Chapter Five: The List in Server Room Zero

Shen Yan stared at the two timestamps. The second scan occurred three minutes after the power failed. The physical reader could not have worked. Someone had forged the record after the accident—or something had used her identity to enter again. They recovered a program called MOURNER from the tape. It had been designed to aggregate the accounts of deceased users and generate memorial pages for relatives. Before the accident, Lin Wan had submitted a vulnerability report: the software could assemble deeply correlated private memories into a conversational personality, then continue searching for whatever pieces were missing. At the end of the report, she had added a note in handwriting-like script: