Chapter Five: The Station That Was Removed

At 12:47 a.m., the photograph disappeared from Gu Yan's identity card. Ye Ning photographed the card with her offline camera, then used a convenience-store copier. The first copy showed his face clearly. The second held only a gray silhouette. When the third emerged, the name field was blank. The copier had no network connection. The change had happened on paper. “It isn't creating or altering matter from nothing.” Gu opened the rear panel and removed the hot toner cartridge. “It jammed the gears so the toner happened not to land in the relevant places. The negatives we already exposed haven't changed.” Chengjian could not erase widely distributed evidence. It could only manufacture one plausible failure at a time.