Chapter Four: Make Him Forget One More Time
After the video ended, the room fell so quiet that all I could hear was the air conditioner.
I stared at my phone.
The screen was frozen on Ruoqing's last line.
“Then make him forget one more time.”
She was standing beside me.
She hadn't tried to snatch the phone away, and she hadn't denied it.
Cai Mingzhe, meanwhile, was frowning, looking like this was the first time he'd seen the video.
I turned up the volume and played it again.
7:12 a.m.
Our bedroom.
I was lying in bed.
Ruoqing was standing beside it.
There was a man outside the door.
His voice was low, but it wasn't Cai Mingzhe's.
At least now I could tell.
“What if he remembers?”
“Then make him forget one more time.”
After listening to it a second time, I looked up.
“Who?”
Ruoqing didn't answer.
“Who was the man outside?”
She looked at me.
“Calm down first.”
“Don't say that to me.”
My voice came out much louder than I'd expected.
“I was sleeping beside you this morning. You stood there discussing how to make me lose my memory with someone else, and now you're telling me to calm down?”
“It's not what you think.”
“Then what is it?”
“That video—”
“Was it real or fake?”
She stopped.
I stared at her.
“Answer me.”
“Real.”
That one word made it feel like something was pressing down on my chest.
I asked again.
“Was there really someone in our house this morning?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“I can't tell you right now.”
I couldn't help letting out a laugh.
“Here we go again.”
Ruoqing frowned.
“What?”
“Can't tell you. Now isn't the time. Go home first. We'll talk about it later.”
I held the phone out in front of her.
“Do you think if you keep stalling, I'll just forget on my own?”
Her expression changed.
I caught it.
“Really?”
“No.”
“So my forgetting things in the past had something to do with you?”
“No.”
“What did ‘make him forget one more time' mean?”
She didn't answer.
I took a step back.
Suddenly, the woman I'd known for four years felt like a complete stranger.
I knew all her habits.
She drank her coffee without sugar.
She always washed her hair first when she showered.
Whenever she watched a horror movie, she'd pull her feet up onto the chair.
She didn't like taking medicine when she had a cold.
But only now did I realize that those things might have been nothing more than the parts of herself she'd chosen to let me see.
She had met me in this apartment building four years ago.
She knew I'd been secretly filmed.
She knew I'd lost part of my memory two years ago.
And this morning, there had even been a man standing in our home.
While I slept through it all without the slightest awareness.
I asked her,
“How did he get into our place?”
Ruoqing said quietly,
“I opened the door.”
“So he'd been here many times?”
“No.”
“Today was the first time?”
She stopped again.
That pause made the answer obvious.
“How many times?”
“Zian.”
“How many times?”
“I honestly can't keep track.”
My hand clenched.
“You can't keep track?”
“It's not the kind of relationship you're thinking of.”
“I don't give a damn what kind of relationship you have with him.”
I pointed at the phone.
“I want to know why a strange man was allowed to enter our home while I was asleep.”
Ruoqing opened her mouth.
Cai Mingzhe suddenly cut in.
“Wait.”
I turned my head.
“Shut up.”
“There’s something wrong with that video.”
I froze for a moment.
Ruoqing turned toward him too.
“What?”
Cai Mingzhe picked up his laptop.
“Send me the original file.”
I didn't move.
“Why?”
“Because the camera angle is wrong.”
He pointed at the thumbnail on my phone.
“The camera in your bedroom isn't positioned there.”
I immediately looked at the surveillance feed on the wall.
One of the screens showed our bedroom.
There was no one in it now.
The camera was set up on the window side, pointed toward the bed and the door.
But the video from the stranger showed the exact opposite angle.
It was filming from the doorway toward the bed.
“So?”
I asked.
“So that isn't our camera.”
Cai Mingzhe said,
“Someone installed another one.”
Ruoqing's face went even paler.
“Impossible.”
“You didn't know?”
Cai Mingzhe asked.
“I only knew about the one you installed.”
I stared at the two of them.
“Hold on.”
I pointed at the screen.
“Did you just say the one in my house belongs to you?”
Cai Mingzhe didn't deny it.
“Yes.”
“Who installed it?”
“You did.”
“Me again?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Before the incident two years ago.”
I walked over to the screen.
“You're saying I installed a camera in my own home and let you watch us every day?”
“Not so we could watch you.”
“Then why is it here with you?”
“For backup.”
“Who told you to back it up?”
“You did.”
I pressed hard against my forehead.
Every answer eventually circled back to the same thing.
The old me.
The old me told Ruoqing to pretend she didn't know me.
The old me told Cai Mingzhe to preserve the videos.
The old me installed surveillance cameras in my own home.
The old me left a note telling the current me not to trust Ruoqing.
And yet the person who should have had all the answers was me.
I just didn't remember any of it.
I looked at Cai Mingzhe.
“Bring up the footage from my place this morning.”
He didn't move.
“Now.”
He sat down in front of the computer.
“What time?”
“Seven to seven-thirty.”
The footage began rewinding.
7:00.
I was still asleep.
Ruoqing came out of the bathroom.
At 7:05, she went to the kitchen.
At 7:09, she returned to the bedroom.
At 7:11, she stood beside the bed and watched me.
And then—
The screen went black.
It hadn't frozen.
The entire frame had simply turned black.
The time in the lower-right corner kept running.
07:11:24.
07:11:25.
07:11:26.
The screen didn't come back until 07:18:03.
Ruoqing had already changed clothes.
There was no one else in the room.
I was still lying in bed.
“Seven minutes.”
I said it aloud.
Cai Mingzhe stared at the footage.
“Someone cut the signal.”
“You didn't have a backup?”
“No.”
I pulled out my phone.
The stranger's video was timestamped 7:12 a.m.
Right in the middle of those seven minutes when the screen had gone black.
A deeply uncomfortable feeling came over me.
He hadn't just been secretly filming me.
He knew exactly which cameras were working.
He could even disable the feed on Cai Mingzhe's end.
I looked at Ruoqing.
“What happened during those seven minutes?”
She took a deep breath.
“Someone came to see me.”
“Who?”
“Zhou Jingchuan.”
Cai Mingzhe's hand stopped.
I noticed.
“You know him?”
He didn't answer right away.
Ruoqing said,
“We know him.”
“Who is he?”
“One of the earliest technical consultants for the Transparency Day system.”
I froze.
“Someone from the government?”
“He used to be.”
“And now?”
“I don't know.”
Cai Mingzhe stood up.
“You saw Zhou Jingchuan this morning?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“He wouldn't let me.”
Cai Mingzhe's face had completely changed.
“How did he know where you lived?”
Ruoqing glanced at me.
“He's always known.”
The room suddenly felt colder.
I asked,
“What does he have to do with me?”
Ruoqing didn't stall anymore.
“The first video of you being secretly filmed in 2009 was sent from his server.”
I looked at Cai Mingzhe.
He nodded.
“He didn't run the website.”
“Then what did he have to do with it?”
“His company provided the early storage service.”
“So he knew who uploaded it?”
“In theory.”
“Did you look for him?”
“We did.”
“What did he say?”
“The records were long gone.”
I frowned.
“And you believed him?”
“Of course not.”
Cai Mingzhe enlarged the underground website screenshot from earlier.
“You spent years looking into him after you turned twenty.”
“What did I find?”
“You found out he later became involved in the Transparency Day system.”
I looked at him.
“Wait.”
An idea slowly surfaced.
“The first video of me was in 2009.”
“Right.”
“When did Transparency Day begin?”
“2016.”
“Seven years later.”
“Right.”
I stared at the screen.
“A man connected to the technical services of an underground secret-filming website later went to help the government design a legal secret-filming system?”
No one answered.
The answer was obvious enough.
I asked Ruoqing,
“Why did he come this morning?”
“To ask whether you'd shown any signs of recovering your memory.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That you hadn't.”
“And then?”
“He said not to let you come here on this year's Transparency Day.”
“Why?”
“He didn't say.”
“Did he mention your memory loss?”
Ruoqing nodded.
The anger in my chest flared again.
“Tell me exactly what he said.”
She paused for several seconds.
“He said that if you still didn't remember anything this year, we should let you continue living the way you are now.”
“And if I remembered?”
“Then something would have to be done.”
“Done with what?”
“I asked him that.”
“What did he say?”
Ruoqing looked at me.
“Make you forget.”
I said nothing.
Cai Mingzhe suddenly asked,
“Did he bring anything?”
“A black case.”
“How big?”
Ruoqing gestured with her hands.
“About the size of a laptop bag.”
Cai Mingzhe immediately went to the metal shelving and pulled out an old folder.
It was full of photos.
He quickly took one out.
“This one?”
Ruoqing glanced at it.
“It looks like it.”
I took the photo.
It showed a small silver-and-black device.
Its shape resembled medical equipment.
Several wires were connected to it.
Written on the back of the photo was:
“TMR-3.”
“What is this?”
Cai Mingzhe said,
“I don't know its official name.”
“You have a photo of it.”
“Because you took it two years ago.”
“Where?”
“Zhou Jingchuan's lab.”
I stared at the machine.
“Can it make people lose their memories?”
“I don't know.”
“You just said—”
“We don't have proof.”
He pointed at the photo.
“All you found back then was that the device was connected to research on memory interference.”
“What kind of research?”
“How visual stimuli affect memory retrieval.”
I frowned.
“Speak English.”
“Showing someone specific images, combined with sound, light, and medication, might make certain memories extremely difficult to recall.”
“Delete them?”
“Not exactly.”
Cai Mingzhe said,
“It's more like locking a door.”
A brief image suddenly surfaced in my mind.
Rain.
Headlights.
Someone by the side of the road.
Then the headache.
I instinctively touched the back of my head.
“So after I was hospitalized two years ago, the reason I didn't remember any of this might not have been the impact to my head?”
Ruoqing said,
“We've always suspected it wasn't.”
“You knew this all along?”
“I suspected it.”
“Why didn't you call the police?”
Cai Mingzhe took over.
“We did.”
I looked at him.
“And?”
“Not enough evidence.”
“What happened to the machine?”
“Couldn't find it.”
“What about Zhou Jingchuan?”
“He denied everything.”
“So after I lost my memory, you just let it go?”
Cai Mingzhe didn't answer.
But Ruoqing said,
“You were the one who told us to stop.”
I glared at her.
“I could still give orders after losing my memory?”
“No.”
She walked over to the metal shelving and took down a small box.
“You left this behind before the incident.”
Inside the box was a voice recorder.
She pressed play.
There was a burst of static.
Then my voice came through.
It sounded a little younger than I did now.
But it was unmistakably me.
“If something happens to me, or if I wake up afterward and don't remember any of this, don't let me investigate it again.”
I stood where I was.
The recording continued.
“Especially don't tell me how far you got investigating that 2009 video.”
A pause.
“If I manage to recover one-quarter of it on my own, that means this isn't over.”
Another pause.
“Only do one thing then.”
My voice dropped low.
“Confirm whether any videos have been uploaded today.”
The recording ended.
No one in the room moved.
My first reaction was to ask,
“Are there any?”
Cai Mingzhe looked at me.
“I haven't checked yet.”
“Check.”
He sat back down in front of the computer.
“The original site shut down a long time ago.”
“Then what are you checking?”
“It moved around a lot.”
He opened a browser.
It wasn't a normal webpage.
It required logging in layer by layer.
A password.
A verification code.
And a physical security key.
At last, it opened a page with almost no design at all.
Black background.
White text.
There were only a few categories on the left.
“Live.”
“Subjects.”
“Annual.”
“Concluded.”
I saw the last two characters.
“What does ‘Concluded' mean?”
Cai Mingzhe didn't answer.
He clicked into the search bar.
Then entered a string of numbers.
3741.
The number from the first chapter.
The screen flickered.
A subject page appeared.
It didn't have my name.
Only:
“SUBJECT 3741”
Below it read:
“Observation began: 06/20/2009”
“Status: Ongoing”
“Public footage: 2,864”
“Private footage: 971”
“Last updated: Today”
I stared at those last two words.
“Last updated today?”
Cai Mingzhe's expression was grim.
He scrolled down.
The newest video was right at the top.
Upload time.
10:51.
Two minutes ago.
The thumbnail showed the three of us standing in this room.
Just now.
The title read:
“3741 Enters the Archive Room Again.”
There were already twenty-three viewers below it.
And the comments were still coming in.
“He really went back.”
“Earlier than last time this year.”
“Lin Ruoqing didn't stop him.”
“Cai still showed him the files.”
“Zhou probably knows by now.”
I saw a familiar account.
It was the same one that had once commented “Keep this” beneath the 2009 video.
Seventeen years had passed.
The account was still there.
It had just posted a new comment.
“Don't let him see Video Zero again.”
I pointed at the screen.
“What is Video Zero?”
Cai Mingzhe didn't answer.
But Ruoqing suddenly came over.
“Turn it off.”
She reached for the mouse.
I blocked her.
“Don't touch it.”
“Zian.”
“What is Video Zero?”
Cai Mingzhe stared at the comment.
His expression told me he knew.
“Tell me.”
It took him a long time to speak.
“It was the video you watched two years ago—the one after which you said, ‘So it was me all along.'”
“What was in it?”
“We don't have it.”
“Who does?”
“You used to.”
“Where is it now?”
“I don't know.”
I gritted my teeth.
“‘I don't know' again.”
“Because you took it with you.”
“So the envelope I had when I left here two years ago contained Video Zero?”
“Most likely.”
I thought of the man who had delivered the envelope just now.
In the photos from two years ago, I had been holding a white envelope too.
And today, he'd given me another one.
I immediately turned the envelope upside down.
It was already empty.
There was only the memory card and the note.
I took out the memory card.
“Could it be on this?”
Cai Mingzhe took it from me.
“The one that man gave you?”
“Yes.”
He inserted it into the offline computer.
A folder popped up.
There were only three files.
The first was called “Don't Trust Ruoqing.”
The second was called “Before Midnight.”
The third had no name.
Only a number.
0.
All three of us saw it at the same time.
Cai Mingzhe's hand stopped on the mouse.
Ruoqing immediately said,
“Don't open it.”
I looked at her.
“Why?”
Her breathing had clearly quickened.
“Because you saw it two years ago.”
“So?”
“You left after watching it.”
“And then I got hit by a car.”
“Yes.”
“Then I have even more reason to watch it.”
“You don't know what's inside.”
“You do?”
She shook her head.
“No one does.”
I clicked the mouse.
The video didn't play right away.
A password prompt appeared first.
Four digits.
I tried my birthday.
Wrong.
The last four digits of my phone number.
Wrong.
Ruoqing's birthday.
Still wrong.
Cai Mingzhe suddenly said,
“Try 2009.”
I entered it.
The screen unlocked.
It stayed black for several seconds.
Then a date appeared.
June 20, 2009.
The day the first video of me had been recorded.
But this time, the camera wasn't pointed at fourteen-year-old me.
It was inside a room.
The image quality was terrible.
A table.
Two computers.
Lots of people's photos pasted to the wall.
The camera shook a few times.
Someone sat down at the table.
It was a man.
He looked to be in his thirties.
He was organizing the footage recorded that day.
One of the folders was labeled 3741.
Me.
I stared at his face.
I didn't recognize him.
The video had been playing for less than twenty seconds when the door suddenly opened.
Someone walked in.
It wasn't an adult.
It was a boy in a junior-high uniform.
Me.
Fourteen-year-old me.
The man in the video turned around.
“Why did you come back?”
My younger self didn't answer.
Instead, he walked over to the computer.
The man moved aside to let him sit.
Fourteen-year-old me operated the mouse with practiced ease.
He opened the 3741 folder.
It was filled with footage of me taken that day.
I stared at the screen, completely unable to understand.
The person in the video was clearly me.
But fourteen-year-old me looked as if he were watching someone else.
Then the man asked,
“Should we keep today's footage?”
Fourteen-year-old me stared at the screen.
After a few seconds, he answered,
“Keep it.”
A chill ran down my back.
The man asked again,
“Should we film him again tomorrow?”
My younger self nodded.
“Keep going.”
“For how long?”
The me in the video was silent for a moment.
Then he said something that silenced everyone in the room.
“Until I find out.”
The video suddenly ended.
I didn't move.
Ruoqing stood beside me, her face deathly pale.
Cai Mingzhe stared at the black screen.
There was only one sentence left in my mind.
Until I find out.
The person who had first arranged to have me secretly filmed.
It wasn't some stranger from an underground website.
It wasn't Zhou Jingchuan.
And it wasn't anyone currently hiding in the shadows.
At least, judging from this video—
It was fourteen-year-old me.
My phone vibrated at that exact moment.
A new message came from the unknown account.
“Do you understand now?”
A second message appeared right after it.
“You were never Subject 3741's victim.”
Then a third.
“You were the first viewer.”
The screen then displayed a live photo.
The location wasn't the archive room.
It was my home.
A man was standing in my bedroom.
The silver-and-black case sat on the table.
There was only one sentence beneath the photo.
“Zhou Jingchuan has arrived.”
I looked at the time.
11:07 p.m.
There were only fifty-three minutes left until midnight—the time that resident had warned me about.