Chapter Three: The Deleted Man

At two in the morning, Shen Zhou and Lin Wan locked themselves inside the offline testing room on the seventh floor. There were no windows. Silver-gray shielding covered the walls. Lin Wan unplugged the router, sealed their phones in antistatic bags, and wrote three sentences on the whiteboard: `Do not trust the history on the screen.` `Do not complete unfamiliar names.` `Before any change, ask who pays its cost.` An absence shaped like a person occupied Shen Zhou's mind. Whenever he approached it, memory routed around it, like a city map marking a real street as permanently closed. They connected the recorder to an old, disconnected computer. The audio remained.