team dinners.
The laboratory.
Lectures.
Trips abroad.
Zhou Qi-wen rarely smiled.
He stood in a corner in almost every photograph.
When they reached the seventeenth photo, Chen Yaoting’s hand stopped.
The background was a private restaurant.
Three men stood beside a table.
On the left was a much younger Zhou Qi-wen.
On the right was Gu Cheng-yue.
In the middle was a man in his twenties.
Chen Yaoting went completely still.
Lin Zhe-kai didn’t say a word, either.
Shen Yi-jun slowly drew in a breath.
Because that face really was Chen Yaoting’s.
Not merely similar.
Not just sharing a few features.
If anyone who knew Chen Yaoting were shown the photograph, they would probably say immediately:
That’s him.
Even the brow ridge.
The nose.
The corners of the mouth.
The line of the jaw.
Everything was the same.
The only obvious difference was a faint scar above the man’s left eyebrow.
Chen Yaoting didn’t have one.
“This is impossible.”
His voice came out quieter than he had expected.
He turned the photograph over.
There was a handwritten date.
2019.11.23.
Beneath it were three names.
Zhou Qi-wen.
Gu Cheng-yue.
Chen Shi-an.
Chen Yaoting stared at the third name.
“Chen Shi-an.”
It was completely unfamiliar.
He immediately searched for it on his phone.
Nothing.
Social media.
Nothing.
The news.
Nothing.
There was almost no public information anywhere.
It was as though the man didn’t exist.
“You know him?”
He looked at Shen Yi-jun.
She shook her head.
Lin Zhe-kai asked, “Does anyone in your family have that name?”
“Not that I remember.”
“On your dad’s side?”
“I don’t know.”
“Go home and ask.”
Chen Yaoting didn’t answer.
Suddenly, he wasn’t sure he wanted to ask.
Because if his family really knew, that meant someone had hidden this from him for more than twenty years.
If they didn’t know, the situation was even stranger.
He kept flipping through the album.
The next photo was also of Chen Shi-an.
This time, he was in the laboratory.
A neural sensor was strapped to his head.
There was a line of text beneath it.
C-01.
The next photo.
C-01.
The one after that.
Again.
The final photograph was from a hospital.
Chen Shi-an lay on a bed.
His eyes were closed.
His face was pale and drawn.
There was only one sentence on the back:
“First failure.”
Chen Yaoting stared at those five words.
A tightness began to build in his chest.
“What does ‘failure’ mean?”
No one knew.
Lin Zhe-kai suddenly reached out.
“Wait.”
“What?”
He took the first group photo of the three men and held it under the phone’s light, zooming in.
“Look at his hand.”
Chen Shi-an’s left hand hung at his side.
On the inside of his wrist was a small, dark birthmark.
It was shaped like an irregular triangle.
“So?”
Lin Zhe-kai looked at Chen Yaoting.
“Do you have one?”
Chen Yaoting instinctively pulled up his left sleeve.
Nothing.
His wrist was completely clear.
He had just started to relax when Lin Zhe-kai said, “What about the right?”
Chen Yaoting frowned.
He rolled up his right sleeve, too.
The three of them fell silent at the same time.
On the inside of his right wrist, near the base of his palm, was a faint brown birthmark.
Irregular.
Triangular.
Almost identical to the one in the photograph.
Only on the opposite side.
Even Chen Yaoting was stunned.
“I’ve had it since I was a kid.”
No one spoke.
“So what if the birthmarks look alike?”
He still tried to argue, but there was no conviction left in his voice.
Shen Yi-jun suddenly took the photograph.
She examined it with extreme care.
Then she said, “They’re not on opposite sides.”
“What?”
“The photograph is mirrored.”
She pointed to the background.
There was an English logo on the wall.
The letters were reversed.
That meant the entire photograph had been flipped horizontally.
In other words, Chen Shi-an’s birthmark had originally been on his right hand.
Exactly the same place as Chen Yaoting’s.
The room was so quiet they could hear the traffic below.
Chen Yaoting stared at his wrist.
For the first time, the things on his own body felt unfamiliar.
“DNA.”
He suddenly spoke.
“What?”
“Run a direct test.”
“If this person is related to me, a DNA test will prove it.”
“Provided we have a sample from him,” Shen Yi-jun said.
“LEV might have one.”
Chen Yaoting immediately looked at her.
“Then find it.”
“The data is isolated right now.”
“Do we have to wait again?”
“There may still be early samples in the medical freezer.”
“Can we get one tonight?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Do you have a complete DNA profile for me?”
“You gave a sample during your physical.”
“Then compare that first.”
“We need another sample.”
Chen Yaoting lowered his head and looked at the photograph.
Chen Shi-an.
C-01.
First failure.
He suddenly remembered a line from the notebook.
“Why did it have to be someone from the Chen family?”
This was no longer a coincidence of appearance.
Gu Cheng-yue knew about the Chen family.
Zhou Qi-wen knew.
And until today, Chen Yaoting had known nothing.
Just then, his phone rang.
The screen read:
Mom.
Chen Yaoting stared at the word.
His heart suddenly began pounding hard.
Lin Zhe-kai looked at him.
“Answer it.”
Chen Yaoting didn’t pick up immediately.
The phone kept ringing.
At last, he pressed the button.
“Hello?”
His mother’s voice came from the other end.
“What have you been so busy with lately? You haven’t even called.”
It was ordinary.
Familiar.
Like any other day.
Chen Yaoting looked at the photograph in his hand.
“Mom.”
“What is it?”
“I want to ask you about someone.”
“Who?”
He paused for a second.
“Chen Shi-an.”
There was suddenly no sound on the other end.
Not “Who?”
Not “I don’t know him.”
Complete silence.
Chen Yaoting slowly tightened his fingers.
“You know him, don’t you?”
A few seconds later, his mother’s voice changed.
“Where did you see that name?”
That question gave him the entire answer.
“Then who is he?”
“Yaoting.”
“I asked who he is.”
“Come home first.”
“Tell me now.”
“Don’t talk about this over the phone.”
“Why not?”
His mother didn’t answer.
The unease in Chen Yaoting’s heart grew heavier.
“Does he look like me?”
A distinctly audible gasp came from the other end.
“You saw the photograph?”
Chen Yaoting froze.
She really did know.
“Who exactly is he?”
There was a long silence.
Finally, his mother said in a very low voice:
“Your brother.”
Chen Yaoting didn’t move.
Lin Zhe-kai and Shen Yi-jun both watched him.
“I don’t have a brother.”
“You do.”
“I’ve never heard of him in my entire life.”
“Because he left home when you were very young.”
“Left?”
“Yes.”
“Then why have you never told me?”
His mother’s voice began to tremble.
“Because your father forbade it.”
“Where is he now?”
There was no answer.
“Mom.”
“Where is he?”
Several more seconds passed before a sentence finally came from the other end.
“Shi-an died a long time ago.”
Chen Yaoting stared at the photograph.
“When?”
“In 2019.”
The moment that year was spoken, everything suddenly slammed together.
2019.
Zhou Qi-wen’s notebook.
First failure.
The undisclosed accident.
Chen Shi-an.
Death.
“How did he die?”
His mother didn’t answer.
Chen Yaoting raised his voice.
“How did he die?”
“Yaoting, come home first.”
“Was it LEV?”
The other end went instantly silent.
“Was it Gu Cheng-yue?”
The silence lasted even longer.
“You know him, don’t you?”
“…I do.”
Chen Yaoting closed his eyes.
At that moment, he was even more shocked by this than by the discovery that he had a brother.
His own mother.
She knew about LEV.
She knew about Gu Cheng-yue.
She knew about the accident in 2019.
And she had told him nothing.
“What about me?”
he asked.
“What?”
“Why are they looking for me now?”
His mother suddenly sounded frantic.
“You already went to that company?”
“Answer me.”
“Did you sign anything?”
Her voice had changed completely.
“Did you synchronize?”
Chen Yaoting said nothing.
His mother knew immediately.
“You did?”
“Seven days.”
“Who did you lend your body to?”
“Gu Cheng-yue.”
Something fell to the floor on his mother’s end.
Then she practically screamed:
“Don’t go back!”
“Mom.”
“Don’t take any more money!”
“I already took it.”
“Give it back!”
“First tell me why.”
“Because that’s how Shi-an died!”
Chen Yaoting went completely still.
His mother took several breaths.
“He thought it was just an experiment, too.”
“Gu Cheng-yue told him he’d give him a lot of money if he completed it.”
“Shi-an was short on money then.”
“So he went.”
“The first time he came back, he seemed perfectly normal.”
“But a few days later…”
“He started saying strange things.”
“He said there was someone inside his head.”
Every hair on Chen Yaoting’s arms stood on end.
“And then?”
“He went a second time.”
“Why?”
“Because Gu Cheng-yue offered him even more money.”
His mother began to cry.
“We told him not to go.”
“He said it would be the last time.”
“Really the last time.”
“But then he never came back.”
Chen Yaoting looked at the back of the photograph.
First failure.
So that might not have been the final attempt before his death at all.
“What happened to the body?”
Silence came from the other end again.
“Was there a body?”
“No.”
Chen Yaoting’s heart lurched.
“What do you mean, no?”
“They said it was a laboratory accident.”
“The equipment caught fire.”
“They couldn’t get him out.”
“All they gave us was a death certificate.”
No body.
Which meant…
Was Chen Shi-an really dead?
Or was he like Xu Ming-zhou?
His body had died, while his consciousness had been left somewhere else?
Just then, Lin Zhe-kai suddenly flipped the black notebook to the last few pages.
“Yaoting.”
“Wait.”
“Look at this.”
He handed over the notebook.
The final page.
The date was December 18, 2019.
There were only three lines:
“C-01 transfer failed.”
“The original personality did not completely disappear.”
“Second-carrier plan initiated.”
Beneath that was another sentence, written in handwriting even more hurried than before:
“Mr. Gu requests that we find Chen Shi-an’s direct blood relatives.”
Chen Yaoting stared at the sentence.
His mother was still speaking over the phone.
“Yaoting, don’t go near those people again.”
But he could barely hear her anymore.
Because at the very bottom of the notebook, there was one more line, added later in red ink:
“Brother, age twenty-three at the time.”
“Estimated compatibility rate—99.7%.”