Word count: ~38800 | Est. read time: 194 mins
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A friend of mine sent me a pair of glasses. Titanium frames, real glass lenses—the kind without any of the usual embedded cams or processors. It looked, for all the world, like your standard old-school eyewear. Those glasses were hand-made by him, and they’d journeyed across a good two thousand-plus kilometres, all the way from his workshop to my ground-floor rental. I slipped them on, stepped out onto the little patch of open ground outside my living room, and tilted my head back. The brick wall, all fuzzy with moss and ivy; the riot of flowers spilling over my upstairs neighbour’s balcony … well, everything looked pretty much the same as it ever did. My friend had said these glasses were going to fix my near-sightedness.
This friend and I go way back, almost twenty years now, and we’ve never actually met face-to-face. We clicked playing some online game, and for my entire drawn-out seven years of college, we were each other’s go-to gaming partner. After I finally got my Master’s degree, I landed a research job at a medical device company in the provincial capital. He, on the other hand, took over the family’s metalworking shop. Life got busy, and we drifted apart a bit. Then, two years ago, the company shut down my R&D centre, and replaced my colleagues and I with some AI. I cashed in some old favours and found a job back home at a special care hospital—a pretty chill gig. That’s when we started talking again more regularly. I guess it’s because he’s never gone through the corporate grinder—he’s always kept this kind of innocent streak, constantly coming up with wild harebrained ideas and making them happen with no trouble at all. I was grumbling to him about the hassles of near-sightedness, and he immediately declared he had a way to fix my vision without any surgery. Then, he’d promptly mailed me these customized glasses.
I picked up the glasses, gave them a good once-over, but nothing really jumped out at me. My friend had said the magic was in the lenses. As it turned out, sandwiched inside the glass was this layer of clear film. This film didn’t just flex under fluid pressure; it was also designed to mimic the stiffening of eye movement that comes with age. Nestled between two liquids with different refractive indexes, this film would change its shape depending on how much liquid was pumped in, and that, in turn, would alter the lens’ power. The whole correction process was supposed to happen in the blink of an eye, literally.
I really appreciated all the thought and effort he’d put into these things, but in my book, being able to dial in different prescriptions wasn’t the same as actually curing near-sightedness. He patiently explained that the lenses were just a crutch; the real fix was all in my head. When I wore these glasses, the lens’ power would shift randomly, sometimes even dropping down to zero. These changes were so lightning-fast, my brain couldn’t even register them. It would just assume it was still looking through the right prescription and automatically fill in the blanks, presenting me with the world it expected to see. Apparently, in psychology, this tendency to complete visual patterns is called “the principle of closure”.
Back in undergrad, I minored in psychoanalysis, so I had a vague idea about Gestalt theory, but I was always a bit sceptical about whether that stuff actually worked in the real world. Not wanting to hurt my friend’s feelings, I dutifully followed his instructions and just wore the glasses as if they were a regular pair, every single day. The hospital where I worked was on the east side of the city, only a twenty-something minute walk from my place. Every morning, at around eight, I’d head out. My first stop was at the unmanned convenience store down the street, where I’d grab a sandwich and a soy milk to fuel up before facing the day. My walk took me past my old elementary, middle, and high schools; the arcade I used to hang out at; those hole-in-the-wall eateries I loved; and that old street that had its fifteen minutes of fame on some social media platform a while back. Those timeworn haunts were still buzzing, the noise of life just pouring out of them. Bluetooth earbuds in, hands shoved deep in my hoodie pockets, I’d weave through the crowds without a second thought, completely oblivious to the fact that what I was seeing was, in a way, a carefully constructed illusion.
This quiet routine went on for about a week. Then Monday rolled around again, and I dragged myself out, grabbed a couple of steamed buns and a cup of instant porridge from the convenience store, and started my usual slow trudge towards the hospital. As I was crossing that cobblestone bridge that all the out-of-towners love to photograph, my friend suddenly called. His excited voice piped out of my smartwatch: “So, how’s it going?”
“It’s Monday. What do you think?”
“Not that. Take off the glasses.”
I did what he said, slipped the glasses off, and looked back the way I’d come. That’s when it hit me. The surging crowds and bustling shops simply weren’t there. The street I’d just walked down had only this one old man sitting by the roadside, fanning himself, watching a pot bubbling away on a wood-burning stove. Behind him, those once-grand restaurants were all boarded up, the signs thick with dust. The tourists in their matching outfits and the guides waving their little flags? All just my imagination. The street was dead quiet—the only sound was the simmering of water in that pot. This was the real face of the old industrial city, slowly fading away with automation.
And just like that, I completely understood how these glasses worked. My brain, when it was filling in the gaps in my perception, was using stored data—my memories. It was showing me a replay of the past, not the reality in front of me. That’s why my friend had warned me to only wear the glasses in familiar places; only then would my brain have enough material to work with.
I put the glasses back on, and just like that, the bustling crowd was back. Surrounded by the fake noise of it all, I continued walking towards the hospital. My friend asked if I was getting used to the glasses, and I didn’t say no. For someone as near-sighted as I am, being able to see the world clearly without surgery is a pretty big deal. Compared to that, reality felt a little less important. In a world where anyone can be replaced, it figures that reality can be too.
I kept wearing the glasses, day in and day out, to and from work. Then, after a while, I just felt like taking them off on my way there. This time, the crowds and the noise didn’t vanish. I walked through the street my brain had conjured up and made it to the hospital just fine. Everything there was normal, nothing out of place, like the old and the new realities had somehow seamlessly blended in front of me. I did my usual rounds, checked the equipment, and clocked out on time. But when I pushed open the hospital doors, that phantom world from the past washed over me again.
I slipped in my Bluetooth earbuds, shoved my hands in my hoodie pockets, and quietly melted into the non-existent crowd. Whether or not my eyes saw reality or an illusion, it didn’t actually change anything in my life. At least, that’s what I thought back then.
The hospital where I worked was the biggest private facility in the city, and also the only special care one. From the outside, it was this sleek, sail-shaped building, all glass and brightly coloured lights, looking more like some fancy hotel plunked down in the middle of all these old flat blocks and office buildings that had seen better days. Inside, you never saw any doctors or nurses rushing around, and there were no lines of patients waiting for their appointments. Compared to the People’s Hospital on the other side of town, this place was eerily quiet, like a desert. But that was the whole point of a special care hospital: it wasn’t about curing patients, it was about keeping them going.
Special care hospitals had started popping up about fifteen years ago. Before that, medical advances had pretty much turned a lot of chronic illnesses—things like heart disease, diabetes, even mental health issues—into rare occurrences. To make up for the drop in profits from drug sales, the big multinational healthcare companies set their sights on human life support systems. These were huge, complicated, and seriously expensive pieces of medical tech that could keep people in the very last stages of life hanging on, all in the hope that some more advanced drug or therapy would eventually come along. For those who were chasing the dream of eternal life, it offered a peaceful state of limbo, especially since human hibernation tech wasn’t quite there yet. With all its hype, human hibernation quickly became the next big thing among the global mega-rich. Families fretting about inheritance taxes started shipping off their elderly, mentally fading patriarchs to these newly-built special care hospitals. To cut costs, ensure security, and keep things out of the public eye, these hospitals were usually located in out-of-the-way places with cheap energy, like this small city I was in—a place that had seen a lot of people move away but still had decent infrastructure and its own hydroelectric power plant.
Two years ago, a college classmate of mine recommended me for a job at this special care facility, and I became a maintenance engineer. Though “engineer” was a bit of a stretch—I was more like a general handyman. I handled everything from the daily upkeep, inspection, and repair of all the equipment to occasionally doing things like moving patients, organizing medical records, and dealing with family members. Compared to my previous job, it was technically brain-dead, but it was my lifeline. Knowing how many well-educated people were out there struggling to find a job, I was especially grateful for it. Every workday, I’d walk into those patient rooms with a sense of thankfulness, serving people who, with the current state of medical technology, had absolutely no hope of recovery.
The special care building had four floors, with patient rooms on the second, third, and fourth. The second and third floors held most of the patients, the ones paying their own way. The fourth floor, because the number sounded unlucky in Chinese, was used as a sort of charity ward for patients transferred from public hospitals. Even though the rooms on the second and third floors were called “regular”, they were bigger and better equipped than most hospital suites, even luxurious ones. Each room had a living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and a separate en-suite room for a caregiver, and the decor and layout could be customized to the patient’s or their family’s tastes. For example, one of the patients I looked after was a retired astronomy professor. The walls, ceiling, and floor of his room were all fitted with LED screens. They constantly displayed dynamic images of the cosmos that I’d downloaded from the China National Space Administration’s official website. His life support pod looked like it was floating in the vastness of space. Every time I went into his room, I was afraid I’d take a wrong step and fall into the endless universe. Then there was another patient who was obsessed with Casablanca, that old film about a love triangle during World War II. His life support pod faced a white screen where his favourite film played on a continuous loop. I’d go into his room around 10:20 every morning to check the projector, just in time to hear Humphrey Bogart deliver that classic line: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” That room felt like a cassette tape stuck on repeat. And in a way, so did my life.
Of course, not every patient had a say in how their life in special care was going to play out. Some were sent by their families, and their rooms were set up based on what their relatives wanted. One designer insisted on having all the windows in her father’s room sealed shut. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all painted with this black stuff that absorbed over 95% of the light, and then they stuck soundproofing panels everywhere. The whole room was like a perfectly sealed coffin. Because no lights were allowed, I had to feel my way around every time I went in, and I had to be extra careful not to make a single sound. The patient was strapped into the middle of his life support pod wearing a black straitjacket, which reminded me of those vampires sleeping in their coffins in films. Before the nursing bot would wash him or give him a muscle massage, it would put on his eye mask and earplugs to cut down on sensory input as much as possible. It’s hard to even describe what kind of existence that was—living was difficult, but even death wasn’t easy.
The typical modern conundrum, I guess.
After I was done with the regular patient rooms, I took the staff stairs up to the fourth floor. Compared to the third floor’s hallways with their imported stone floors, all fancy and dreamlike, the fourth floor felt more like a real hospital. The hallways here had dull white tile floors, and all the doors, doorframes, and handrails were this solid, deep blue. There were rows of chairs outside the rooms, and inside, there were no living rooms, dining rooms, or kitchens, just a basic hospital bed and a tiny bathroom that was barely big enough to turn around in. In a way, those rooms were the government’s way of compromising with the medical conglomerates.
Ever since human life support systems had come into being, multinational healthcare giants had been pushing hard to get these pricey gadgets onto the procurement lists of public hospitals and to have their usage covered by health insurance. Most governments weren’t exactly thrilled about footing the bill for what they saw as rich people’s toys, but public pressure eventually made them cave. In China, public hospitals didn’t buy the systems outright, but the government would contract private hospitals equipped with them to provide end-of-life care services to terminally ill patients who didn’t have a lot of money. This way, the private hospitals made a buck, the public hospitals got some breathing room with their bed shortages, and those poor folks on their way out weren’t just kicked to the curb to die in the street. Win-win-win, supposedly.
Even though the fourth floor wasn’t as fancy as the second and third, and the patients there were all from less privileged backgrounds, I still preferred working up there. It was the only place where I really felt like I was doing something worthwhile as a healthcare worker. The patients in those weird and wonderful rooms on the second and third floors—they just weren’t my kind of people. There was this one patient on the second floor who’d been in a car accident and had this massive open wound in his abdomen, all his insides spilling out. It still hadn’t healed, and the life support system was just keeping his mangled lungs and heart ticking over. Every time I saw his exposed chest cavity, it just felt … inhuman, and it gave me the creeps. I never experienced anything like that on the fourth floor. The patients there were just regular folks, like me, with faces and limbs etched with the marks of time and a hard life. Their families would come to visit, talking non-stop to patients who were already unconscious, changing their clothes, and clipping their nails. After I’d set up the equipment in their rooms, the families would thank me and offer me a peeled apple. It was only then that I really felt like I was helping someone. My job was a job, not some kind of spectacle.
After night fell, all the patient rooms got extraordinarily quiet. You hardly ever had visitors in the regular rooms, and in the charity rooms, overnight stays weren’t allowed. The hospital was mostly just sleeping patients and a handful of staff. After scarfing down the boxed meal from the central kitchen, I’d count and check the nursing bots as they trundled back to the charging bay, and then the night shift would begin. I pulled three night shifts a week, and the job was pretty straightforward: sit in the duty room and just stare at the monitor screens showing the patients’ vital signs streaming in from their life support systems, making sure all the rooms and everyone in them were still doing fine. To stay awake, my colleague and I would take turns doing rounds. After checking each floor, I’d take a breather for a bit in the main hall in the middle of the floor.
Because the patients here didn’t need treatment, there was no nurses’ station in the special care hospital. I’d stand alone in that empty hall, looking out through the floor-to-ceiling windows at my hometown. The city lights at night were sparse, and you could count the people walking around on one hand. The building I was in was the only thing still blazing with light. This city, which had lost its youth, its main industries, and any real future, was slowly decaying, while the patients behind me were waiting to be brought back to life. Life and death stared at each other across a pane of glass. I stood on the boundary between the two, and my vision, my thoughts, became fuzzy. And in that dreamlike haze, two years just slipped away.
This spring, the hospital I worked at teamed up with a research team from some university. For the next year, all the patients with disorders of consciousness in the charity ward were going to be part of this non-invasive neuromodulation trial. This wasn’t exactly groundbreaking stuff, but it ended up changing my life in a way I never saw coming, and it even got me back into a hobby I’d had back in my student days.
Disorders of consciousness, or DOC, basically means a loss of awareness caused by severe brain damage, like comas, vegetative states, and minimally conscious states. If a DOC lasts for more than 28 days, it’s considered chronic. “Vegetative state” is just the everyday way of talking about chronic DOC patients. Non-invasive brain stimulation, or NIBS, uses non-surgical techniques to probe the brain’s cortex using physical or chemical means. It can reversibly tweak the activity of the brain and neurons, bringing the nervous system back into balance. Clinically, it’s usually used to treat things like post-traumatic stress disorder, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s, and the main ways it’s applied are transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial electrical stimulation (TES). The team my hospital was working with was going with the latter.
The idea behind TES isn’t too complicated. The equipment has two surface electrodes, an anode and a cathode. You stick them in specific spots, and the stimulator sends out a constant, low-intensity electrical current. This current travels through the skull and affects the brain’s cortex, which then changes the activity there and influences related senses, movement, and cognitive functions. In past research and practice, the current was usually aimed at the damaged areas of the brain. But in this trial, the current was going to transmit sounds and images directly into the patients’ brains to try and wake them up. To put it simply, this experiment was about using the brain as a screen, showing films to patients with disorders of consciousness to help them regain awareness. Given my educational background and previous work experience, the job of setting up and operating the TES equipment naturally fell to me.
I wasn’t exactly a brain science expert, so I didn’t have any real say in the experiment itself. But I did think the things they were planning to show the patients were all wrong. The research team emailed me a bunch of video clips they’d prepped—dozens of them. I watched them all, and honestly, I was pretty disappointed. They were just random snippets cut from films, documentaries, and concert recordings from some public domain library. There was nothing specific or personal about them. No one was going to be moved by something that bland. So, to make sure this trial actually had a shot at working, I made a bit of a risky call: I decided I was going to screen films that I’d made myself for the patients.
Ever since elementary school, I’d been a total film buff. During my free time in gym class, I’d always sneak off to the multi-purpose classroom to watch films. When I got to middle school, the first club I joined was the film club. I was in it for six years, president for two, and together with the other members, we made a series of promotional videos for the school and countless little short films. Once I got to university, I started using AI to make full-length films. By the time I finished my Master’s, I’d created three independent films and even won an award at the city’s student film festival. The way I saw it—whether it was novels, essays, films, or plays—all fiction was basically just a lie. And the trick to lying well is to sprinkle in a whole lot of real details. These details trigger the memories of the reader or the viewer, blurring the line between what’s real and what’s fake, and making them believe what the creator is trying to say. I figured the same principle applied to this experiment. To wake up those patients with disorders of consciousness, you had to recreate the people and things they knew in their own minds.
The idea was simple enough, but pulling it off was a different story. The first thing I needed to do to recreate someone’s past was to know their past. If I’d been working at a regular hospital, that wouldn’t have been too hard; I could just talk to the patients themselves. But I was at a special care hospital, dealing with people who were there for end-of-life care. And in this day and age, end-of-life care basically meant a slow, gentle slide into oblivion. Once they were in the charity ward, the patients were dosed up with a ton of sedatives every day, just drifting off painlessly, bit by bit losing whatever life force they had left until their flame went out completely. Having a chat with them was out of the question. While most of the patients had family and friends who would come to visit, my experience told me they wouldn’t be much help. Parents don’t always know what their kids are really into. Husbands or wives might not know much about their spouse’s past. People who think they’re a patient’s friend might not even know their real name or what they did for a living. So, relying on family and friends wasn’t going to cut it. To gather enough material, I only had one option: the internet.
The internet is the modern man’s everything—their grocery store, their diary, their playground, and their personal memorial. Pretty much everything anyone does online leaves a trail. And when you piece those trails together, you can map out a person’s whole life. As long as I had a real name, a picture, and some contact info, I could find out nearly anything I wanted to know about anyone. Through school websites, I could figure out their major and what they were into. Job sites gave me their work history and skills. Social media posts let me figure out their home address, financial situation, where they hung out, and who they knew. Every account they followed, every like they gave, every photo they uploaded, every comment they left—it all told me something about who they were. No matter how high the walls modern men build around their inner lives, online, they’re always walking around naked.
Thank God for the internet—I could always gather the materials I needed with surprising speed. In less than a week, I knew more about a patient than even the family members who came to visit them. Once I had everything prepared, I dusted off the artificial intelligence I’d pretty much abandoned years ago and started making films again. Compared to my college days, all the tools I used had come a long way. Back then, I’d hand-draw storyboards myself, then describe the characters’ actions and the background style so the AI could generate the corresponding visuals and animated sketches. After that, I’d use video editing and special effects software to polish everything up, adding character voices, soundtracks, and incidental music generated by voice tools to match the video content, and finally put the whole film together. Now, AI could handle most of that for me. The storyboards it generated were even closer to what I’d imagined, and the editing suggestions, transitions, and rich sound effects it came up with were every bit as good as those blockbusters from the pre-AI era. Watching the final cut the AI had churned out, I felt relieved; at the same time, the realisation that my dreams of filmmaking had flatlined was a real punch in the gut.
Following the experimental protocol that the hospital and the research team had agreed on, I used the TES equipment to play the film I’d custom-made for the first test subject, while at the same time using an EEG to monitor and record her brain activity as she watched. The EEG didn’t show any unusual patterns. But my creative urge wasn’t dampened in the slightest.
For the next couple of months, I ditched gaming, the gym, and my whole social life, pouring every spare second into making films. Every night, I’d be holed up in my dim, cramped flat, hunched over the high-spec PC I’d built myself, just grinding away. The last time I’d been this obsessive was probably back when I was studying for my postgraduate entrance exams. I made a zombie flick for the patient who was into those, setting it in the middle school he used to go to. For the one who loved mountain climbing, I put together a first-person perspective climbing documentary. And for the patient who’d been abused by her guardian, I created a revenge film starring her. Even though the EEGs showed these films weren’t doing a thing to wake anyone up, I was still completely absorbed in it. Every time I gave the AI another command, I felt this deep conflict inside me. I knew perfectly well I wasn’t doing this for the patients, but for myself. What I was doing was pointless; it wasn’t going to change anything. But even so, I kept going, driven by this weird, inexplicable enthusiasm, churning out these films that had absolutely no artistic merit whatsoever. My work was as directionless as my life.
The trial was supposed to involve 100 patients and was expected to take anywhere from six to twelve months, but my creative burst only lasted for two. Once I got back into making stuff, the first roadblock I hit wasn’t a lack of ideas, it was a lack of source material. Most people, no matter their age, gender, or job, leave some kind of digital footprint online. Even if they aren’t big internet users themselves, they’ll pop up in other people’s discussions or photos. But there were a handful of patients who were really hard to track down, both online and offline. Facing those cases felt like stumbling into some untouched primeval forest, with no clue which way to go.
The first mysterious patient I came across was a woman named Ye Tang. She was four years younger than me, from the provincial capital, and her medical records listed her occupation as “freelancer”. Looking at her, Ye Tang wasn’t particularly striking, but she had this approachable face, the type that other women and older people tend to like. Her hands were rough, and the muscles in her arms were lean and tight, probably from doing hard physical work for a long time. When she was admitted to the charity ward, the scar from the surgery to fix her skull fracture still hadn’t completely healed. She still had basic brainstem reflexes and a sleep-wake cycle, but she wasn’t conscious of herself and couldn’t communicate with anyone. The doctors said she’d been like that for over three months, a textbook case of a vegetative state caused by brain trauma. Apparently, she’d been working in a quarry in the mountains when a loose rock fell and hit her. Her only family was her grandmother, who was in her eighties and couldn’t leave the house because of Alzheimer’s. No one had come to visit her since she’d been admitted.
The first time I saw Ye Tang, she didn’t strike me as someone with a complicated backstory. She seemed like me, someone born into an ordinary family, just trying to get by. I went through my usual routine, searching for information about Ye Tang online using her name and photo. She hadn’t registered any social media accounts, never posted any comments, and hadn’t uploaded any photos or videos. There was no CV for her on any job sites. I couldn’t find her name on any public information platforms run by government agencies or on any business inquiry sites. In desperation, I turned to the Internet Archive, a website that preserves the memory of the internet by crawling websites and taking snapshots. I looked through hundreds of web pages that no longer existed and finally found Ye Tang’s name in an article published by the film club of some university in the provincial capital. She was mentioned as the president of the club in the article, which was published when she was a junior. Judging by her age, the timeline matched up. I then flipped through hundreds more historical records and spotted Ye Tang’s face in a deleted personal diary. The diary was from three years ago, and the author had written about their experience participating in a vocational skills training program for unemployed people organized by the government, and they’d uploaded a few photos. Ye Tang was one of the trainees. According to the diary entries, they were learning stone carving, a craft listed as a form of national intangible cultural heritage.
So now I knew Ye Tang’s university, her major, and the clubs she’d been in. I also knew she’d learned a craft after losing her job. But it still wasn’t enough to piece together a complete picture of who she was. I didn’t know what kind of work she did after graduating, or why she’d become unemployed. I also had no idea what had happened during her time in the film club that would make them delete all the articles that mentioned her name. Plus, to become the president of a film club, you’d have to have at least some creative talent, but I couldn’t find even one piece of work online that Ye Tang had been involved in, as if everything about films in her life had been brutally erased.
The fact that my investigation had stalled was giving me insomnia, something I hadn’t experienced in ages. I couldn’t help but be curious about those missing years in Ye Tang’s life. Even though I had some pieces of the puzzle, I still didn’t know what she liked, which meant there was no way I could tailor a film specifically for her. Before Ye Tang, I’d successfully created personalized films for over a dozen patients. My compulsiveness just wouldn’t let her be the exception. Even if it cost me something, I had to figure this woman out.
I decided to pay a visit to Ye Tang’s home in the provincial capital.
It had been some time since I’d been to the provincial capital—I hadn’t visited since my check-up at the Provincial People’s Hospital last year. This time, it was right in the middle of the summer holidays, so the city was crawling with tourists dragging their families around. I had to wait for three trains before I could finally squeeze onto the monorail. Once we pulled out of the station, the train glided along the tracks, winding its way between endless green hills and the towering skyscrapers. This year was the third anniversary of Virtual World going online. To celebrate the upcoming milestone, the holographic online game with billions of users worldwide had plastered ads all over the city. Huge holographic phantoms flapped their wings, drifting past the train tracks and showering the ground with starlight. The out-of-towners around me were all whipping out their phones and cameras, snapping away at the view outside the window. But I just held onto the train’s handle, staring blankly at this city I hadn’t seen in so long. It felt like coming home, and like being in a completely foreign place at the same time.
I’d spent seven years in this city for university and another ten working here. For me, it was second in importance only to my hometown. It had seen me transform from a clueless college kid into a seasoned working professional. I’d also witnessed its boom, its decline, and its changes. Even though the streets were still packed with people and the city skyline was still dazzling, I knew perfectly well that, just like my hometown, it was slowly rotting from the inside out.
Most of the out-of-towners got off at the central interchange in the city centre, and the train cars suddenly emptied out. I found a seat and stayed on as the train continued north. Ye Tang and her grandmother lived in the Automotive Industrial District, only two stops away from my old university. I knew this area pretty well. When I first started college, it was the government’s pride and joy: a manufacturing hub with all sorts of auto parts companies, dozens of standardized factory buildings, and a bunch of dormitories. The district had everything—schools, hospitals, shopping centres—and the restaurants and service industries around it were booming. But then the wave of automation swept across the globe, and all those factories were converted into unmanned operations. The dorms, schools, and hospitals gradually fell into disrepair, and the restaurants and shops around the district closed down one after another. By the time I left the provincial capital because I’d lost my job, the Automotive Industrial District had become a forgotten corner of the city. You hardly saw anyone on the streets except for a few half-crazed loners.
I was the only one who hopped off at the Automotive Industrial District. The whole station was silent as I walked out. I took the escalator up to street level and just followed the directions on my smartwatch towards the district gates. On the way, I happened to see the hotpot place where I used to eat with my college mates. The place had been totally ripped out; the floor was just a mess of building rubble that hadn’t been cleared, and you could see all the steel bars and pipes in the bare walls. I stood by that dusty, old wooden-lattice window, just staring at the spot where I used to sit. Maybe it was just the nostalgia messing with my head, but I blinked—and suddenly I saw customers all huddled around steaming copper hotpots, and waiters pushing carts piled high with food weaving their way through the tables.
I watched the phantom scene for a few seconds, then turned and kept walking towards my destination. Once my brain kicked into its “yesterday replay” mode, everything around me was bathed in this hazy, yellowish light. Whether it was the elementary school kids in their uniforms chasing each other on the pavement, or the vendors pushing carts and selling hand-made shaved ice on the street, or the workers in their blue uniforms and hard hats, everyone looked like they’d stepped straight out of an old film. I listened to the muffled sounds these non-existent souls were making and quietly walked along the long, shady avenue, finally stopping in front of Ye Tang’s flat.
After the factories had all gone automated, the only folks who still lived in the district were in the welfare housing they’d built ages ago, and they were mainly senior engineers and long-serving workers. The living conditions in these flats were a big step up from regular employee housing. There was plenty of space between buildings, and they even came with gardens and little pavilions on the ground floor. The outside was plain as anything, covered only in basic white tiles, and every flat had the same square sliding windows, just like in my grandparents’ place, where I used to go as a kid. Ye Tang was on the fifth floor. I gave the lift a miss and took the stairs. The stairwell lights weren’t on, and sunlight streamed through the patterned walls, throwing their checkerboard shadows on the skinny landings. Every security door had these faded, curling Spring Festival decorations stuck on either side. Some doors even had dried mugwort hanging over them. Suddenly, I was a kid again, visiting my grandparents in the summer, carefully putting my feet on those narrow, steep steps until I got to Ye Tang’s door.
The door had one of those smart video doorbells. Without really expecting anything, I pressed it. A calm male voice came through the speaker right away: “Who is it?”
That voice definitely threw me for a loop. I’d assumed Ye Tang’s grandmother was the only one living here. Good thing I’d thought ahead. I held up my digital work ID to the camera, which the special care hospital had given me. I explained that I was there to get some information about Ye Tang from her family. Whoever was inside bought it and cracked the security door open a few inches. I pushed it open. The first thing I saw was a smooth, metallic face. It clicked instantly—this was the caregiver bot looking after Ye’s grandmother.
Most of the caregiver bots you see around town are on wheels, but the one in Ye’s place had a human-like form, covered in shiny silver alloy plating. It must have cost a fortune. It politely showed me into the living room and poured me a glass of lukewarm water. “Are you here to handle Ms. Ye Tang’s funeral arrangements?”
That question from the humanoid bot caught me off guard. But then again, when you thought about it, it wasn’t that weird. As far as most people were concerned, being in end-of-life care was pretty much the same as having one foot in the grave. If the patient didn’t have any family, or if their family couldn’t swing it, the hospital would handle the burial once they’d passed. I guess in everyone else’s eyes, Ye Tang was just another body waiting for a coffin.
Seeing that I hadn’t answered straight away, the bot took my silence for a yes. “If you’re the one sorting out Ms. Ye Tang’s final things, you can go to her room and pick out some bits and pieces that meant something to her, to go with her ashes. I’ll have a look at them before you leave. You can’t take any valuables or any personal women items.”
According to local custom, when someone passes, you’re supposed to put some of their belongings in the grave with them as burial goods. The caregiver bot’s suggestion wasn’t what I was there for, but it gave me an excuse to get into Ye Tang’s room, so I didn’t say no. Before I started snooping around Ye Tang’s room, I wanted to say hello to her grandmother.
Ye’s flat was just over a hundred square meters, but it was divided into three bedrooms and two living rooms, so every room felt a bit cramped. The furniture was made of dark, solid wood—the kind that older people like. The traditional paintings and calendars on the walls, the flower-shaped chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and the lace doily covering the dining table all had a real old-fashioned feel. The only balcony was connected to the living room, and it had a recliner and a bunch of potted plants. Ye’s grandmother was resting on the recliner. Summer in the mountain city was brutally hot, but the old lady was wearing long sleeves and pants, with a light blanket draped over her legs. She didn’t seem to notice me at all, her eyes fixed on a daylily she was clutching in her hand, muttering tang1 over and over. The caregiver bot finished tidying up some things in the living room, walked over to the old lady, and expertly handed her a piece of candy. “The main ingredients in this candy are xylitol and stevia. It won’t affect your blood sugar levels.”
I gave her a polite hello and put the box of health supplements I’d brought on the tea table next to her. She didn’t pay me any mind and just kept fiddling with the candy in her hand. I looked over at her bot. “How long has she been like this?”
“If you’re referring to Madam Han Yu’s Alzheimer’s disease, this is her eighth year with the condition.” The robot maintained its ever-polite demeanour.
“Have you been looking after her the whole time?”
“Ms. Ye Tang purchased me seven years ago. Since then, I have been responsible for Madam Han Yu’s care. Three years ago, Ms. Ye Tang moved back from out of town and helped me with many of the tasks.”
Three years ago—that lined up perfectly with when Ye had been in that vocational training program for the unemployed. I guessed she’d probably lost her job around then, which was why she’d moved back in with her grandmother.
“What about Ye Tang’s parents?”
“Ms. Ye Tang’s parents divorced when she was four years old. They both subsequently emigrated to different countries. Madam Han Yu raised Ms. Ye Tang.”
“If Ye Tang doesn’t make it back, what will happen to her grandma?”
“If Ms. Ye Tang passes away, ownership of me will be transferred to the community to which this residential area belongs. Community staff will visit the home regularly to monitor my fulfilment of my caregiving duties. If Madam Han Yu passes away, the community will handle her funeral arrangements.”
That put my mind at ease a little. I shifted gears. “What did Ye Tang do for work before she got injured?”
“Ms. Ye Tang’s primary occupation was stone carving. She would usually take orders on online platforms, creating stone carvings according to client specifications. In her spare time, she also worked part-time at a school, teaching students the art of stone carving.”
“What did she do before she became a stone carver?”
The bot answered straightforwardly, “In my memory, Ms. Ye Tang has always worked as a stone carver. I have no information about her previous employment history.”
“I see. Thank you for answering my questions.” I gave the bot a slight nod of thanks and then headed towards Ye Tang’s room.
My conversation with the bot had cleared up some things but also raised a series of new questions. The bot knew all about Ye Tang’s childhood and her family situation, but had no clue what she did before becoming a stone carver, which suggested Ye had probably deliberately kept her previous work life a secret. I couldn’t figure out why. I was hoping I’d find some answers in her room.
Ye’s room was the smaller bedroom, and it didn’t get much light. It was squarish, with the door facing the window. A dark red wooden bed sat right in the middle, with a nightstand to the left and a wardrobe to the right. In the corner by the window, at the foot of the bed, there was a narrow desk with an outdated desktop computer on it. Apart from a couple of green potted plants on the windowsill, there weren’t any decorations in the room. There were a lot of sticky tape marks on the white walls, like something—probably posters—had been stuck there and then ripped off.
Even though the room hadn’t been used in a while, it was pretty clean inside, and everything was arranged meticulously. I checked each of the cabinets in turn. There weren’t many clothes in the wardrobe, mostly comfortable and professional-looking outfits. A few storage boxes held thick winter clothes and a down comforter. The top drawer of the nightstand had some everyday items and basic skincare products. The bottom drawer had a heavy black gift box. Judging by the writing on it, it looked like it was originally for tea, but Ye Tang was using it as a storage box. Inside, there was Ye’s university acceptance letter, an old smart clapperboard, a roughly made cloth doll wearing a tiger-head hat, an unfinished turquoise amulet of Buddha, and a black fluffy cat-ear headband. I picked up each item and looked at it closely, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
So, all that was left was the computer. I plopped down at the desk and hit the power button. Luckily, Ye Tang hadn’t bothered with a login password. Once I was on the desktop, I immediately pulled up the file explorer. It was like a really organised library in there; all the files were neatly sorted and arranged with different number prefixes and time suffixes. The folder starting with “01” had all the work bits and pieces, like project plans, contracts, and event schedules. Ye had put individual passwords on all her work files, so I couldn’t actually see what was in them. The “02” folder was crammed with professional and how-to books in digital form. I flicked through them, and Ye seemed to have her fingers in a lot of pies. The “03” folder was packed with personal photos, which I quickly scrolled through, one after the other. Played back fast, the photos were like an old film reel, making it look like she was moving. I watched Ye Tang grow from a little girl with a pudding-bowl haircut in a red padded jacket into a primary school kid in a blue and white tracksuit, then a middle schooler in a white mandarin-collar shirt and a grey checked pleated skirt, and finally into an adult in a black formal suit. No matter what she was wearing or where she was, she always had this gentle, calm look on her face, like she just accepted whatever life chose to throw at her. Looking at these photos gave me an odd feeling of knowing her and being a bit let down at the same time.
Out of all the folders, the one that was hogging the most space was labelled “Reference Materials”. Not expecting much, I clicked on it and found that apart from a massive pile of images and video clips, there were also countless scripts, hand-drawn storyboard drafts, and really detailed breakdowns of classic films. I just clicked on one at random. Honestly, Ye Tang’s film analysis was miles ahead of mine as just a hobbyist, and even better than a lot of the filmmaking students I knew. When she broke down the composition, she’d pore over every single line and every bit of light in the frame, explaining exactly how the viewer’s eye would track across the screen. Just looking at these analyses, it was clear why she’d been the head of the film club. The sad thing was, when you compared them to the scripts and storyboard drafts she’d actually created herself, they were … nothing special. The more I looked, the more I felt sorry for Ye Tang. It was like the universe gave her this real love and eye for something, but didn’t give her the actual knack for doing it. It’s like handing someone a beautiful set of knives and forks and a roaring appetite, but with absolutely nothing to eat. If that’s not cruel, I don’t know what is.
After going through all the files in the folders, I really should have stopped there, but my curiosity wouldn’t let me. I opened the task manager and checked the app history. Ye Tang’s most-used application was her browser. I checked her browsing history and found a few websites she visited regularly. The one at the top of the list was a niche forum for sharing and discussing obscure films and TV shows. Users from all over the world would talk about and share the little-known media they’d watched on this forum. Since Ye had auto-login enabled, I easily found her posting history. Two years ago, Ye had created an account on this forum, and right after signing up, she’d posted a thread looking for an independent film called One Day. It was the only original thread she’d ever started on the forum.
Based on Ye’s description, the film she was looking for was made by artificial intelligence and was around 12 minutes long. It told the strange story of a university student named Gao Wen. Her description piqued the interest of a lot of forum users. They all started leaving comments on her thread, suggesting other films with similar plots that they’d seen, but Ye shot them all down. Someone asked Ye how she’d seen the film, and she replied that it was online, but as far as she knew, it had been screened at a student film festival in China. Based on the clues she dropped, some helpful users dug up the screening schedules for every student film festival held in China over the past decade, but One Day wasn’t on any of them. Ye explained that the film wasn’t an official entry; it was made by a student volunteer who was helping out at the festival. Apparently, a lot of volunteers would screen their own work before the official events started, and the organisers just looked the other way.
Even though that film festival lead went nowhere, it didn’t kill the forum users’ enthusiasm for One Day. As time went on, more and more people jumped on the bandwagon to find it. Some folks messaged people who’d worked at past student film festivals, asking if they’d ever seen it; others made trips to the China Film Archive, hoping to stumble across it in their collection; and a few even used the Internet Archive and found that someone had uploaded the film to some pretty obscure video site overseas, only to delete it soon after. Even though none of these attempts really panned out, they at least proved that One Day actually existed. As I browsed, I saw that there were still people in Ye’s original thread talking about where One Day could be. These people had basically formed a well-organized team, with some doing online searches, others hitting the pavement to look for clues in the real world, and still others using AI to recreate what Gao Wen looked like and some scenes from the film based on Ye’s descriptions, just to give the search a visual aid. The AI-generated Gao Wen had these deep-set eyes, with the corners and ends of his eyebrows drooping slightly, and his face narrowed from his temples down to his jawline, giving him this really gloomy vibe. Even though there wasn’t a drop of rain on him, the photos still looked kind of damp to me.
I got completely lost in the long forum thread, totally losing track of time. It wasn’t until the caregiver bot knocked on the door that I realized I’d been in Ye Tang’s room for a solid hour. I quickly shut down the computer, put everything back exactly where I’d found it, and then walked out of the room as calmly as I could, holding that black gift box. The bot scanned me from head to toe with infrared, making sure I hadn’t pocketed anything that wasn’t mine, then took the black box from me and carefully checked every item inside. It pointed at the tiger-head hat doll and said, “Madam Han Yu gave this to Ms. Ye Tang when she was a child. You may take it as a burial item for Ms. Ye Tang.”
Even though Ye Tang’s consciousness was probably barely there anymore, the word “burial item” still sounded a bit harsh. I didn’t say anything, but just watched as the bot continued to turn over those objects in the box. Another thing that caught its attention was the unfinished turquoise amulet of Buddha. The bot picked it up and examined it closely under the bright light. “Ms. Ye Tang was carving this piece before the accident. It may have been an item for sale.”
I neither agreed nor disagreed with the bot’s comment. I just took the amulet from it and touched the traditional Chinese character shou, meaning “longevity”, carved on the back. “So, when’s Han Yu’s birthday?”
“Madam Han Yu’s birthday for this year has already come and gone. It was last month.”
I wandered slowly over to Ye Tang’s grandmother. She hadn’t touched the candy the bot had given her and was clutching it tight instead, still mumbling away under her breath. Then it clicked—she wasn’t asking for candy, she was saying “Tang” as in Ye Tang.
I gave the amulet to her. She looked up at me, dropped the candy she was holding, took the amulet, and just clutched it in her hand, like she was miles away. I turned back to the caregiver bot. It didn’t bat an eyelid at what I’d done and just quietly handed me the black gift box.
I took the box and had another peek inside. All that was there was a university acceptance letter, an old smart clapperboard, that roughly made doll with the tiger-head hat, and a black fluffy cat-ear headband. That was the lot. That was everything Ye Tang, who’d been walking this earth for thirty-three years, was going to be able to take with her.
I left her place.
I made my way back to the station the same way I’d come. The train car was still empty. I sat by myself in the middle of the seats, just staring blankly out the window opposite. My legs were killing me from all the walking and those stairs; I was so knackered I couldn’t even be bothered to twitch a finger, but my brain was still buzzing. Even though I’d left Ye and her grandmother’s flat, my thoughts were still stuck in that tiny bedroom, glued to the computer screen. After reading that thread, I’d decided to switch gears. If finding One Day was Ye Tang’s final wish, then instead of cooking up a film just for her, I’d much rather give her the film she’d been searching so hard for as a last goodbye.
I was just turning over the weirdness of the One Day thing in my head, while the familiar clickety-clack of the train tracks lulled me into a state of half-asleep, half-awake. Just as I was about to nod off completely, that massive holographic ghost popped up again, perched right on top of a skyscraper, singing an ethereal tune. Its voice was like something out of those old stories about sirens, wooing every single person wandering around the city. Even though I was half-asleep, I could still hear that dreamy singing crystal-clear.
Back in my hometown, I established a work rhythm. All that burning the midnight oil had really taken its toll on my body. It dawned on me that I wasn’t a student anymore, I couldn’t just run myself ragged like that without paying for it. So, I got my sleep sorted, started hitting the gym at least three times a week, and made sure I didn’t spend more than two hours a day on anything film-related. This orderly life helped me get my energy back, and I was getting loads more done at work too.
Before, whenever I had a breather at work, I’d usually just nip off to the duty room. It had a bed to crash on and all my snacks, drinks, and my game console that I’d lugged from home. But lately, I’d stumbled on this new little hideaway—Ye Tang’s room. Her parents were both overseas, her grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and she didn’t have any colleagues or friends she kept in touch with. There was pretty much zero chance of anyone popping in to see her. I could just park myself in the chair next to her bed and dig around for info on One Day without having to worry about anyone bugging me. Sometimes, if I came across anything dodgy, I’d tell Ye Tang about it and see what she thought. Even though she wouldn’t say a word back, the room still had this kind of warm and friendly feeling about it.
I put together all the bits and pieces about One Day from Ye’s post and stuck them in a spreadsheet. Because I had what everyone else had already dug up as a starting point, it wasn’t long before I spotted the gaps in their search. The forum crowd had been hunting for One Day based on the story, the music, the set design, the costumes, even the way the light and colours looked. But nobody had given a second thought to who actually made the thing. The reason for that was all down to how Ye had described it. She’d gone into great detail about the plot and thrown in all sorts of other stuff, like what the soundtrack sounded like, what the main character was wearing, and what the plants looked like in the outdoor shots, but she’d never once mentioned who was behind the camera. That felt a bit off to me. Most films, even student ones, chuck up credits at the start and end. For Ye to remember the instruments in the score but not a single name of anyone who worked on it just didn’t feel right. Even if, for some crazy reason, the film didn’t have any opening titles or a cast and crew list at the end, the fact that Ye knew it was made by a student volunteer at the festival meant she must have had some idea who made it. She probably even knew the creator of One Day, which was why she had so much information about it. Her not saying anything felt more like she was deliberately avoiding the subject.
To try and get to the bottom of all this, I started poking around online for info about who made One Day. But I hit the same brick walls as all those helpful forum users. Since the internet wasn’t playing ball, I decided to try a different route. Ye Tang and I had been at different universities in the same city. She was in her third year when I was just finishing my Master’s. I’d been in the film club back in my undergrad days, and our club used to team up with the film clubs from a few other universities in town for events. I dug out the old email account I used back then and found the email addresses of some folks from other university film clubs I’d worked with. I fired off a message to each of them, asking if they’d ever seen or heard of One Day. I got three replies, and only one of them gave me a yes. The person who replied used to be the head of Ye’s university’s film club and still went back to hang out with the current members after graduating. He said he’d heard about the film when he was chatting with the younger students. The person who made it was Li Boyan, and Li was also in the film club.
Li Boyan.
I breathed the name quietly into the still hospital room. Ye Tang was out cold on the bed next to me. Her face was dead peaceful, like she was off in dreamland. She didn’t even twitch at the name.
So, who was Li Boyan?
I typed the name into the search bar. Unlike Ye Tang’s blank slate online, Li Boyan had her own pages on both local and international “who’s who” sites. I clicked on the local one first. Right after Li Boyan’s name, in brackets, were her birth and death dates, which meant the person who made One Day had already died. With a little pang of sadness, I started reading her life story.
Li Boyan was the same age as Ye Tang but had packed a whole lot more living into her years. Her parents split up when she was just three, and she hopped abroad to live with her dad, who was a software engineer. Thanks to him, she started learning software development and AI from a young age, and became a big shot on all sorts of tech forums by the time she was fourteen, eventually raking in millions selling cybersecurity services by sixteen. When Li was seventeen, her dad got killed in a car crash. Still a kid, she came back to China to live with her birth mother. Her mum, who already had a whole new family, grudgingly took in the daughter she hadn’t seen in years. Li picked up on her mother’s bitterness and, as soon as she got into college, cut ties with her and started fending for herself.
Once she got to college, Li got hooked on films and started playing around with AI to make her own indie flicks. Her first few tries went down a storm with her classmates, and one even picked up a gong at some national film festival. After graduating, Li landed a job at a big-shot software company in China. Five years down the line, she quit and set up her own media company, getting the ball rolling on her first proper commercial film. That interactive film, called Night Wanderer, used a VR tool Li had developed herself. It took a year and seven months to shoot and wrap up, but when it finally hit the screens, it bombed big time. To dodge the debt collectors who were after her, Li legged it solo to Santiago, Chile. Not long after that, the local news over there reported she’d passed away. Gas poisoning was the cause of death. They found her fully dressed, with a plastic bag over her head connected by a rubber tube to a gas pipe, and there was a bit of blood around the body. The local cops called it suicide. That was curtains for the one-time whiz kid.
I read through Li Boyan’s life and death a good few times, then scrolled right back to the top of the page, my mouse hovering over her picture. The young lady had one of those faces that just sticks with you—not just good-looking, but with this real spark and almost a heroic glint in her eyes. Her eyes, twinkling like morning stars, looked straight out of the screen at me, and you could practically see the ambition burning in them. Maybe it’s just a filmmaker thing, but I couldn’t feel a scrap of resentment towards those hungry eyes. Li Boyan had more dosh than me, more talent than me, and a hell of a lot more to lose, but she was braver about going after her dreams. Even if she ended up completely alone, dying in a foreign country, that was the ending she chose. I’m not one for gambling, but I respect anyone who plays their hand, come what may.
Before I knew anything about Li Boyan, I had just been trying to track down One Day for Ye Tang’s sake. But after finding out about Li, I got properly hooked on her as a person and her work. Even if Ye Tang hadn’t been in the picture, I guessed I’d still want to dig into this woman. After clocking off, I headed back to my flat and just camped out in my bedroom, staring at the screen, trying to piece together Li’s journey. I compared her entries on local and international websites to get a proper timeline of what she’d done, and using the links they mentioned, I tracked down her accounts on social media and tech forums. Li was someone who clearly loved to show off and share her thoughts, and she was a real pro at working social media. Right from her first year at college, she’d churned out thousands of posts online, racking up over four hundred thousand followers, and her posting history on all the tech forums went on for pages and pages. She used the same sign-off on every single platform: “If you decide to predict fate, do not fear facing the consequences.”
I went through all the digital footprints Li Boyan had left all over the internet, trying to sniff out where One Day might be hiding. Even though she was clearly sharp as a tack, easy on the eyes, and had this seriously enviable artistic flair, her online reputation was anything but spotless. Whether it was on social media or tech forums, loads of people weren’t shy about saying they couldn’t stand the sight of her. Judging by her posts, Li loved to flaunt her wealth and her skills, and she wasn’t afraid to put the boot in with other people, which got her a pretty loyal gang of haters. Another of her favourite things was posting these really cutting, no-nonsense reviews of popular films and TV shows. These reviews would often get picked up by those online news peddlers, which then brought in hordes of trolls who just loved to tear Li a new one. I counted at least three proper online witch hunts that happened just during her college years. These “ride-or-die” haters just kept hounding Li. Even after she’d passed away, the pointless abuse just kept on coming. Till now, you could still find fresh nasty comments under her posts.
I had to wade through the swamp of online hate just to try and sniff out even a tiny clue about One Day. Unfortunately, even though the trolls were having a go at Li from every angle you could think of, they never once brought up One Day. Most of the poison was aimed at that Night Wanderer film that had bled Li dry. She didn’t seem like she would have given a toss about personal insults, but that film was clearly her pride and joy. If anyone posted any dodgy info about it, she’d be there to set the record straight. But she just ignored anything that didn’t touch on that film. Even when people were calling her all sorts of names under her university graduation photo, saying she looked like a streetwalker and that she probably hadn’t even got her degree but was just faking it as a graduate, Li never stuck up for herself. She never bothered deleting comments or blocking users to tidy up her account. It was like keeping the heat on was more important to her than not getting a load of abuse.
I spent a good couple of hours going through every single thing Li had ever posted online, jotting down a few bits and bobs that weren’t in her “who’s who” blurb, but none of it had a thing to do with One Day. So, I swung the focus of my digging back to the real world. I asked the guy who’d given me Li Boyan’s name in the first place if he knew anything else about her. He said he’d never actually dealt with Li face-to-face, but just knew she had a pretty rotten reputation in the film club. If the club president back then hadn’t been a good friend of hers, with the way Li treated people, she’d have been given her marching orders ages ago.
I was sitting by Ye Tang’s bed and staring at the softly glowing screen, my eyes glued to the words “club president”. And then it just clicked—I’d completely overlooked something staring me in the face. To see if my hunch was right, I pulled up Li Boyan’s website, found the year she started college, and then went back to that article Ye’s old university film club had put out. Working backwards from when the article was posted and what year Ye was in at the time, I figured out when she must have started college. Bingo, the two years were a dead match. Li Boyan and Ye Tang weren’t just in the same year at university, they were both in the film club, so the odds were that that’s how they knew each other. That would explain why Ye Tang had seen One Day, which hardly anyone knew about—she was friends with the person who made it. But if that was the case, then Ye posting on that forum looking for One Day just didn’t add up. She could have just got straight in touch with Li.
I went back to the forum where Ye had posted and checked when she’d started the thread. She had posted about looking for One Day a month after Li had killed herself. By then, the news of Li’s death had already been splashed across the Chilean papers. Ye finding out her friend had killed herself and wanting to watch her old work as a way to remember her—that sort of made sense. But I still couldn’t get my head around why Ye hadn’t mentioned Li even once in her post.
Over the next few days, I just went through the motions at work, all the while my brain was buzzing about the connection between Ye Tang and Li Boyan. Whenever I had a spare minute, I’d sneak into Ye’s room and just sit by her bed, staring at her peaceful, sleeping face, totally lost in my own thoughts. I was really hoping she would wake up and give me some answers, and we could hunt down One Day together. But I knew deep down that was never going to happen.
The precious weekend just vanished in this hazy fog. Then, it was the start of another week. I was still sat by Ye Tang’s bed, just zoning out, staring at her face. In the quiet, the smartwatch on her wrist suddenly let out this sharp little ping. Four months after Ye had slipped into a coma, someone had sent her an email.
I got up and wandered over to the bed, gently lifted Ye Tang’s wrist, and checked out her smartwatch screen. All it showed was a “new email” alert—I couldn’t see who it was from or what it was about. I took the watch off and tried to unlock it with Ye’s fingerprint, but no luck there. Carefully, I pried open her eyelids and used her iris to unlock the watch.
Ye was using one of those standard free email accounts that doesn’t let you set the filters. Her inbox was absolutely rife with junk from online shops, phone companies, and banks. The email that had just landed was right at the top. The sender and the subject were both just a tiny little dot, which felt a bit suspect. I opened it, and the email itself was this formal letter:
Dear Ms. Ye Tang,
Hope you’re doing well. We are writing to you as representatives of an online group dedicated to the identification and preservation of lost media across various formats. Your production, the virtual reality film Night Wanderer, has garnered our considerable interest. Recognized as the most substantial independently financed VR cinematic endeavour within China and a notable instance of live-action independent filmmaking in recent years, we believe it warrants inclusion within the annals of internet history. Regrettably, despite exhaustive inquiries through numerous avenues, we have thus far been unsuccessful in locating a source copy of Night Wanderer.
In your capacity as the film’s producer, we respectfully request your assistance in this matter. Should you possess any resources or pertinent information that might facilitate our search for Night Wanderer, we would be most appreciative if you would consider contacting us via this email address. We assure you that our investigative efforts are strictly non-commercial, and any materials obtained will not be used for profit-driven purposes.
We await your response with anticipation and extend our sincere gratitude for your time and consideration.
Respectfully,
The Hunters
This email, which reeked of something fishy from the get-go, actually threw me a few unexpected bones. It had never even occurred to me that Ye Tang was the one who produced Night Wanderer, and I’d certainly never thought that Night Wanderer had gone missing, just like One Day. One Day was just Li Boyan’s amateurish attempt at film-making as a student, so it being hard to find made sense. But Night Wanderer was a commercial film that had actually seen the light of day. Even if VR films needed special kit to watch, which limited how many people could see it, there was no reason it should have just vanished off the face of the internet. I had this nagging feeling that both these films going completely missing was no accident. I read the email back and forth a good few times, and my eyes kept landing on this one phrase.
Lost media.
Being practically internet-native, I’d come across the term before. Basically, it’s any video, game, song, film, book—anything that used to be out there but has now disappeared or is a real pain to track down. People always think that in the internet age, everything leaves a footprint, but the truth is, in this never-ending digital tsunami, everything’s become easier to lose than it ever was. I once read this study that said about 11% of online shared stuff bites the dust in the first year after it’s put up, and after that, another tiny bit, like 0.02%, vanishes every single day. Over the last twenty years, something like 98.4% of links on the internet have just keeled over and died. People think this ocean of online info is going to last forever, but actually, it’s gone through numerous digital extinction events. Loads of cultural products that used to be all the rage have just turned into digital dust bunnies, sleeping all alone in the deep, dark abyss of forgotten things.
Clocking off work, I grabbed one of those instant hotpots from the convenience store, scarfed down a few mouthfuls when I got home, and then opened the laptop. I did a quick dive into lost media and these lost media hunters, and it really opened my eyes. Turns out, there were way more people out there obsessed with tracking down ghosts from the past than I ever would have guessed in a million years. They were not in it for the money, just spontaneously banded together in anonymous online hangouts or private forums, and they got a real buzz out of sharing any tiny scrap of info about lost media. To find some public service announcement that aired on some local TV channel twenty years ago, they would go through every single advertising yearbook published in those two decades, visit the TV station staff in person, and actively interview every Tom, Dick, and Harry who claimed they actually saw the thing. They did all this not just for the actual media itself, but also to get the history of the internet spot on. There was something strangely familiar about this seemingly pointless obsession. I somehow understood it.
So, I replied to the Hunters on Ye Tang’s behalf. I wrote them a long email, going into detail about why I was looking for One Day, what I’d done so far, and what I’d dug up. I also said that even though I was clueless about where Night Wanderer had gone, maybe we could help each other out. A day after I hit send, I got a reply. The Hunters were up for my suggestion and pinged over a conference ID and password, inviting me to join a holographic meet-up.
The last time I’d been in a holographic meeting was way back when I was working at the R&D centre. I had to join some cross-country meeting pretty much every month back then. I hardly ever spoke, mostly just watched the marketing and sales folks waffling on about a load of flashy charts. When I quit that job, I took all the office gear the company had given me, including the headset for meetings. All that white-collar fluff got thrown in a moving box and came back to my hometown with me, gathering dust ever since. Now, for the sake of One Day and Night Wanderer, I had to rummage through the bottom of that box and dig it all out.
I clicked on the meeting link five minutes early and saw that two of the Hunters had already logged in. Their usernames were Duyun Maojian and Taiping Houkui. I had a quick think and decided to go with a tea name myself. So, in the “Your Name” box, I typed in “Zhuyeqing”, then punched in the meeting password, clicked “Join”, and stuck on the headset.
The meeting room was done up like a Chinese tearoom. The south, north, and west walls were all in deep grey, but the east side had airy wooden-lattice screens as dividers. The floor was covered in tiles the same shade as the walls. Right in the middle of the room was a solid wooden table with three round-backed chairs. The two Hunters were sitting on one side of the table, waiting for me to show. White text floating above their heads told me who was who. Duyun Maojian was wearing black-rimmed glasses, a dark blue shirt, and grey joggers with elastic ankles—he looked like your typical science and tech student. The person next to him, Taiping Houkui, was dolled up in a grey-green halter-neck silk gown, as though she’d just rolled in from some posh dinner. And the avatar I’d picked was just a plain bloke in a black suit —not anyone to write home about. I wandered over to the empty round-backed chair and sat down, giving the two of them a slight nod across the long table that had a purple clay tea set, a white porcelain vase, and a little boxwood bonsai tree on it. They both politely said, “Hi.”
Taiping Houkui was the first to get down to business. Her voice was as clear as a bell and didn’t sound digitally altered at all. “We read your reply. The leads you gave us are really helpful. The main reason we wanted you to join us is to give you the lowdown on how we’re going about our search. That way, we can keep each other in the loop. What do you think?”
I nodded.
Taiping Houkui and Duyun Maojian gave each other a quick look. He nodded for her to go first. Taiping Houkui turned back to me, looking a bit defeated, and said, “Alright, I’ll kick things off then. I suppose I was the first one to put out a call online for Night Wanderer. That film was released over the National Day holiday three years back, but it got pulled from cinemas after only two weeks because it didn’t pull in enough at the box office. Usually, when a film finishes its run in theatres, it’s on streaming services. But Night Wanderer never landed on any of them. That’s what piqued my interest in the first place. I wanted to see just how bad it was that the distributors would rather swallow a loss than let it trash their online reputation. It wasn’t until later that I found out that Night Wanderer tanked at the box office for reasons that weren’t anything to do with the film itself.”
Intrigued, I asked, “Really? How come?”
Taiping Houkui went on, “You know about Virtual World, right?”
I nodded. What she said made me think back to that massive holographic scene I’d seen on the monorail the day I went to the provincial capital.
“Virtual World was launched on September 30th, three years ago. It was the first fully immersive holographic online game in the world, and when it launched, it was absolutely huge. Back then, pretty much every young person was queuing up outside holographic gaming arcades to have a crack at it. Places like cinemas, theatres, and concert halls were practically deserted. The box office takings for that year’s National Day holiday were over 70% down compared to the year before. Night Wanderer wasn’t a bad film, it just had seriously rotten luck.”
Being a bit of a film buff myself, even if just an amateur, I’d go along with Taiping Houkui’s idea that Virtual World hitting the scene was definitely one of the reasons Night Wanderer flopped, but I didn’t think it was the be-all and end-all. Even before Virtual World came out, going to the cinema was already on the way out thanks to the surge in AI-generated films. The main edge that commercial films had over indie ones was their massive scale, A-list actors, and those mind-blowing visuals and sound. But with AI getting so clever, that gap had shrunk to practically nothing. Once AI-generated stuff became the norm, injecting a load of cash into live-action films just wasn’t a smart move anymore. The investors were no longer keen on films; they were all piling into holographic tech and human-computer interaction, which were the shiny new toys. There was a massive clear-out of jobs for people in the film industry, but at the same time, the number of films and TV shows being churned out globally every year just kept smashing records. These days, anyone with a bit of know-how could use AI to cook up their own stories. These stories were flooding the internet, and no one knew if they were full of hidden gems or just plain rubbish, or if anyone was even going to bother watching them. For Li Boyan to bet the farm on a live-action film in that kind of environment—I didn’t know whether to call her daft or brave as hell. But I got where she was coming from. After all, no film fanatic could resist the chance to stand on a real set, telling professionals what to do to make a real film. If I’d been in her shoes, I’d probably have fallen for the same trap.
I couldn’t exactly bore the Hunters with all that pointless navel-gazing, so I just pointed out the flaw in Taiping Houkui’s thinking: “But that doesn’t explain why Night Wanderer didn’t just stream on some online platform. They could have at least clawed back some of their losses that way.”
Taiping Houkui agreed. “You’re right. We couldn’t wrap our heads around that either. Apart from that, there’s another thing that bugs me. Usually, with any film that’s had a cinema release, you’ll find some kind of dodgy copy doing the rounds online, even if it’s not as sharp as the official version. But I’ve scoured the whole internet, and I can’t find Night Wanderer anywhere. Not a camrip, not a tele-sync, not even a screener. Zilch. That’s why I’ve always been so intrigued by Night Wanderer.”
Taiping Houkui pulled up a virtual display and showed me a headshot of a young woman. She looked pale and a bit frail, but her eyes burned like torches in the dark. Taiping Houkui said, “Right, well, after I decided I was dead set on finding Night Wanderer, the first thing that popped into my head was the actors. I mean, actors make a living out of being seen, so they’re way more in the public eye than the folks behind the camera, and usually a lot easier to track down. I trawled the whole internet and only found one still from Night Wanderer, and there was just one actor in it. Using face recognition, I found her CV on this professional networking site. Her name’s Zhang Yixuan, and she’s working at an architecture firm in the capital these days. Back when they were filming Night Wanderer, she was still an architecture student. That film’s the only one she’s ever been involved in.”
Duyun Maojian and I just quietly stared at Zhang Yixuan’s mugshot. I totally got why Li Boyan would pick this non-professional actor for her first film. Even in just one photo, you could feel this real fiery energy simmering under Zhang Yixuan’s calm face.
Taiping Houkui swiped Zhang Yixuan’s picture to the side with her finger and opened up a new window, showing us her emails with Zhang. “Once I’d tracked down Zhang Yixuan, I sent her an email asking if she knew who had a copy of Night Wanderer. A week later, she got back to me saying she didn’t have it herself and didn’t know anyone who did. But she gave me a rough idea of what the film was about and dropped a few names of people she thought might be able to point me in the right direction: Liu Miao, the cinematographer for the film, Lin Maocheng, the art director, and Ye Tang, the producer.”
Taiping Houkui pulled up photos of these three. Their faces lined up neatly below the previous two pages, like three peas in a pod. “These three were pretty much small fry in the industry. I tried looking them up. Ye Tang’s got absolutely zero online presence. Liu Miao had a social media account where he just used to post snaps he’d taken. That account’s been dead for five years. I sent him a private message and didn’t hear back for a month. Liu Miao eventually said he didn’t want to give away any info about Night Wanderer because Li Boyan had copped a load of online flak about it when she was alive. He felt if Night Wanderer ever got released online, even more haters would come crawling out of the woodwork to have a go at Li. I explained to Liu Miao that I didn’t have any bad intentions and definitely wouldn’t use Night Wanderer to bash Li, but he stopped responding after that. As for Lin Maocheng, she’s changed careers and now does set design for a holographic game company. I sent her an email and still haven’t had a reply. So, that’s pretty much where my digging ended. Your turn,” she rounded up, looking over at Duyun Maojian.
With me and Taiping Houkui both looking expectantly at him, Duyun Maojian awkwardly cleared his throat and sounding almost reluctant, started talking, “I saw her post on the lost media forum.” He used his thumb to gesture towards Taiping Houkui. “I was also pretty keen on Night Wanderer, so I set up a chat group, just for sharing and learning about any leads related to the film. Both of us are in it. At first, there were only five or six of us in the group. But then the post started gaining traction, and more people piled in. The day after she got that reply from Liu Miao, this new person just turned up in the group. They’d never posted in the forum, and we’ve no idea where they’d got the group invite from—they just popped up out of nowhere.”
Duyun Maojian’s fingertips twitched, and a string of gibberish-looking characters appeared in mid-air: “carpediem69”. That must have been the mysterious user’s name. He went on, “After this person joined, I asked if they’d come from the forum. They said no, they were just dropping by for a look. I told them they could just lurk if they wanted, but they didn’t get back to me.
“A dozen or so hours later, I’d completely forgotten this person was even in the group, and then they suddenly shared this picture in the chat. It looked like a screengrab or a still from Night Wanderer. None of us in the group had ever seen it before. I downloaded the image and threw it into a bunch of search engines, but couldn’t find any matches. I asked that person where they’d got the picture from, but they wouldn’t spill the beans, just said they didn’t get why we were so interested in the film, that it was just a tool Li Boyan tried using to make money. Me and the others all felt something was off, so we asked if they’d ever been part of the Night Wanderer crew, and what their job was.
“Then, they just bailed from the group without saying a word. I checked the account, and it looked like a burner, one of those throwaway ones you buy. Apart from the group I set up, that ID hasn’t shown up anywhere else.”
Duyun Maojian looked like he wanted to carry on, but I held up my hand to cut him off. “Could I have a quick look at that picture?”
Duyun Maojian and Taiping Houkui exchanged another glance. After getting the nod from Taiping Houkui, Duyun Maojian turned a picture towards me. I dragged the image closer, zoomed right in, and carefully checked out the texture and the way the light and shadows fell. It didn’t take me long to figure it out. “That picture’s AI-generated,” I said. “It’s not a real photo.”
Duyun Maojian shot me a look of agreement. “Yeah, that’s what we thought too. Based on Zhang Yixuan’s rundown of the Night Wanderer plot, that scene should have been in the film. So, this person either worked on the crew or he’s actually seen the film.”
I took it a step further. “This person was definitely on the crew, and they were in the art department, no doubt about it.”
“What makes you say that?” Taiping Houkui butted in suddenly, after being quiet for a while.
I flipped the picture around so it was facing both of them and explained, “I used to be in the film club back in college, and I was involved in creating a fair number of student films. So, I know a bit about how films get made and what everyone’s job entails.” I pointed at the picture. “This is a scene design sketch for the film, what some people call a mood board or a concept drawing. After the art team gets the script, they first have to dig up all sorts of reference material based on the story outline, do their initial brainstorming and get their ducks in a row, and then they have a meeting with the director, the writers, the producers, and other relevant departments in the crew, like the camera team, the costume department, and post-production, to get the lay of the land.
“Once they’ve done all that, the art people will work on these visual representations of all the scenes in the film, then they’ll show them to the director and the other departments for feedback and tweak them based on what they say. Only when the scene designs are signed off on, can the crew actually start scouting locations and filming. Back when AI wasn’t so clever, the scene design stage would all be done by hand. Nowadays, pretty much every film crew uses AI to produce these visuals, which saves a ton of time and manpower. Seeing as this person was able to dig up the original scene design drawing, he or she was most likely part of the art department.”
Both of the Hunters nodded in agreement with my take. Duyun Maojian chipped in, “It’s possible that after Liu Miao got your private message, he mentioned it to some of the old colleagues, which is why ‘carpediem69’ popped up in the group to try and throw a spanner in the works. Apart from them, we had another guy who seemed like he was part of the crew join the group.”
“Who was that then?”
“Someone called Walton. This was about a month after ‘carpediem69’ vanished. He just suddenly appeared in our group. He hadn’t posted anything in the lost media forum either, so we were all a bit suspicious of his intentions. But Walton was pretty straight-up; he came right out and said who he was, and spilled a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff about the Night Wanderer crew.”
“What did he have to say?”
Duyun Maojian pointed at Taiping Houkui with his thumb once more. “Someone in the group wanted to see Liu Miao’s reply again, so she stuck up the screenshot of his email. But when Walton saw what Liu had said, he jumped in with this massive rant. He said Li Boyan definitely copped a load of online abuse, but she wasn’t exactly an angel herself. She treated the crew like skivvies, constantly bossing them about, and often didn’t cough up their wages on time. As a director, she never tried to pull the team together; instead, she’d stir up trouble between people for kicks.
“And when Night Wanderer flopped, Li went online playing the victim card, saying she’d sunk all her savings into the film. But the truth was, she still owed the car hire place and the hotel where they had the premiere party lots of cash. Apart from the softer ones like Liu Miao and Ye Tang, everyone else on the crew hated Li’s guts.”
“Do you think he was telling the truth?”
Duyun Maojian didn’t hesitate for a second. “Yeah, I’d put money on it. He mentioned a load of really specific stuff that someone who hadn’t been on the crew would have no way of knowing. He talked about the studio that made the trailer for Night Wanderer and the debt collectors who chased Li halfway to Chile. We checked those names later, and they were all correct. He also said a few things about how the crew were treated. When Li was hiring, she specifically went for young, wet-behind-the-ears types who were desperate to make a name for themselves. Those kids didn’t have a clue about the real world, didn’t know how to read a contract, and were completely at Li’s mercy before they even started work. That all lines up with what we’ve heard from other people who worked on the film.”
“Did you ever get around to asking him who had the master copy of Night Wanderer?”
“Yeah, we did. He said Li was the only one who ever had the original. After Night Wanderer flopped, Li flogged off the rights dirt cheap to some other company. None of the crew ever saw a penny of that cash, or even heard a whisper about her paying off her debts. Walton quit the group right after answering that. He’d been using a burner account too.”
I scribbled down a few key words on my electronic notepad. “Apart from all that, have you guys got any other leads?”
“Yeah, we do.” Duyun Maojian opened a foreign video website. “You’ve probably seen this site before, right?”
Looking at the familiar banner, I nodded. I’d seen this site in Ye Tang’s post when she was trying to track down One Day. Someone had uploaded the original version of One Day to this site, then deleted it afterwards. The profile picture of that person was the default one, and the username was “USER” followed by what looked like random numbers.
Duyun Maojian clicked on the user’s avatar, taking us to the user page. Everything you could fill in was just blank. “I stumbled across this website when I was searching Li Boyan’s name. This user had uploaded some of Li Boyan’s early works, then deleted the lot later on. Luckily, this person hadn’t shut down the account, so I managed to get in touch with him through a private message on the site. He didn’t want to give his real name or any personal details, just said he was at college with Li Boyan. He’d meant to upload them privately, but accidentally set them to public, which is why he deleted all the videos he’d put up. He’d secretly kept copies of these films without Li knowing. He was worried that Li would sue him for copyright, so he didn’t want to risk it.”
“So he should still have some of Li Boyan’s stuff, shouldn’t he?”
Duyun Maojian shook his head, looking upset. “Nah, used to, but not anymore.”
“Why?”
“Well, after he deleted those videos he’d uploaded on the site, his computer caught a virus. Someone had sent him a dodgy-looking work email. He thought the attachment was some kind of digital contract, so he clicked download, and his computer started crawling with a Trojan. The hacker used the Trojan to break into his cloud storage and wiped a lot of files, including all his copies of Li’s works. Now he hasn’t got a single film she ever made.”
“Doesn’t that sound a bit too convenient?”
Duyun Maojian gave a wry chuckle. “Yeah, it’s a bit fishy, isn’t it? These backdoor Trojans are usually used to link up infected computers to create a botnet that can be used for all sorts of shady business. But this hacker just used it to delete some random files, almost like they were deliberately trying to stop us finding Li Boyan’s work. If that guy hadn’t shown me photos of his computer after it got hit, I wouldn’t have bought his story myself.”
“When did his computer get hit?”
Duyun Maojian looked at his sleeve, thinking for a bit, then replied, “Must have been after Night Wanderer got pulled from the cinemas.”
“Was that before Li Boyan killed herself?” I pressed.
Taiping Houkui followed my reasoning right away. “You think Li Boyan was the one who did it?”
“It’s a possibility we can’t rule out,” I reminded them. “Li made a mint selling cybersecurity tools when she was only sixteen. She’d know her way around a Trojan virus like the back of her hand.”
Taiping Houkui didn’t look convinced. “Why would she do that, though? Why would a creator want to scrub all traces of their own work off the internet?”
I said calmly, “Because those works were no longer something to be proud of, but something to be ashamed of.”
The two Hunters went quiet. After a long pause, Duyun Maojian finally answered my question. “Yeah, his computer definitely got hit before Li took her own life. But just based on that, saying Li was the hacker is still a bit of a leap, isn’t it? It’s been so long now; even if we wanted to trace the hacker’s IP address, we wouldn’t have a hope in hell.”
“It’s just a hunch, mind you. I could be barking up the wrong tree. But the fact that this guy pops up online saying he’s got copies of Li’s stuff, and then his computer gets a hammering from a Trojan practically the next minute—that’s just too much of a coincidence for my liking. I’m not buying that it was just a bit of bad luck.”
The two Hunters didn’t really commit one way or the other about what I’d said. Taiping Houkui glanced at her watch. “Right, well, we’ve pretty much covered everything we wanted to. Any other questions from your end? If not, we can have a quick chat about where we go from here with the digging.”
“Nope, all good here. What’s the next step for you two?”
Taiping Houkui had clearly given this some thought and had a pretty solid plan. “We reckon our best bet is to try and track down the current owner of the rights to Night Wanderer. Li Boyan only ever made one commercial film, so her contacts in the film world probably weren’t that extensive. Plus, seeing as Night Wanderer was a massive flop, her options wouldn’t have been great. We’re planning to get in touch with the distribution company that handled Night Wanderer and see if they’ve got any leads.”
That was pretty much the best idea I could think of at the moment too. So, to return the favour, I laid out my plan: “I’m going to try and have a word with Liu Miao and Lin Maocheng. They might be able to shed some light on things.”
After hearing what I said, both of them pulled a sceptical face. Taiping Houkui was pretty blunt. “Liu Miao and Lin Maocheng only ever worked with Li Boyan on Night Wanderer. One Day was something she made back in her student days; they probably haven’t even seen it. You’d be better off carrying on trying to track down Li’s old college friends. You might have more luck there.”
I politely declined. “Yeah, I get your point. But I still want to have a chat with them.”
Seeing I wasn’t for turning, Taiping Houkui didn’t push it and pinged over their contact details to me. That informal holographic meeting then came to an end. After Duyun Maojian logged off, Taiping Houkui got up to make a move too. I called out to her just before she stepped out of the virtual tearoom. “Just one more thing. If you’d rather not answer, no worries.”
Taiping Houkui turned back to face me, casually flicking a lock of hair away from her face. “Fire away.”
“If the person who made it specifically didn’t want their lost media found, would you still go looking for it and try to bring it back into the world?”
Taiping Houkui answered without batting an eyelid. “Yeah, I would.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I’m on the hunt for lost media to satisfy my own curiosity, and what anyone else thinks just doesn’t come into it for me. Whether the creator or some random busybody objects, I couldn’t give a toss. Once a piece of work is out there, it’s no longer just the creator’s to call their own.”
“But the team behind Night Wanderer are against it being seen online. That film was Li Boyan’s absolute downfall. For the rest of the key players, it only dredges up bad memories. What you’re doing isn’t rescuing Li’s forgotten work, it’s ripping open everyone’s old wounds. Even if that’s the case, you’re still okay with it?”
Taiping Houkui let out this little chuckle that could have meant anything. Even though I’d challenged her, she still didn’t seem remotely bothered. “That’s where we see things differently. You’re looking for One Day for Ye Tang’s sake. We’re looking for Night Wanderer for our own. My guess is you’ll never be a Hunter, which is, I suppose, probably for the best.”
With that, Taiping Houkui logged off immediately. I was left standing on my own in the empty virtual tearoom, feeling like I’d been completely misunderstood. I wasn’t the selfless do-gooder Taiping Houkui seemed to think I was. My digging into Ye Tang’s life, even going into her flat, was all just to feed my own curiosity. The reason I wanted to talk to Liu Miao and Lin Maocheng was also to figure out what went down on the Night Wanderer set back in the day. I was practically gobbling up Ye Tang’s and Li Boyan’s past, but when it came to Li’s actual work, I was beginning to get cold feet, wanting to preserve some final bit of dignity for someone who was gone. It wasn’t out of pure sympathy—it was more like a fellow creator feeling a pang of: “There but for the grace of God go I.”
By the time I took off the headset, the sky outside was filled with stars. I didn’t have time to admire the pretty night sky; I quickly bashed out two emails, one to Liu Miao and one to Lin Maocheng, asking if I could meet them face-to-face. Once that was done, I had a quick wash and hit the hay. My dreams that night were a chaotic flurry, comprising shards of incomprehensible fragments. Ye Tang, Li Boyan, Gao Wen, and the two Hunters all made an appearance. In my dreams, Taiping Houkui’s eyes were as bright as Venus in the early morning, but devoid of its heat, colder than Uranus.
The night vanished in a blink. When my alarm woke me the next morning, my hand went straight for the smartwatch on the nightstand to see if Liu Miao and Lin Maocheng had pinged me back. Seeing they hadn’t, I dragged myself out of bed, grabbed whatever was in the fridge for breakfast, slung my bag over my shoulder, and headed out the door.
The hospital was its usual, eerily quiet self. I went through the motions of checking all the medical kit in my patch, then double-checked and uploaded the latest test results. Afterwards, I had a quick chat with my colleague on the next shift, and then slipped into Ye Tang’s room like clockwork. She looked even more gaunt than the last time I’d seen her, and her vitals had taken another dip. I helped her roll over, then used tweezers to gently dab her mouth with cotton wool soaked in chlorhexidine mouthwash. Only when I was sure she wasn’t showing any discomfort did I park myself beside her and start sifting through the info I’d gathered.
As soon as I opened my digital notepad, all the keywords I’d jotted down before jumped out at me, floating around like planets in space. The most glaring one, the biggest one, was “money”. I dragged it closer with my finger.
No doubt about it, money was at the heart of the Night Wanderer crew’s falling out. “carpediem69” accused Li Boyan of using the film as a cash cow. Walton thought Li hadn’t lost all her money on the film like she made out, and that the rest of the crew hadn’t been paid what they were owed. If they were telling the truth, that would mean the investment in Night Wanderer was a load of hot air, and Li had been secretly feathering her own nest by making the film. Personally, I didn’t think that was very likely. With Li’s brains and talent, she had plenty of ways to make a decent living without having to wade into the murky world of filmmaking. Even if, against all the odds, she had actually made a killing off Night Wanderer, she could have easily taken the money and sodded off to some other country to live the high life, instead of ending up all alone in a grotty flat in Santiago, Chile, and killing herself. “carpediem69” and Walton clearly had a grudge against Li Boyan, so I didn’t really trust what they said.
The second keyword I’d jotted down was “copyright”. Walton mentioned Li selling off the rights to Night Wanderer to some other company for peanuts. That struck me as a tad odd. Even though I’m no expert, I know enough about the film world to know it’s one of the most cutthroat, snobby places around. Night Wanderer was a total box office flop, so there’s no way its copyright would have fetched a decent price. If Li had used that cash to clear her debts or start afresh, it would have made some sort of sense, but the fact is, she killed herself not long after getting the money. Why would she sell the rights to her passion project? What on earth did she do with the money? Those two questions were really nagging at me.
The third keyword was “suicide”. Walton claimed Li hadn’t paid off any debts at all and had actually made a bit of money selling the rights. If he was telling the truth, then even though Night Wanderer had tanked, Li hadn’t exactly been on her last legs. She had money and skills; she could have easily carried on living abroad as a regular person, maybe even had a pretty comfortable life. But she had thrown that all away, chosen to end it all, and even seemed to have scrubbed her work off the internet before she went. I just couldn’t wrap my head around why Li had been so final about it. And then there was the fact that she had picked Chile as her final resting place. As far as I knew, she’d never had any connection to that country in her life, yet she’d chosen to spend eternity there. That was another thing that didn’t sit right with me.
The last keyword was “identity”: the Hunters still hadn’t managed to pin down who those two dodgy users were who’d gate-crashed their chat group. I didn’t have a clue who Walton was, but I had a feeling that “carpediem69” and Lin Maocheng were somehow connected. Duyun Maojian thought that Liu Miao might have let slip something to old colleagues after getting my private message, which is why “carpediem69” showed up in the group to try and throw them off his scent. That theory seemed to hold water for me. “carpediem69” was tight with the cinematographer and was also in the art department—the first person who sprang to mind who ticked both those boxes was Lin Maocheng.
To see if my hunch was right, I opened up Lin Maocheng’s CV that Taiping Houkui had sent me. Lin had these deep-set eyes and a rounded nose—a classic Southern Chinese look. She’d done both her undergraduate and Master’s degrees at a top art school, so her family was probably pretty well-off. I used a special converter tool to check Lin’s birthdate in the lunar calendar, and her lunar birthday just happened to be June 9th. That pretty much nailed the identity of “carpediem69” for me. Liu Miao felt sympathy and admiration for Li Boyan, but Lin Maocheng, who was his good friend, absolutely couldn’t stand her. I really wanted to know where that massive difference in opinion came from, and I was hoping that meeting these two in person would give me some answers.
I’d figured it would be a few days before I heard back from those two. But before I even finished my shift, Liu Miao sent me a load of messages, all about Ye Tang. In my email, I’d mentioned that Ye Tang was barely hanging on and that her one wish was to track down One Day. Liu said he hadn’t actually seen the film, but he was up for helping me out. He also wanted to have a holographic meeting with me. Unlike the Hunters, he had one extra condition: I had to show up as myself, no messing about with avatars.
I’m not exactly fussed about showing my real face—after all, in this day and age with all the tech we’ve got, privacy’s more of a pipe dream than a reality. So I said “yes” to Liu Miao’s request without much hesitation. About half an hour later, he sent over a conference ID and password, inviting me to meet him at nine that evening. I replied with a quick “Sorted”, then used my smartwatch to snap a photo of Ye Tang in her hospital bed. I reckoned Liu might want to see what she looked like now.
After work, I didn’t go anywhere, but just ordered a takeaway from my favourite stew joint, scoffed it down at home, then killed some time doing weights while listening to music. Bang on nine o’clock, I headed back to my bedroom and stuck on the headset. Liu Miao had picked this little art deco-styled bar for our meet-up. The walls and leather sofas were this vibrant red, and the spotlights on the ceiling looked like rows of distant stars, making every non-playable character (NPC) look like an actor bathed in stage lights. Liu was sitting on his own in a booth by the wall, staring into his drink and looking lost in thought. The various NPC patrons around him, all of different races, were tucking into their food and chatting quietly. Their soft murmurs reminded me of white noise you use to help you drift off.
I plonked myself down in the seat opposite Liu and said hello. He looked a bit flustered as he mumbled a greeting back and shook my hand. He looked pretty much the spitting image of the photo Taiping Houkui had shown me, just with a few more lines etched around his eyes and a bit more grey peppered throughout his hair. He was kitted out in a dark-green suede hunting jacket over a grey-blue shirt and brown tie, and his hair and goatee were all neat and tidy—pretty much fitting my stereotypical image of someone in the creative arts. Before I could even properly introduce myself, he blurted out, “How’s Ye Tang holding up?”
I showed him the photo I’d taken earlier of Ye looking all frail in her hospital bed and gave him a brief rundown of how things were. When he heard that the chances of Ye coming round were next to nil, Liu’s eyes dropped, and he gave a sad, self-deprecating laugh. “I always thought she would be the last one standing from our lot, seeing as she was the one who lived the most normal life. Looks like that saying about the good die young is true as ever.”
I just looked at him in silence. As someone I’d only just met, it wasn’t really my place to comment on his feelings about Ye. Thankfully, he didn’t get too bogged down in the past, and after pulling himself together a bit, he got down to business. “Thanks for everything you’re doing for Ye Tang. Even though I haven’t seen this film you mentioned, if there’s anything at all I can do to help out, just say the word.”
“You’re too kind. I work at the hospital; looking after patients is just part of the job,” I said, trying to tread carefully as I got to the real reason I was there. “One Day is one of Li Boyan’s films. I was hoping to learn a bit more about her. Do you know if she had any of those online hangouts where people stash their work? Like cloud storage or video websites?”
“No, I doubt it. Li Boyan made her name in cybersecurity tools. She was always dead serious about keeping info safe and never kept anything important in cloud storage, let alone video websites. Plus, she was really strict about copyright. I remember when Night Wanderer came out, some were sharing dodgy clips online, and she immediately sent them lawyer’s letters. So, you won’t find any official copies of her work online,” Liu Miao replied gravely.
I nodded to show I was following. “There’s one more thing I’m a bit puzzled about. Li made quite a few films back in her student days. But after she died, Ye Tang only put out a call looking for One Day. Do you reckon that film held some special meaning for her?”
Liu frowned. “I’m not sure either, to be honest. The whole thing about Ye Tang posting online to find Li Boyan’s work doesn’t really add up for me. Knowing those two, she should have copies of all of Li Boyan’s films.”
I latched onto the key bit of what he said. “So, Ye Tang and Li Boyan were pretty tight, then?”
Liu chuckled, like I’d asked something completely obvious. “If they weren’t close, do you think Li Boyan would have made Ye Tang the producer of Night Wanderer?”
“Fair enough, but I heard that Li was always late with the wages during the filming of Night Wanderer. Even the best of friends would struggle with that, wouldn’t they?”
The mention of money seemed to put a downer on Liu’s mood. “Yeah, that did happen. Though to be fair, you can’t lay all the blame at her door. The original filming schedule was only thirty days. But when we were shooting on location, we got hammered by a typhoon and had to push back the filming dates, which meant the costs for the crew and locations shot up. Then there was that collapse on set, where some of the crew got injured and the emergency services came to have a look. They told us to stop work and sort things out, which cost a fair bit more money too. Part of the post-production was outsourced to a studio abroad, and they’d barely started the job before they went on strike. In the end, we had to switch to another studio, and we didn’t get all our initial payment back from the first lot. The crew’s accounts were always open to us heads of department; everyone knew about these problems, so no one really complained. We just hoped it would all come good once the film was released. But then … “
He trailed off, his head bowed as he wrung his hands. I just looked at the top of his head in silence. If we were in the real world, I’d definitely offer him a cup of tea or hot water. But we were just facing each other’s virtual selves, so I could only quietly wait for him to get his thoughts together. After a bit, I carefully asked, “The producer would have been the one in charge of the crew’s finances, right?”
“Yeah, pretty much. Ye Tang was the one handling all the money.”
“Didn’t Li Boyan ever get involved? I heard she was manipulative on set.”
Liu shook his head firmly. “No, nothing like that. Li Boyan could be a bit of a pain in the arse with some people, but she always treated Ye Tang with respect. Out of the whole crew, Ye Tang was the one Li Boyan trusted through and through.”
“Do you reckon Ye Tang was up to the job as a producer?”
That question seemed to flick a switch in Liu. He started going on about how much he admired Ye. “You couldn’t have asked for a better producer than Ye Tang. She was like the mother hen of the crew. Li Boyan’s head was always in the clouds with the filming side of things. Everything else—the food, the digs, the locations, the gear—that was all Ye Tang’s bag. She even schmoozed the investors and the distributors. Back then, Ye Tang would be on set with us all day, then she’d have to go to all sorts of posh dinners and meetings in the evening. She ended up in hospital a few times from running herself ragged. Everyone on the crew knew that.”
“So, if I’m getting this right, Li was in charge of the actual shooting and making of the film, and Ye was the one holding the purse strings and sorting out all the other stuff.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much the standard setup for a director and producer.”
“So, there’s no way Li could have secretly squirrelled away the crew’s money without Ye knowing, right?”
Liu Miao’s expression darkened. “Have you heard something?”
I didn’t deny it. “I’ve heard a few whispers from other crew members. Their take on the crew’s finances is a bit different from yours.”
Liu Miao took a deep breath, his nostrils twitching slightly with annoyance. “I don’t know who you’ve been listening to. But I can tell you straight up, there’s no chance Li Boyan would have done something like that. If she was just after the money, she wouldn’t have bothered making a film in the first place. She earned enough in the software company to keep her going. Back then, to get Night Wanderer off the ground, she remortgaged her house and car. Do you really think someone like that would be pinching the crew’s wages?”
“But she didn’t just owe the crew wages, she also owed the car hire place and the hotel a packet. Surely, she wouldn’t have been so skint that she couldn’t even cough up those smaller amounts?”
Liu let out a heavy sigh. “It wasn’t that she didn’t want to pay; she genuinely didn’t have the cash. Because of all those unexpected cock-ups we had earlier, Night Wanderer’s budget ballooned by nearly 50% from when we started to when we wrapped. Towards the end, we were practically on our uppers, and everyone was racking their brains trying to cut corners. A lot of the clothes and props in the film were things we bodged together from bits and pieces we’d scavenged from other film sets. To save a few quid, we couldn’t even afford to rent cleaning bots; everyone took turns to clean and cook. With all that going on, how could we not have ended up in the red?”
“Did she ever cough up the money later on?”
“I wouldn’t know. After the film got pulled, Li Boyan never got back in touch with any of us. The next I heard, she was in Chile. Seeing as she’d left the country, I reckon she probably didn’t.”
“I heard that after Night Wanderer bombed, Li pawned the rights for next to nothing to some other company. Is that true?”
“Yeah, that’s right. She definitely pulled a fast one there, didn’t even bother to have a word with us about it.”
“Do you have any idea what she blew that cash on?”
“Who knows? Didn’t exactly see any of it in our pay packets,” Liu said, chuckling dryly.
“Why didn’t Ye Tang try to talk her out of it? It was all your blood, sweat, and tears, after all.”
Liu Miao was dead certain. “Ye Tang didn’t know a thing about it. When she heard the rights to Night Wanderer had been sold, she practically flew into a rage. She kept calling Li Boyan on all sorts of different numbers, but Li Boyan just blanked her. Those two had a falling out at that point.”
“Because of the box office flop?”
Liu waved his hand dismissively. “Nah, it wasn’t anything to do with that. Yeah, Night Wanderer didn’t exactly set the world alight at the box office, but compared to other films, it actually held its own alright. Its cinema occupancy was the highest of anything out at the same time, and the audience and critic reviews weren’t half bad either.
“That year, Virtual World just dropped online out of the blue with no fanfare and caught all the National Day films completely off guard. Everyone knew the bad box office numbers were down to the wider situation, and they weren’t any one person’s fault. No one held Li Boyan responsible for the takings. The problem was her attitude. As soon as the first day’s box office figures landed, she just went to ground, wouldn’t answer our calls or get in touch—no leadership whatsoever from the director. That’s why the rest of the crew got so fed up with her later on.”
“So, it sounds like Li basically ghosted the entire crew. Why do you say she and Ye had a falling out?”
On this topic, Liu Miao sounded a bit less sure of himself. “About two days before Night Wanderer got pulled from the cinemas, Ye Tang and Li Boyan had a huge fight. Li Boyan practically trashed Ye Tang’s office. I was just outside the door at the time and caught bits and bobs—sounded like they were having a row about some kind of extra agreement, but the specifics were lost on me. Anyway, after that, the two of them were properly at each other’s throats.”
I finally heard something that pricked up my ears and leaned forward a bit. “Was it Ye Tang who wanted to call it quits with Li Boyan?”
Liu shook his head. “I honestly couldn’t say. Night Wanderer was a box office disaster, none of us got the wages we were owed, and no one wanted to talk about the project anymore. But I really didn’t see them reaching that point. Li Boyan always leaned on Ye Tang a lot. The real backbone of our crew was Ye Tang, not Li Boyan.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Li Boyan had talent, she had vision, but she wasn’t a people person. It’s not that she was completely clueless about social niceties; she could actually read people pretty well and knew how to play the game. She was good at buttering up people who were higher up the food chain than her—the ones with power—but she couldn’t be bothered to be nice to those she thought were beneath her. Every time we cocked something up or put our foot in it, she’d make it crystal clear how little patience she had. Ye Tang was never like that.”
“So, Ye Tang was well-liked by the crew, then?”
“Ye Tang was a gem, definitely. She wasn’t exactly a creative genius, but when it came to getting a project settled, she was top-notch. When she gave us tasks, she’d already thought about all the potential problems we might run into, and she was always fair when it came to giving credit where credit was due. Li Boyan just told us to get on with it and never gave a toss about our personal lives. Ye Tang was different; she knew how many mouths each of us had to feed, what our folks did for a living—the whole shebang. If we had some trouble at home, she’d go out of her way to help us juggle our work so we could go and sort things out.
“Towards the end of filming, the crew weren’t getting paid. There was this one colleague in the production team whose house roof back home had sprung a leak and needed fixing. Ye Tang dipped into her own pocket and secretly gave him some money so he could go home, sort his house out, and then come back to work. Li Boyan would never have done anything like that. So, the crew grumbled about Li Boyan behind her back a lot, but you never heard a bad word said about Ye Tang.”
What he said brought me back to Ye Tang, lying in that hospital bed day in, day out, just a bag of bones. No matter how many people had relied on and raved about her in the past, all that stuff didn’t count for squat now. She was like how Li Boyan had ended up being, staring down a gloomy dead end.
I kept all those thoughts to myself and carried on asking questions like nothing was amiss. “Seeing as you all had such a big issue with Li Boyan, why didn’t Ye Tang have a heart-to-heart with her? Li trusted her so much; surely she would have listened to her.”
Liu Miao sighed again. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But to be honest, I don’t know if Ye Tang ever tried to have a word. She always just let Li Boyan walk all over her. Whether it was work or her personal life, Ye Tang was always picking up the pieces. Even the contracts with the investors were signed by Ye Tang and her team, because Li Boyan was throwing a fit and couldn’t be bothered to go out. Loads of people on the crew used to joke that Ye Tang was Li Boyan’s keeper.”
“Why was she so good to Li? With her skills, she could have easily left Li and landed a decent job.”
“More likely than not, it was because of Li Boyan’s talent. Ye Tang wasn’t exactly a creative person herself, but she was drawn to the arts, so she was easily bowled over by talented people. She told me herself that she really looked up to Li Boyan back when they were at college, and she could talk on for ages about Li Boyan’s films. When Li Boyan got into a bit of trouble off campus in her third year, Ye Tang even covered for her, which ended up with her getting the boot as head of the film club.”
“So, they knew each other back in their student days?” I asked, putting on a surprised act.
“Yeah. Didn’t you know that?”
“I just knew that they did their undergrad at the same university; I didn’t know they already knew each other.”
“They hit it off straight away when they started. They weren’t on the same course, but they met in the film club. Li Boyan’s temper was way worse back then. If it hadn’t been for Ye Tang, she wouldn’t have lasted even five minutes in the film club.”
“What sort of trouble did Li get into?”
“I don’t have the exact details, but it must have been pretty serious, even the university top brass got wind of it. Li Boyan didn’t even get her degree because of it. She used to laugh it off when we were hanging out.”
My mind went back to Li’s comments section online. Under a graduation snap she’d posted from college, some hater had criticised her for pretending to be a graduate when she hadn’t even got her degree. Looks like that wasn’t just made-up then. I mentally filed that away, but kept my face like a mask. “Do you think One Day could be something Li Boyan made back in her student days?”
“If it was done with AI, then it’s highly likely. Li Boyan said she churned out loads of films with AI when she was doing her undergrad, and she even won a few awards at student film festivals. By the sounds of it—short flick, single character, simple storyline—it’s probably one of her student efforts.”
I nodded a fair bit, looking like I was totally on board. Liu Miao seemed chuffed by my reaction and suggested, “You could try tracking down their old college friends, especially anyone who was in the film club back then. One of them might have watched the film.”
“I’ll give that a shot. Thanks for giving me such a useful lead,” I said, looking Liu Miao straight in the eye. I meant every word.
Liu gave a wry smile. “Don’t mention it, I should be thanking you instead. I worked with Ye Tang, and she always had my back. If anyone should be seeing her last wish through, it should be me. But I can’t even easily get back to the country to see her. So, thanks for everything.”
“So you’re working overseas these days, then?”
“Yeah, on assignment.”
“Still doing photography?”
Liu chuckled and shook his head. “No, not a chance. I’m an engineer by trade, so I’m back doing what I know best.”
“Fair enough. Still keep in touch with any of the old gang?”
“There are a few I’m pretty tight with; we have a chat online now and then. But most of them I’ve lost touch with.”
“Are they doing alright for themselves these days?”
“Yeah, not bad, all moved onto other things. We still talk about Li Boyan now and then when we chat. We used to absolutely detest her—didn’t even have a good word to say when things went south for her. But now I’m actually a bit envious of her. When you think about it, living a life like Li Boyan did isn’t so bad. Doing what you want to do, and if it all comes to ruin, you just dust yourself off and end it all. It’s a damn sight better than drifting through life like a lost sheep.” Liu kept a slight smile playing on his lips, but his eyes looked utterly vacant.
I didn’t jump in. He just carried on, lost in his own thoughts. “I still remember the last thing Li Boyan posted online after she went to Chile: ‘Whereas a prolonged life is not necessarily better, a prolonged death is necessarily worse.’ Couldn’t have put it better myself. Hanging around for ages isn’t necessarily a good thing. Someone like Li Boyan, even after they’re gone, people are still looking for their work. But people like us? When we kick the bucket, we’ll just become a footnote on some website no one ever visits, not even worth a sniff for the search engine bots.”
I didn’t want to get into his views on death, so I tried to steer the conversation elsewhere. “Those other folks from before, the ones who were asking you about Night Wanderer—did they ever get back in touch?”
“Nope. Did they manage to find the film?”
“No, not yet. But they haven’t given up.”
Liu said sadly, “I wish they would. Whatever Li Boyan got up to back then, it’s all water under the bridge now. I don’t want to see anyone else having a go at her.”
“But that film was your baby too, wasn’t it? If it ever got unearthed, maybe one day it could get seen by everyone and get the credit it deserves.”
Liu Miao instantly dismissed the tiny glimmer of hope I was dangling in front of him. “So what if it did? Would it bring Li Boyan back from the dead, or wake Ye Tang up? What’s done is done. I don’t want to dwell on the past. I reckon everyone else feels the same.”
His words left me speechless. That was pretty much the end of our chat. He didn’t log off straight away; instead, he walked out of the virtual boozer with me, like you would in real life. Outside was a bumpy cobbled street, and thick ivy crawled over the walls, wrapping us in a green shade. Before I said my goodbyes to Liu, I asked him one last thing: “What was Ye Tang’s reaction when the news of Li Boyan’s suicide got back home?”
Liu Miao shoved his hands in his pockets, his eyes gazing up at the gorgeous pinks of the sunset on the horizon, his face completely blank. “I was back in my hometown at the time. The rest of the crew pinged me to tell me what had happened. As soon as I got it, I gave Ye Tang a call. She was even calmer than I was. She said she’d given up on Li Boyan ages ago. Li Boyan only ever had eyes for herself, no one else.”
“Do you think she really meant that?”
Liu nodded firmly. “Ye Tang might have seemed soft, but she was actually a really decisive person. Once she’d made her mind up, there was no turning back. The time Li Boyan went missing and left the crew in the lurch, Ye Tang threw all her personal stuff, didn’t even keep a pen. Li Boyan choosing to end it all … she might have felt sad about it, but I doubt she had any regrets.”
“Are you sure she threw out all Li Boyan’s personal stuff?”
Liu said without a shadow of a doubt, “We all saw it with our own two eyes. She didn’t keep a single thing.”
I didn’t argue with him. Yet in my mind’s eye, I saw that black gift box on Ye Tang’s bedside table. Inside it was a black fluffy cat-ear hair clip, exactly the same as the one Li Boyan was wearing in her graduation photo.
After wrapping up my meeting with Liu Miao, I felt down for days on end. I couldn’t put my finger on where the gloom was coming from—I just knew it was weighing me down like a lead balloon, making me hunch over whether I was sitting or lying down, like I was trying to protect some invisible sore spot from that massive weight. The only time the pressure eased off a bit was when I was gazing at Ye Tang’s face. So, I’d hang around in her room from dusk till late, watching the deep blue of the night creep up her frail body, like the Grim Reaper was wrapping her up in his cloak from head to toe. With every tick of the clock, her breathing got that little bit shallower. While I listened to her breaths, I’d picture her and Li Boyan’s past, like I was storyboarding a film in my head. I could clearly imagine their gazes when they looked at each other, the tone of their voices when they spoke, and the sound of their footsteps when they walked. But every time I got near the end of a scene, the picture would get fuzzy, and the sound would just vanish into thin air. Ye Tang and Li Boyan’s lives were like one half of a two-reel film, and I was constantly irked by the missing ending.
I spent night and day mulling over why Ye and Li had fallen out, and I even lost the drive to keep hunting for One Day. It wasn’t until I heard from Lin Maocheng that this feeling lifted. Saturday night, I was just kicking back at home like usual, playing some ancient online game and letting my mind wander, when I suddenly got an email from Lin Maocheng. The email just had one simple question: “How’s Ye Tang doing?”
I was used to everyone asking about Ye’s health, so I didn’t answer Lin’s question directly, just invited her to a holographic meet-up. Lin pinged me back a conference ID and password. Just like Liu Miao, she also wanted me to show up as my actual self.
Lin picked seven the next morning. I put down my game controller, told the lights to switch off, and snuggled under the covers. It felt like only ten minutes later when my alarm dragged me back to the land of the living. Still bleary-eyed, I just reached out and grabbed the headset from the nightstand without even opening my eyes.
The meet-up spot Lin picked was way more spacious than the last two: a swanky modern art gallery. Spotless white walls all around, plastered with all sorts of different paintings. In the middle of the main hall, there was a random rococo-style mahogany long table with two fancy armchairs sporting red cushions. Lin hadn’t logged on yet, so the table was deserted.
While I had the chance, I started nosing around; it felt pretty much like being in a real art gallery. I don’t know much about painting, so I couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about with these artworks. I just appreciated them in a sort of childlike way. After doing a circuit of the main hall, I stopped in front of this simple portrait. It showed two naked women hugging really tight, but upside down. The one on top with the brown curly hair was kneeling on the ground, and it looked like her legs below the knees had just vanished into thin air. The redhead underneath had her arms wrapped around the brown-haired woman’s neck, nuzzling her head into her chest. To me, the painting felt more about deep reliance than lust.
Just as I was pondering what the artist was trying to get across, an icy female voice cut in from behind me. “That’s a Schiele.”
I spun around and saw Lin Maocheng standing by the long table, staring at me with an unreadable expression. She was a lot thinner than in the photos, her cheekbones stuck out and her eye sockets were much deeper, making her look a lot sharper. Before I could even say hi, she yanked out a chair and sat down without a word.
I sauntered over to the long table, pulled out a chair as emotionlessly as Lin, and sat myself down. She was dolled up in a smart light-green tweed suit, with the frilly parts of her white silk blouse tied in a massive bow at the collar. Sleek metal earrings of different designs dangled from each ear. Every time she moved even a smidge, they would sway about like elegant fish tails. Everything about Lin Maocheng, from her clothes to how she held herself, screamed she’d never done a hard day’s work in her life.
I thought she might fill me in on Schiele, or at least what the painting was called. But she didn’t utter a word and just stared right through me like I was some kind of criminal. I had to put my curiosity on the back burner and get straight to the point about why I was there. After I’d finished, she didn’t even bat an eyelid and just flat-out refused my request. “I couldn’t give a toss about Li Boyan’s student flicks. All I want to know is how Ye Tang is now.”
Left with no other option, I just rehashed what I’d told Liu Miao, and showed her the photo of Ye Tang as well. Seeing Ye Tang on her last legs, Lin Maocheng didn’t show a flicker of sadness, but more a sense of quiet resignation. “Hope she goes peacefully. She’s had a rough trot in this life.”
That sounded like a whole can of worms. I was itching to dig deeper, but to see Ye’s wish through, I had to keep probing about One Day. “I don’t get why Ye Tang was so keen to track down One Day. What was so special about that film for her?”
Lin rattled off her answer, talking at a rate of knots and barely pausing for breath. “For Ye Tang, it wasn’t about One Day, it was about Li Boyan. Even with Li Boyan six feet under, that hasn’t changed one bit.”
“But I heard that Ye Tang and Li Boyan had a bust-up even before Night Wanderer hit the screens.”
“Who told you that?”
I told her directly. “I had a chat with Liu Miao before, in a holographic meet-up.”
Lin scoffed at that. “Oh, you mean old Liu the Third Wheel? You really know how to pick them. He was the most clueless guy on the whole crew, didn’t know his backside from his elbow outside of work. What did you manage to wrinkle out of him?”
I couldn’t help sticking up for Liu Miao. “He actually gave me a fair bit of decent info.”
“Such as?”
“He told me Ye Tang and Li Boyan were at college together and that they first met in the film club. One Day is likely something Li made back in her student days. So he suggested I try and track down other members of the film club from that time.”
“Everyone on the crew knew that.”
“He also gave me his two cents on Ye and Li, how well-liked they were on set, and what their relationship was like.”
“Oh yeah? Spill the beans.” Lin Maocheng perked up a bit.
“He said Li was talented and had a good eye, but she was a bit rough with the people below her. Ye was a really nice and capable person, and the crew all trusted her. And that Ye always let Li have her own way.”
Lin let out a grunt. “Is that his take on it? Typical old Liu the Third Wheel, still so clueless and innocent at his age.”
“What’s wrong with what he said?”
“What’s this, then? Got a bit of a fascination with those two, have you?”
I met Lin’s sharp gaze and nodded honestly. She seemed quite happy with my honesty, shifted into a more relaxed pose, and settled back in her chair. “Alright, I can let you in on a few things, but this is just between you and me, yeah?”
“You don’t have to worry about that. Our chat’s staying right here.”
Once she’d got my word, Lin started laying out her side of the story about Ye and Li. “Old Liu the Third Wheel’s a bit simple, all he thinks about is clocking in and clocking out. Loads of the nitty-gritty goes right over his head, and no one bothers to fill him in. Take what he says with a pinch of salt. Li Boyan wasn’t some pure artist, and Ye Tang wasn’t some softie either.”
“So what were they like, in your opinion?”
The mention of Li Boyan brought on a frosty smile from Lin. “Li Boyan’s problem wasn’t that she didn’t know how to play the game with people; it was that she knew exactly how to, and she was dead keen on using and controlling them. When Night Wanderer was getting off the ground, I’d barely been out of art college a year. Li Boyan saw my stuff online, then just flew to London, approached me at my graduation ceremony, told me how much she dug my talent, and asked me to be the art director for Night Wanderer. I’d never seen anything like it; I got all flustered and just said yes. I didn’t even sign a contract before I was on set. It was only after I started that I realized a lot of things weren’t what she had spun me.”
“You didn’t sign a contract?” It was hard to believe someone from a top art college would make a choice like that.
“Nope. You probably think I was a right mug, don’t you?” Lin laughed, aware of her own folly. “It wasn’t just me; none of the heads of department signed contracts. No wages, no social security, no health insurance, nothing. All because Li Boyan promised us a cut of the profits once the film was released. The rank and file did sign contracts, but their pay was rock bottom, and their social security contributions were the bare minimum. There were dozens of us on the crew, and apart from Ye Tang, we were all suckered in by Li Boyan’s smooth talking. She said we’d make the best interactive film the world had ever seen, something that would go down in the history books. Turns out, we and the film were just tools for her to rake it in.”
That familiar line made me think back to my earlier hunch. “Have you ever gone by the online handle ‘carpediem69’? The Hunters told me a user called ‘carpediem69’ showed up in their group trying to stop their search for Night Wanderer, and that person even posted a mood board for the film.”
Lin gave me a surprised look, clearly hadn’t expected that I knew about that bit of history. But she still owned up to it. “Yeah, that was me. Night Wanderer was a total nightmare for those of us who were involved. I don’t want it dredged up again by anyone, let alone stuck under the public microscope.”
“Apart from the contracts, did Li Boyan pull any other underhanded stunts?”
“She loved stirring the pot between the rest of the crew. She didn’t want us getting too close; it didn’t suit her. Because I was pretty young, a few people in the art department didn’t give me the time of day, and they’d slack off on the work I gave them. I went to Li Boyan to complain, and she promised she’d have a word with them, but as soon as she was face-to-face with them, she’d say my family was loaded and well-connected and that they shouldn’t cross me, which just made those people resent me even more. She was always playing people off against each other like that. Only a simple soul like old Liu the Third Wheel couldn’t see through her.”
“So Li was a bad egg, I get that. Why do you say she was after the money?”
“Well, that’s a long story. You know Xingcheng Capital?”
I shook my head.
“Xingcheng was the big money behind Night Wanderer. The film was officially put out by Li Boyan’s own little company. There was this clause in the investment contract they signed, saying that if the film’s production costs went over budget by more than ten percent, Xingcheng had the right to pull the plug and just keep their initial investment. During the filming of Night Wanderer, the crew had to down tools for a long time because of the typhoon and the safety hazard, so the budget went through the roof. Li Boyan was worried Xingcheng would pull the rug, so she tried to get the accountant to fudge the numbers. If it hadn’t been for Ye Tang putting her foot down, she’d have got away with it. If that’s not being money-grubbing, I don’t know what is.”
“Did Xingcheng end up pulling the plug?”
“Of course they did. The film went over budget by nearly fifty percent; they didn’t want to throw good money after bad.”
“So how did you sort out the cash flow problems towards the end of the shoot?”
Lin gave this tight, sarcastic smile. “You’d have to ask Li Boyan about that one. As far as I know, loads of people on the crew are still paying off loans now.”
I was completely flabbergasted. “Li got the crew to take out loans from the bank?”
“Mental, isn’t it? But that’s exactly what went down. To scrape together the money for production, Li Boyan encouraged anyone she thought had a bit of money behind them to borrow some. Banks, online lenders, loan sharks, anything. A few poor sods were even sweet-talked into remortgaging their flats. I sold a few handbags I didn’t use and coughed up hundreds of thousands for her—makes me feel like a right idiot looking back. Old Liu the Third Wheel’s folks were farmers, so they didn’t have much cash and their land couldn’t be sold, and he just about dodged that bullet. That’s why he still hasn’t got a clue what Li Boyan was really like.”
I couldn’t believe this kind of thing happened in the age of AI. “Working without a penny, no social security or health insurance, and having to take out loans to give the company money. Didn’t anyone think that was a bit dodgy?”
Lin let out a long sigh. The way she sighed was almost a carbon copy of Liu Miao. “When you’re on the outside looking in, yeah, it sounds crazy. But we were on that film set. Ever since Night Wanderer started filming, we were all working under this massive pressure cooker, barely had time to think about anything that wasn’t the film, and hardly any contact with the outside world. That kind of closed-off, high-pressure environment was like being in some kind of cult or pyramid scheme. Whatever Li Boyan said, we just swallowed it, and we didn’t question her.”
“Did Ye Tang go along with all that?”
“No way. Ye Tang wasn’t the kind of person to just fall in line. Li Boyan knew she wouldn’t be on board, so she never even breathed a word of it to her. But you can’t keep a lid on everything, and Ye Tang found out in the end.”
I remembered Liu Miao saying that Ye and Li had a fight about two days before Night Wanderer got yanked from cinemas. “Was it just before Night Wanderer was taken off the screens?”
Unexpectedly, Lin shook her head firmly. “Ye Tang knew way before the film even hit the cinemas.”
“What was her reaction then?”
“She wouldn’t even agree to fiddling with the books, so how could she have gone along with something like that? What happened was, some unlucky fellow from the crew went to her begging for a loan, saying the loan platform was chasing him for repayments and he couldn’t cope. That’s when Ye Tang found out Li Boyan had got the crew to take out loans to bankroll the film; she’d been under the impression Li Boyan had pulled in some foreign investment. When the cat was out of the bag, she practically blew a fuse and had a massive row with Li Boyan that very day. She didn’t even bother turning up to the premiere of Night Wanderer afterwards.”
“So Ye Tang and Li Boyan had a falling out. What about everyone else?”
Lin Maocheng shrugged, palms up, looking resigned. “What else could we do? The money that needed borrowing had been borrowed, and the money that needed spending had been spent. The die was cast. All our moaning would have done was add to the film’s bad press. Everyone was just hoping the film would get released as soon as possible, even if it bombed—because that was better than living in constant fear.”
“What was the crew’s reaction to the box office figures after the film came out?”
“No reaction, really. Everyone had seen it coming a mile away. As soon as the first day’s takings were in, I just thought, ‘Yeah, figures.’ After everything that had gone on, apart from Li Boyan, no one else actually believed the film would be a success.”
“Did Ye Tang feel the same?”
“I don’t know what she was thinking,” Lin said with a wry smile. “Li Boyan had done a runner, and she was left to pick up the pieces on her own, like a widow who’d just lost her other half.”
That comparison actually lightened my heavy mood a fair bit. I couldn’t help but crack a smile at Lin. She smiled back at me too. The atmosphere suddenly felt a lot less heavy.
“What was Ye’s reaction when she learned of Li’s suicide?”
“I’m not entirely sure. I’d already packed my bags and left by then. I was trying to scrub everything that went down with the Night Wanderer lot from my memory and just pretend it was all a bad dream. After seeing the news online, I gave Ye Tang a call, said a few comforting bits and bobs. She fobbed me off with a few words and hung up. She sounded okay on the surface, but I had no clue what was going on in her head. Out of the whole crew, she was the one who had the deepest feelings for Li Boyan. Even if Li Boyan was a right pain in the arse, for Ye Tang, she was her one-of-a-kind pain in the arse.”
“Why was she so good to Li? Was there a particular reason behind it?” Liu Miao had thought that Ye’s soft spot for Li was because she saw her talent. I agreed, but didn’t think that was the whole story.
Sure enough, Lin came up with a different answer from Liu. “How do I put this delicately? It’s a bit tricky to explain. If Ye Tang went to a rescue centre to adopt a stray cat, she’d definitely go for the one that was most broken. You catch my drift?”
“So you think her kindness to Li came down to feeling sorry for her?”
“Not exactly that,” Lin said, waving her hands about. “If you wanted a pet that would rely on you completely, would you pick one that was lively and super affectionate, or one with a gammy leg?”
I got where Lin was coming from. “So you’re saying that to Ye Tang, Li Boyan was like that stray cat with a gammy leg.”
“Exactly. Li Boyan’s pull on Ye Tang wasn’t about her talent, it was about the messed-up bits of her personality. Ye Tang always had a soft spot for people who came from tough backgrounds or had quirks, and she’d often go out of her way to sort out their drama. That’s how she got her satisfaction, her sense of self-worth. And Li Boyan was the perfect candidate to fulfil that need for her.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t see eye-to-eye with Lin on that one. I knew that some people got their kicks from playing the hero with people in a pickle, and perhaps Ye was one of them. But Li was nothing like some poor stray with a gammy leg. By all accounts, Li was a pushy, arrogant piece of work: she sweet-talked young hopefuls into working for peanuts, pressured the accountant to cook the books, and stirred up trouble between her staff. When her big dreams went down the drain, Li’s choice was to just kill herself, nice and clean. That kind of person wouldn’t hang around waiting for a handout, or let anyone’s kindness call the shots.
Even though I didn’t agree with Lin Maocheng’s take on Li Boyan, that “stray cat with a gammy leg” analogy felt oddly familiar and kept nagging at me. I tried to rack my brains for someone who fit that bill. After mentally crossing off Zhang Yixuan, Liu Miao, and the lost media hunters, a lifeless face popped into my head. Deep-set eyes, the corners drooping slightly, and the lines of his face narrowing from his temples to his jawline—it was Gao Wen, the AI. Compared to the ambitious Li Boyan, the quiet, gloomy Gao Wen seemed more like the kind of wounded little creature Ye Tang would have taken under her wing. Maybe that was the real reason Ye was so desperate to find One Day. In her mind, Li Boyan and Gao Wen were two sides of the same coin. After all, Li was still a rookie when she made One Day, and it’s normal for inexperienced creators to project a bit of themselves onto their characters. What Ye Tang was desperately chasing was both Gao Wen and Li Boyan. The roots of that obsession probably lay in her family.
Lin Maocheng clearly thought along the same lines. “The reason Ye Tang ended up like that has a lot to do with her family set-up. Her parents split up when she was little, and both of them went abroad, leaving her here in China to live with her gran, who was a bit of an odd lady and didn’t really give her much attention. So, when Ye Tang grew up, she really lapped up the feeling of being needed by others, because it was something she never got as a kid. Li Boyan had the artistic flair Ye Tang lacked and hated people, so she had to lean on Ye Tang as a go-between. No matter what anyone else thought, in Ye Tang’s eyes, Li Boyan was perfect. Even after Li Boyan killed herself, Ye Tang was still cleaning up her mess.”
What Lin said sent my mind spiralling back to that cramped, gloomy bedroom in the provincial capital. I pictured Ye Tang’s life in that room as a little girl. Dumped by her own parents at four, living with her frail old grandmother in a knackered flat block, watching the car district go from boom town to ghost town. Her room wouldn’t have had any toys, games consoles, or snaps of her friends, just some clunky old desktop computer. Her wildest fun probably involved sticking film posters all over the walls and then tearing them down again. Growing up, apart from her grandmother who was slowly losing her marbles, no one ever needed her. It wasn’t until she got to college, joined the film club, and met Li Boyan that she got her first real break. It wasn’t her fault. Anyone growing up in that kind of setup was bound to fall into that trap called Li Boyan.
“What sort of mess are you talking about?” I asked.
“After she left the film industry, Ye Tang didn’t look for another job. She went and learned stone carving. I heard she often shelled out cash to those crew members who’d remortgaged their flats, probably trying to make amends for what Li Boyan did,” Lin replied, sounding a bit down.
What Lin said cleared up a question that had been bugging me for a while. Ye’s grandmother was a retired senior engineer, so her pension must have been pretty cushy. Ye herself had grafted away in the workplace for years, and then retrained as a professional stone carver, so she should have been earning a decent sum too. But their flat was surprisingly basic, without even a piece of smart gear, apart from the care bot looking after her grandmother. If she had been bankrolling those crew members Li had swindled, then all the pieces fell into place.
Through Lin Maocheng’s description, I was starting to get a decent handle on Ye Tang. But Li Boyan was still a bit of a mystery. “What was Li Boyan’s attitude towards Ye Tang before they fell out?”
“Rubbish. She’d put on a bit of a show for other people, but she never bothered with that charade with Ye Tang.”
“Liu Miao said that out of the whole crew, Ye Tang was the one Li Boyan trusted most.”
As soon as I used Liu Miao’s words to bat back at her, Lin got a bit annoyed. “Li Boyan trusting Ye Tang and treating her like dirt aren’t mutually exclusive. Li Boyan was a puppet master; she knew exactly when to play hardball, when to go soft, and when to butter people up. But she never bothered with any of that with Ye Tang, just spewed whatever came into her head and did whatever she felt like. We all thought she was bang out of order.”
“On the flip side, that could also prove she saw Ye as one of her own.”
“Li Boyan definitely treated the people she was close to worse. It’s no wonder her family background cooked up someone like her.” Lin was clearly a firm believer in the “your folks mess you up” theory.
“I’ve seen a bit about Li online. Looks like her parents split up pretty early on too.”
“Yeah, that’s the ticket. Li Boyan went abroad with her dad. Her mum stayed put, remarried soon after, and had a son and a daughter. Her dad never remarried, but he was always swamped with work and barely had any time for her. Li Boyan turning into the state she did, her parents definitely had a hand in that.”
“Just looking at their families, Li Boyan and Ye Tang actually had quite a bit in common.”
“But their personalities were like chalk and cheese. Ye Tang’s problem was being too controlling, while Li Boyan’s was being massively insecure. If someone’s never been shown any love, they won’t believe anyone in the world loves them. They’ll suspect everyone who’s nice to them of having an angle, and they’ll constantly push other people’s buttons in self-destructive ways until the other person leaves. It’s a kind of self-preservation. There’s a saying, ‘If you want to test how tough a glass is, it’s bound to shatter.’ That’s how Li Boyan was with Ye Tang.”
I just stared at Lin Maocheng in silence. I had to hand it to her: women could have a scary knack for seeing right through things. I couldn’t argue with a single word she said about Li Boyan. Ye Tang wanted someone who couldn’t leave her, like a stray cat with a gammy leg. And Li Boyan wanted someone who’d accept her no matter how awful she was. Their actions were built on the same basic idea: the belief deep-down that they’d never get pure, no-strings-attached affection. Their convictions sealed their fate. No matter how hard they tried, that story was always heading for a grim ending.
Lin was about to launch into another grand theory about Li’s and Ye’s personalities. I wasn’t in the mood for more of her high-and-mighty pronouncements, so I changed tactics. “Didn’t Ye and Li have a fight just before Night Wanderer was pulled from the screens?”
Lin thought for a bit, then answered slowly. “Yeah, I think there was something like that.”
“Do you know what they were fighting about?”
“No clue. None of us were around at the time.”
“After the film bombed, Li sold the rights dirt cheap to some other company. Could those two things be connected?”
“Hard to say. Knowing Li Boyan, she might have done it to get back at Ye Tang, who saw Night Wanderer as her own kid. She was absolutely livid when she heard about it.”
“But Night Wanderer was Li’s creation too. I can’t see her deliberately trashing her own work just to get revenge on Ye Tang.”
“By that point, the film wasn’t the thing Li Boyan was once so proud of; it was a badge of shame. Selling it off wouldn’t be out of character. Using the last bit of leverage she had to get back at someone she felt had stabbed her in the back before she went off the rails—that sounds exactly like something Li Boyan would do.”
“Isn’t ‘stabbed her in the back’ kind of a strong way of putting it?”
Lin just shrugged. “No one really knows why those two fell out. I’m just guessing. But there’s another possibility too. I’ve chatted with a lot of ex-colleagues about Li Boyan’s suicide, and more than one of them reckons she faked her own death.”
That theory was pretty far-fetched. I pointed out, “Her suicide was all over the news in Chile. The local police even released some of the findings from their investigation.”
“News is news. No one’s actually seen Li Boyan’s death certificate and any photos of this supposed suicide scene. She had never even set foot in Chile before, so why would she suddenly go all the way over there to end it all? If she’d already decided to snuff it, she wouldn’t have needed to do a runner; any old empty room would have done the trick. The fact she ran suggests she definitely had another game plan. In all likelihood, she faked the whole thing to dodge the debt collectors. Knowing her, I bet she could pull the wool over the local cops’ eyes.”
Lin was making a pretty solid case. I’d been about to argue, but after giving it some thought, I couldn’t actually find any holes in her logic. Fair enough, the mainstream media isn’t always gospel, and what’s on those info websites isn’t necessarily fact. I’d been led astray by my own assumptions. This screw-up didn’t get me down; in fact, it sparked a sneaky little bit of excitement inside me. I couldn’t help but ask, “If Li really is still alive, what would be your take on that?”
Lin didn’t hesitate for a second. “I’d be happy for Ye Tang.”
I hadn’t expected her to come out with that. “I thought you really couldn’t stand Li.”
Lin admitted it straight up. “I do loathe her guts. But she’s already paid for what she did. Even if she’s still alive, she’s lost her career, her identity, and the only person who ever really had her back. Her future will be anything but easy. But if she’s still out there, it would be a massive comfort to Ye Tang. If Ye Tang’s still got any awareness, she’d be over the moon.”
Though I had no solid proof, I supposed Lin had a point. Even if Ye and Li had had a falling out before Night Wanderer hit the screens, even if Li had deliberately sold the rights to get her own back on Ye, even if Li had fled abroad, leaving Ye to sort out the mess, Ye still hadn’t let go of Li. As Ye lay there, all alone and out of it in that poky hospital room, I bet a little corner of her mind was still clinging onto the memory of Li.
I couldn’t find the words to describe how I was feeling. Lin Maocheng and I just stared at each other in silence. My gaze drifted past her shoulder and landed on the white wall behind her. Hanging right there was the painting I’d been looking at earlier. The two women in the picture were still locked in that tight embrace. Even though I couldn’t see the brown-haired woman’s face, I had this weird feeling she was trapped, unable to move. The redhead was gently holding the kneeling brown-haired woman, but there was no warmth on her face, just a serenity I couldn’t quite wrap my head around.
Back in the land of the living, the sun outside was blinding. I wandered out of my room and stood on the patch of ground outside the living room, craning my neck upwards. The white bird of paradise flowers my upstairs neighbour had on their balcony had all drooped. Sunlight filtered down through the thick green leaves, landing on me in little patches. Even though it was still baking hot, autumn was definitely on its way.
I hadn’t had a bite to eat since I woke up, and my stomach was rumbling like mad, so I didn’t hang about for long before heading back inside to whip up some food. After scoffing down an easy fried rice made with odds and ends I found in the fridge, I opened the laptop and started digging for any concrete proof that Li Boyan had actually died. Just like Lin Maocheng said, all the search engines drew a blank for Li’s death certificate. There was nothing about her on the official websites of the Chilean investigation police or the Chinese embassy in Chile. Every single media outlet online reporting her demise was using the same source: a press release from a Chilean media outlet that her personal online blurb had linked to.
I looked into the outfit that put out that press release—a local TV station in Chile. Then I searched the name of that station on the Chinese internet, and it turned out that before filming Night Wanderer, Li had been at this international film festival co-run by China and Latin America as an up-and-coming director, and this Chilean TV station just happened to be one of the festival’s media sponsors. So, Li had connections with the very people who reported her death years before it even supposedly happened. That really got my brain ticking over. Maybe Lin Maocheng and her old workmates’ hunches weren’t so far-fetched.
To get to the bottom of things, I decided to go right back to square one. I used AI to turn the recordings of my chats with Liu Miao, Lin Maocheng, and the two Hunters into text. Then I pulled out all the key info and put them together with what I’d already dug up online and from other sources, slowly piecing together the full picture bit by bit.
Ye Tang’s parents split up when she was a kid, and she was brought up single-handed by her grandmother. When she got to university, she met Li Boyan in the film club; Li was also from a broken family, and they clicked over their shared passion. Li had artistic talent but was a right prima donna and didn’t get on with people. In her third year, Li landed herself in a load of hot water off campus. Ye covered for her, which cost her the position as head of the film club, and Li lost her degree. After graduating, Li worked in a software company for five years, built up a decent wedge of cash, then quit the job to start her own production company and began making her first commercial film, Night Wanderer, asking Ye to come on board as producer. Because of bad weather and other mishaps at the filming locations, the film went way over budget. To stop the investors from pulling the plug, Li suggested the accountant fiddle with the books, but Ye adamantly refused, so that was the end of that. Later on in filming, the coffers ran dry, and Li told the crew to take out loans from all sorts of places to keep things afloat. When Ye found out about that, she had a massive fight with Li and refused to show her face at the premiere of Night Wanderer. With a holographic online game taking off like a rocket, Night Wanderer bombed at the box office, and Li, the director, did a runner. Two days before Night Wanderer was finally pulled from the cinemas, she went back to the set and had another blazing argument with Ye. That was the final nail in the coffin for their friendship. After Night Wanderer flopped, Li sold the film rights for nearly nothing and fled to Chile on her own, only to be declared dead by suicide in the news not long after. Meanwhile, Ye retrained as a stone carver through a government scheme, looked after her grandmother who had Alzheimer’s, and helped her old colleagues pay back their debts, until an accident left her in a coma.
Even though I’d pieced together the ins and outs of what had happened, there was still one thing I couldn’t get my head around: why exactly did Ye and Li have such a massive falling out? Liu Miao and Lin Maocheng’s stories about it were clearly at odds. Liu Miao said he was right outside the door when they had their fight and even overheard some of it. Lin Maocheng, on the other hand, said that no one was there except Ye and Li. If I had to pick one of their stories, I’d lean towards believing Liu Miao. Lin answered all the other questions straight off the bat, but when it came to this one, she hesitated for a bit and didn’t offer up any proper information, which made me wonder if she was deliberately keeping something close to her chest.
I found the bit in the transcript where Lin said those few lines and read them over and over. After grilling her about that, I then asked Lin Maocheng if Li selling the film rights on the cheap was anything to do with her and Ye having a falling out. Lin gave a pretty wishy-washy answer, but then chipped in that Li Boyan might have done it to get back at Ye Tang. That second bit was probably what she really thought, because she didn’t even pause for breath before she said “get back at”—it was a complete gut reaction. Since Lin Maocheng thought Li was after revenge, it must mean Ye had done something in Lin’s eyes that deserved payback. Linking that to the supplementary agreement Liu mentioned and how Lin brought up Ye stabbing Li in the back, I had a hunch Ye had fiddled with the deal Li had with the investors.
With a theory brewing, all that was left was to see if it held up. I opened the search engine again and found the website for Xingcheng Capital, the main backers of Night Wanderer. It wasn’t a public company, so they weren’t obliged to disclose information. I could only have a nose around the news section of their website for any clues. Whether I typed in “Li Boyan” or “Night Wanderer” in the search bar, I only got two results. The first article was from five years back and was brief, just announcing the company had invested in the Night Wanderer project, with no mention of how much or what kind of investment it was. The second article popped up after Night Wanderer flopped; it was a statement disavowing responsibility. It said that Xingcheng Capital had demanded to pull their funding after the film budget went through the roof, only keeping their initial ten million yuan, which gave them a 20% stake, so the film’s box office disaster wouldn’t have a major impact on the company’s bottom line. That corresponded with what Lin had said.
Since Xingcheng Capital pulling their funding was a done deal, then that supplementary agreement Liu Miao mentioned looked even fishier. I had a vague inkling in my head, but no concrete proof. After chewing it over for a bit, I decided to get in touch with the two Hunters for help. After I’d laid out the whole story, Taiping Houkui agreed to my request straight away. I wasn’t exactly surprised. Lost media hunters are driven by curiosity, like sharks sniffing around in the ocean of the internet. There was no way they were going to pass up a juicy mystery like this one.
After Taiping Houkui gave me her word, I slipped back into the usual grind of my daily life. My ward got some new faces, and some old ones left for good. Ye Tang’s vitals were getting shakier and shakier, so after the AI had a check, she was moved to the special care unit. The special care unit had walls in warm colours and comfy smart electric beds. Anyone working in end-of-life care knows that once a patient’s wheeled in there, it’s pretty much the last stop. Because no one ever came to visit Ye, the photo wall facing her bed was completely bare, and no family members had stuck up photos of her as a kid or written any well-wishes on it. I went to her room a few times and thought the wall looked too grim, so I printed out Li Boyan’s university graduation photo and stuck it up there. While Ye lay sleeping, twenty-two-year-old Li was always looking down at her with a smile.
With the investigation pretty much done and nothing else for me to do, I often hid away in Ye’s room, whiling away the hours watching films projected from my smartwatch. I was sitting by her bed, rewatching Casablanca, when Taiping Houkui rang. I’d just got to the part where Ilsa turns up at Rick’s place looking for him when the phone buzzed. I hit the answer button, and Taiping Houkui didn’t even give me a chance to say hello; she just jumped straight in. “The reason Xingcheng Capital put out that statement is because Li Boyan turned up on their doorstep with a dodgy contract. They wanted to get ahead of any fake news hitting the headlines, so they came out with their side of the story.”
“What dodgy contract?”
“After Night Wanderer came out, Li Boyan got in touch with Xingcheng, saying that according to this supplementary agreement they’d signed earlier, they should split the losses fifty-fifty. But Xingcheng had never even seen this so-called agreement. Back when Night Wanderer was still being filmed, Xingcheng had wanted to pull their funding because they’d gone over budget, and the crew had agreed. The agreement Li Boyan produced had Xingcheng’s official stamp on it, but no one had signed it. Xingcheng called someone in to have a look, and it turned out the stamp was a forgery!” Taiping Houkui was absolutely buzzing, like a kid who’d just unwrapped an amazing present.
“Where on earth did she get her hands on this fake agreement?”
“The Xingcheng lot haven’t got a clue. As soon as the stamp came back as a fake, she vanished into thin air. But they’re all guessing it was Ye Tang. After all, Ye Tang was the one handling all the contract stuff, and she was the point of contact with the lawyers. No one else would have been in a position to pull it off.”
“Could it be that Xingcheng and Ye Tang were in cahoots on this whole thing? You’d think it’d be a tall order to fake an official stamp these days.”
“It’s a possibility. But even if it was, Li Boyan couldn’t exactly go running to the cops. After all, she signed that agreement and used it to try and wrangle a loan from the bank. Her main worry was probably keeping the bank off her back.”
“She used that fake agreement to try and get a loan from the bank?”
“Yeah. And she borrowed a lot. Ye Tang’s a right operator, isn’t she?” Taiping Houkui said, sounding impressed. “Li Boyan was the official head of the company, and her name’s on the agreement. Even if Ye Tang forged the stamp, Li Boyan was the one in charge. Forgery plus loan fraud—if Li Boyan hadn’t fled, she could have been looking at ten years in prison, easy. That’s way scarier than any debt collector breathing down your neck. No wonder Li Boyan ran to Chile, leaving everything else to go to pot.”
After hearing what Taiping Houkui had to say, all I could hear was this deafening buzzing in my ears. I instinctively hit the end call button and slumped back into the chair next to the bed. My hands and feet were like ice, and all the strength seemed to have drained out of me. Only my brain was still going at warp speed, trying to process the info I’d just taken in.
The film was still playing. After the call ended, the actors’ voices came back into focus. But I couldn’t make sense of what they were saying anymore. My gaze drifted downwards, finally landing on the sleeping Ye Tang. I didn’t know this woman and had never even exchanged a word with her. After all my digging, I thought I had her figured out. But now I realised I’d only scratched the surface.
I was pretty sure it was Ye Tang who’d cooked up that dodgy agreement and framed Li Boyan. In my mind, there was no way Li would have signed anything without checking it over unless the person handing it to her was Ye. The only question was why. Since Li used that fake agreement to try and get a loan from the bank, it proved the film’s finances had already gone belly-up. So, Ye must have decided to screw Li over after she found out Li was asking the crew to cough up their own cash for the film. Ye couldn’t stomach the fact that the artist she’d been looking after had turned into some cash-hungry git, so she chose to punish her in the harshest way possible. That’s one way it could have gone down. If that’s what really happened, I bet Ye went through hell making that decision. Li represented her youth and her dreams of making films. Betraying Li would have been like betraying her past self and her ideals all at once. Maybe that’s why Ye lived such a frugal life after Li’s supposed suicide. She wasn’t making amends for Li; she was making amends for herself.
Then again, there was another way to look at it. When I met with Lin Maocheng, something had struck me as off, but I didn’t bring it up at the time. Live-action films are pricey enough, but VR live-action films are money-guzzling beasts. Let’s say twenty people on the Night Wanderer crew offered a bit of their own money Li’s way, averaging half a million each—that’s still only ten million. For a VR live-action flick, that wouldn’t even cover the special effects. To get the whole thing filmed properly, they would have had to rely on other ways of getting the funding. Even I could figure that out as an outsider, so there was no way Ye, as the producer, wouldn’t have known that. Xingcheng had already bailed, so there’s no way other investors would have wanted to touch the project. Given the film’s sorry financial state, the only way to get enough money was for someone to take a massive risk. So Ye made a choice. Between Li and the film, she chose the film.
Compared to the first idea, the second one was a better explanation as to why Li killed herself. As far as Ye was concerned, Li was just a disposable tool to make her dreams a reality. The proud Li probably couldn’t take that fact, which is why she sold the film rights and tried to get her own back on Ye with this scorched-earth strategy. Ye probably didn’t expect Li to be so ruthless. She frantically rang Li, and when she didn’t get any answer, she flew into a rage and chucked out all of Li’s personal belongings. But she still didn’t leave, staying on at the film set to sort out the mess. Even then, Ye likely still thought Li would come back. After all, every time Li got into trouble off campus back at college, she’d always come crawling back to the film club for Ye to sort things out. With that thought in mind, Ye went back to her hometown, looking after her grandmother who was totally dependent on others, all the while waiting for news from Li. Not long after, she read that report from the Chilean media, saying Li had put a plastic bag over her head in some grotty flat in Santiago and connected it to the gas mains with a rubber tube. Whether the report was true or not, everyone swallowed the story. Old colleagues sent their condolences to Ye, but she didn’t say a word. Some time later, Ye, who never left any digital footprints, registered an account on a niche online forum for indie film buffs. Then she posted a thread, genuinely asking everyone to help her track down Li’s student film. Not once did she mention Li’s name.
No happily ever after, no tearful reunions. That was the end of the line for them.
The story I’d pieced together based on that second idea seemed almost spot on. The only question that remained was: what if Li Boyan hadn’t actually died?
I sat there for a long time, lost in thought beside Ye Tang, who looked as peaceful as the dearly departed. To my right, on the white wall with Li’s young portrait stuck to it, Ilsa, played by Ingrid Bergman, and Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, had finally got back together. Rick was repeating Ilsa’s old promise. Ilsa, with a scarf wrapped around her head, was begging him to stop, tears welling up in her eyes. Lost in the presence of these fictional lovers, my mind was elsewhere, wondering where Li had gone. She had dodged the long arm of the law and scrubbed all traces of her work from the internet. She’d probably changed her name and started a whole new life by now. But I didn’t reckon she had completely let go of the past. No one can forget a failure they poured their heart and soul into. The scars left by shattered dreams might heal over, but they never really vanish. As someone who created things myself, I knew that firsthand.
I switched on my laptop and kept digging through the endless ocean of the internet for clues. If Li was still alive, that burning need she had to express herself would have driven her to leave some kind of trail. That trail would most likely be connected to Night Wanderer. That film was her brainchild, and she wouldn’t have stood for anyone twisting or badmouthing it. That much would never change.
I started looking up Night Wanderer on all the big film rating sites. Just like Liu Miao had said, the film actually had decent reviews, it just wasn’t well-known, and not many people had rated it. Most of the folks who had seen it gave Li Boyan high marks for her professional skills. Some had even written these massive essays, thousands of words long, going into all the finer points of the film’s blocking and camera work. There were also a few people who’d posted rumours about the film and nasty personal digs at Li in the comments section. Because of a ton of complaints, those spiteful reviews had been pushed way down the list. I tried to have a look at the complaint history for those reviews, but I didn’t have the access rights. So, with no other option, I had to go back to where it all started—Li Boyan’s personal entry online.
Online encyclopaedias, both here and abroad, let regular users have a look at the history of edits to entries. I rearranged these histories in chronological order and flagged any IP addresses that kept popping up in red. Li had quite a few long-term haters online who just wouldn’t let the matter rest. Even after she’d supposedly killed herself, they were still trying to cause trouble by messing with her entry. But there was this one IP address that kept fighting the good fight. Every time someone maliciously changed Li’s page, this IP would immediately put it back to how it was. I looked up where this IP address was located. The second I saw the result, my heart skipped a beat—the IP address was from Santiago, Chile.
I took a good few deep breaths, trying to get a grip on my racing heart, then tried a bunch of different lookup sites, and they all gave me the same result. Once I was sure it was right, I instinctively glanced over at Ye Tang in the bed. She was still out of it, sleeping soundly, her face entirely still and expressionless. She couldn’t see what I’d seen, couldn’t hear what I’d heard. Whatever she had done to Li Boyan, I bet she’d hoped, countless times, for this moment I was living through. Now her wish had come true, but it was all pointless.
I stared at the glowing screen, my mind devoid of any thought. Before I even realised what was happening, my hand had taken over. I clicked the edit button in the top right corner of Li Boyan’s page and added a sentence to the end of her biography, along with my email address and phone number. I don’t know why I did it. But my body sent a message to the mysterious person hiding behind that IP address before my brain had even caught up.
“Ye Tang’s dying. Please get in touch.”
Once I’d made the changes, I clicked submit and then just sat quietly in front of the screen, waiting for a reply from across the ocean. Casablanca was just reaching its end. Ilsa and her new love were flying off to freedom. Rick was walking off into the misty darkness with his old friend. I watched their backs on the screen, just patiently waiting. Even after the sun had completely gone down outside and the whole city was tucked up in bed, I hadn’t received a new email or a call from abroad.
I didn’t get up to leave the ward, and I didn’t feel like going home—I just kept sitting there like a statue, listening to the city breathing outside the window. I didn’t even know what I was waiting for. After what felt like ages, my smartwatch, about to conk out, gave a little ping. I opened the new message, and the bit of text I’d just changed on the website had been put back to how it was. I immediately checked where the user who’d made the change was located.
The IP address was from Santiago, Chile.
When I was a kid, I used to get this all the time. Whenever I finished a book that really enamoured me, or watched a really satisfying film, I’d sink into this massive emptiness and confusion. It felt like waking up from an incredibly real dream. When the dream faded, I couldn’t tell which world was real—the one in front of me or the one that had just vanished. I’d been living someone else’s life, seeing the world through their eyes, getting all worked up and emotionally drained by their experiences. Coming back to reality always felt like a tremendous letdown; everything seemed so bland. This happened over and over during my student days, so much so that by the time I grew up and started working, I realised I’d become this emotionally detached person. Nothing really got to me. My emotional batteries had been run down way too early.
It’s been twelve years since I got my Master’s. In that time, I’ve gone through the whole rigmarole of job hunting, being sent to another city, getting the sack, coming back home—using up all the potential and uncertainty of my life. I’d become a rational observer, just watching the world go by. I thought that quiet life would just keep on going undisturbed. But then I came to know about Ye Tang, pieced together her whole story with Li Boyan, and I felt that familiar emptiness creeping back. Without even noticing, I’d wandered off the sidelines and onto the stage. When the lights went out on their story, it felt like the curtain had come down on my own life too. I’d woken up from another long dream. Zhuang Zi got all confused about whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. Me? I had no clue if I’d been dreaming I was Ye Tang or Li Boyan.
I’ve never told anyone I know in real life about my digging into Ye Tang’s past. Apart from me, no one knows this secret story from long ago. I carry this secret around with me, going to work and coming home like nothing’s changed. To the other staff at the hospital, I was still just that quiet maintenance engineer. No one knew the effort I’d been putting into unearthing a stranger’s private life. I’d slowly got used to this double life, and I was starting to understand what those people who went to all that trouble to find lost media were really searching for. Taiping Houkui said I’d never make it as a Hunter. I thought she was wrong.
Having finally figured out what went down with the Night Wanderer lot back in the day, I decided to try a different tack to track down One Day. Li Boyan’s dreams had gone down the drain, and she’d been stabbed in the back by the one person she trusted most, so she’d resorted to the extreme of deleting all backups of her work, saying goodbye to her film-making career. Being aware of her tech know-how, I didn’t reckon there were any scraps of One Day still floating around online. But what I could do was use AI to recreate it based on what those who’d actually seen the film could remember. That was my best bet.
So, I got in touch with the people from the film club who’d known Li back in the day, through that contact who’d first given me her name. Sadly, none of them had any recollection of One Day whatsoever. So, I had to turn back to the internet. This time I set my sights on Li’s comments section. Under the university graduation photo she’d posted, someone had called her out for pretending to be a graduate when she hadn’t even got her degree. Since this user knew something so personal, I figured they must have known Li in real life, and probably Ye too.
I clicked on this hater’s profile. This user, called “Meeting with Lama”, was still updating on social media, mostly posting everyday bits and bobs, like late-night congee after work and snorkelling photos from a beach trip. Judging by the content, the account owner seemed to be a young woman. Apart from when she was having a go at Li, she seemed like someone who loved life and was pretty upbeat.
I sent “Meeting with Lama” a long private message, filling her in on Ye Tang’s current state and the whole story of me trying to find One Day. Just like Liu Miao and Lin Maocheng, “Lama” replied pretty sharply, asking worried questions about Ye. I also found out her real identity through our chat. “Lama” wasn’t just in the same year as Ye and Li, she was also in the film club, and she’d always been put off by Li’s awful personality. She’d never seen One Day, but she pointed me down a path I hadn’t even considered.
She told me that Li had got her degree cancelled by the university because back in her second year, she’d hacked into the public transport system and used the video screens on all the city’s buses and trains to show her own films. This audacious bout of hacking went on for nearly a year without any of the transport staff even noticing. Then Li Boyan being Li Boyan, she started bragging to other people about her brilliant stunt, and some who couldn’t stand her called the mayor’s hotline to complain. That’s how the transport company found out what she’d been up to and reported her to the police. Because they didn’t have any solid evidence, Li only ended up getting a slap on the wrist by the university and didn’t face any criminal charges. Before her illegal dealings came to light, every single commuter who hopped on a monorail or bus during rush hour could have potentially seen Li’s work. “Lama” suggested I try to track down some of those people.
I sat in front of the computer, staring at the words “Lama” had sent me, still not replying. I tried to picture the scene. During the most soul-crushing morning rush hour, people heading to work, clutching onto the grab rails, swaying and half-asleep in the packed carriages. And above their tired faces, the TV screens were showing Li Boyan’s indie films. No one even knew they were witnessing a crime in progress. The whole thing had this subtle, dramatic feel to it, and at the same time, it was uncanny. I had this odd feeling that I should have been one of those commuters.
I closed the chat window with “Lama” and opened Li’s online blurb again. Li started university fourteen years ago. She hacked into the public transport system in her second year, so that would have been thirteen years ago. The hacking went on for almost a year. Which means, twelve years ago, anyone who got on public transport in the provincial capital during peak times could have potentially seen Li’s work, and that would have included me.
I still remember that year as clear as day. For me, it was a tough but fulfilling one. I got my Master’s and, thanks to my supervisor’s recommendation, landed a sweet gig at a company I really wanted to work for, doing R&D. During those first few months, to look after my mum who’d just had surgery for pancreatic cancer, I was constantly shuttling back and forth between my hometown and the provincial capital on the intercity bus. I’d finish work on Friday and hotfoot it home, spending the weekend cleaning the flat, tidying up, and buying all the groceries and stuff my mum would need for the following week. Then, on Monday morning, I’d catch the crack-of-dawn bus back to the capital for work. I could never sleep on that stuffy bus, so the whole journey I’d either stare out the window at the endless green hills and the houses dotted amongst them, or I’d fixate on the only screen in the bus. The screen on the bus often showed these obscure films I’d never heard of, and one of them might well have been Li Boyan’s work. Even though I’d forgotten what I actually watched on those journeys, I had this knack for seeing into the past.
I’d always been a rational, down-to-earth type. But I had to admit, in that moment, I was floored by this powerful sense of fate. I picked up my smartwatch and found the long-distance bus ticket app I’d downloaded years ago in the app manager. With the rise of the railways, intercity buses had fallen out of favour. Many routes had been axed. The one from my hometown to the capital was still running, but the service had been cut from three times a day to just once. The route details page had real-life photos of the bus. It looked almost exactly the same as it had twelve years ago, except the ads on the side had changed from energy drinks to holographic online games. Just looking at that familiar blue bus, I couldn’t help myself—I bought a ticket. I knew this trip might be a wild goose chase. But one way or another, I wanted to take this journey into my memories.
I didn’t sleep well that night, my head full of hazy, broken dreams about the old days. My ticket was for six o’clock the next morning. To make sure I was on time, I dragged myself out of bed at five and left at twenty past, walking to the only bus station in our small town. The city was still fast asleep, not a soul to be seen on the streets. A thick morning fog hung over everything, and the streetlights barely illuminated the top of the trees lining the pavements. I trudged along the dark roads, not even able to see my own feet. But even without any signs or zebra crossings to guide me, I knew exactly where I was going. I’d walked this road too many times; I could have done it blindfolded.
At six o’clock sharp, the bus I was waiting for pulled in right on time. I hopped onto the empty bus, paid with a face scan, and then headed towards the back. The seating arrangement was exactly the same as it used to be, except the driver’s cabin was now completely empty. Back when I’d just graduated, every time I took this bus back to the capital, I’d see this middle-aged driver with dark skin and thinning hair. He’d always help the farmers who were carrying their baskets and sacks of produce to sell in the city. Once we got to the capital, he’d usually head to this noodle place near the station for a big bowl of spicy noodles. Sometimes I’d have a chat with him at one of the tables there. After he found out about my family situation, the driver always had some comforting words for me. About seven years ago, all the buses in the province became automated. I never saw him again after that.
Out of habit, I took a window seat at the back. An old man in a black jacket with grey hair was sitting a couple of rows behind and to my left. He was on the aisle seat, right in my blind spot, which was why I hadn’t seen him at the station. He was gripping the seat in front with his gloved hands, staring out the window, deep in thought. I wasn’t sure if he was just part of my imagination, but I still said, “Morning.”
He didn’t budge, nor did he give a reply. I quietly looked away and stared out the window myself, lost in my own thoughts.
After a sweet female voice announced our destination, the bus slowly pulled away. The second the scenery outside started to blur, something amazing happened. The previously empty bus suddenly became packed. Almost every seat was taken by country folk speaking in a local dialect. They were dressed warmer than city dwellers, and most of the men were wearing flat caps or hunting caps. The aisle and the space next to the priority seats were crammed with the baskets and vegetable crates they’d brought, along with those same bulging sacks of produce. The air in the bus had this fresh, earthy smell. The bus bustled with excitement and energy, and everyone was chatting away about the recent weather and the price of vegetables.
That’s exactly what it was like every time I took this bus back to the capital when I’d just graduated. These were farmers from the towns near my hometown, who got on at the stop before mine, bringing their wares into the city. Sometimes I’d buy a few kilos of fresh navel oranges or crisp plums from them to take to the lab to share with my colleagues. The farmers were grateful that I was helping them out, and they always gave me a discount. Thanks to them, my journey back was never lonely, and always sweet. Sadly, after my mum’s cancer came back and she passed away, I rarely took the bus anymore. I never tasted navel oranges or crisp plums that good again.
Though I wasn’t wearing glasses, I still saw the phantoms from the past clearly. From the very beginning, I understood that these phantoms had nothing to do with lenses that could automatically adjust their dioptres; they were merely the embodiment of my inner desires. One only sees what they want to see, hears what they want to hear, and feels what they are capable of feeling.
Listening to the other passengers chatting away, I felt this weight lift off me. I leaned my head against the cool glass of the window, watching the bus nimbly navigate the winding mountain roads. Between the hills, the city was slowly waking up. As the bus kept going, the streetlights on the overpasses blinked off one by one. The big lorries full of goods had vanished, replaced by a glittering stream of countless cars. More and more pedestrians appeared on the pavements, stopping and starting at the traffic lights, like worker ants eager to get home, swarming towards the towering office blocks. I used to be one of them. I once had a twelve-square-metre box for an office in this city, a two-bed flat, a rented parking spot, and countless lonely nights. I knew then, and I knew now, there was no real place for me here. Nothing had changed on that front.
A good hour or so after we set off, the bus pulled into the downtown bus station. The vast majority of passengers got off here, heading to the nearby vegetable market to set up their stalls. I used to get off at this stop too, then hop on the subway to get to work. Today I had no destination in mind, just wanting to go all the way to the end of the line. I didn’t get up, just stayed put as the bus emptied out again and carried on.
Past the city centre, the industrial district loomed closer. I’d driven through this area before when I went to visit Ye Tang’s old place. But this time, instead of seeing the rundown state of the car district now, I saw it in its heyday. Huge swathes of identical white factory buildings sat like giant building blocks on the flat land, separated from endless fields of vegetables by just a road. Tens of thousands of car interiors and other functional products left here every day, heading along the highways to the car manufacturers on the coast, where they’d be assembled before being shipped overseas from the international logistics port. Nearly a hundred thousand workers and their families lived and worked here. The food streets and pedestrianised areas near the industrial district used to be packed every night. My classmates and I would often come here for dinner on weekends, then stroll along the pavements at the edge of the district, just enjoying the breeze. When I leaned over the railings and looked down at the brightly lit factory grounds, it felt like the heart of the city, constantly pumping, sending oxygen and nutrients to every part of the urban sprawl. Now that heart had stopped beating. I had no idea where those workers and their families were now. And I had no idea where I was heading myself.
The bus trundled along the elevated highway all on its lonesome, leaving the endless rows of high-rises behind. Judging by the time, it should have been broad daylight out there, but all I could see was this thick, swirling fog. I didn’t know if it was real or just the sky playing tricks on my eyes, so I just kept leaning against the window, watching this city that felt both familiar and totally alien. The long, droning hum of the engine slowly started to blur my mind. Half-asleep, half-awake, I vaguely felt the bus reach the edge of the city. This was one of the few big open spaces you’d find around here. The government used to put on a massive fireworks display here every Chinese New Year, but they switched to drone shows because of the air pollution. My friends and I came to see it a few times. I still remembered the colourful fireworks bursting in the night sky, and the deafening sounds they made. That was the city’s golden age, well and truly gone. Now this place was deserted. I should have just drifted off to sleep, but this secret yearning deep inside me kept me wide awake. Maybe my wish was just too strong, because the impossible happened again. One after another, these unique fireworks shot up into the sky, bursting in the starless night, lighting up this place that once was, and now wasn’t.
I listened to the lively sounds outside the bus window, closed my eyes, and like the tide going out, I drifted peacefully into a dream of the past. In my dream was my old home, my mum when she was younger, and Ye Tang and Li Boyan too. The dream reached its peak when I saw this ordinary-looking young man wake up in bed. Lying next to him was someone who looked exactly like him.
Gao Wen could wake up at seven every morning without an alarm. Sunlight was already creeping through the curtains. The person next to him was still out like a light. He rubbed his eyes, rolled over, sat up, grabbed the pre-knotted rope from the bedside table, slipped it expertly around the other person’s neck, and yanked back hard with both hands. At first, the guy thrashed his legs a bit, but it wasn’t long before his breathing got shallower and shallower, until it just stopped altogether.
Routine done, Gao Wen finally got out of bed to get dressed and wash up. Breakfast was a simple affair: two slices of toast, a fried egg, and a glass of milk. After wolfing that down, he stripped the clothes off the corpse, folded them neatly, wrapped the whole thing in cling film from head to toe, shoved it in the suitcase he’d already packed, and finally chucked in some activated charcoal to get rid of any whiff. Job done, Gao Wen read for a bit. Ten o’clock on the dot, he put on his hat, mask, and shades, took his car keys, and lugged the suitcase out the door.
The flat building Gao Wen lived in had this little yard fenced off with brick walls and a corrugated iron gate, and his car was parked in there. It was an unremarkable second-hand black SUV, its main selling point being the massive boot space. He heaved the suitcase into the boot, cranked up the car stereo, and cruised towards the outskirts of town with some cheerful tunes blasting. About an hour later, he pulled up in front of a huge cave.
This small southwestern town had seen better days, and tourism wasn’t exactly booming. The underground caves on the outskirts were untouched, perfectly preserved in their natural state. Gao Wen strapped on his headlamp, hefted the heavy suitcase, and trudged into the cave. It was pitch-black inside, with the faint sound of trickling water. The limestone, eroded by groundwater over millions of years, made it tricky to walk. Gao Wen didn’t dare go too deep, feeling his way to a stalagmite, then shoved the suitcase into the dark underground river. The suitcase hit the riverbed with a muffled thud. Gao Wen let out a sigh of relief and headed back towards the entrance with a spring in his step.
Stepping out of the cave, the sun was blazing. Gao Wen glanced at his watch; it was one o’clock in the afternoon. He had eighteen hours left to live.
If you only had twenty-four hours left on the clock, what would you do? Before he hit twenty-four, Gao Wen had never given it a second thought.
Before he hit twenty-four, Gao Wen was just your average university student, slogging away at a pretty useless subject, with a decent supervisor and friendly classmates. He’d even published a few papers and was just waiting to graduate and become your run-of-the-mill researcher, living out his days as blandly as everyone else. But one morning, when he was twenty-four, all his plans for the future went up in smoke.
It was just a normal day. Gao Wen hadn’t had any accidents beforehand, hadn’t bumped into anyone untoward. He’d just woken up in his rented room and seen another version of himself lying next to him in bed.
He froze solid for a bit, then rubbed his eyes hard. No matter how he looked at it, there was no mistaking it—the man lying next to him was definitely him, wearing the same grey pyjamas, sporting the same buzz cut, with the same face, even down to the size and placement of his moles. The other him was fast asleep. Gao Wen just sat there, his mind a complete blank.
It felt like a lifetime before the other him finally stirred. Gao Wen picked up his phone from the bedside table and squinted at the time—only ten past seven. The other bloke rolled over, sat up, and the second he saw Gao Wen’s face, he was gobsmacked.
That morning was the longest Gao Wen had ever lived through in his twenty-four years. Once the initial shock wore off, he and the other him sat down and went over their lives in detail, confirming their memories were a perfect match—no parallel universes or time travel involved. They didn’t leave the room all day. Gao Wen texted his supervisor to call in sick. They ate instant noodles, staring at each other in the cramped thirty-square-metre flat. Neither of them had a clue what to do next. As night fell, Gao Wen felt this overwhelming sense of dread and confusion.
He knew the other him felt exactly the same. They just sat there, not knowing what to say. Eventually, Gao Wen broke the silence. “Let’s just get some sleep.”
They crawled into bed, lying close together like they had that morning. Two identical men staring up at the blank ceiling. Gao Wen’s heart felt like it was being crushed by a massive weight. But he still drifted off to sleep pretty quickly.
Seven o’clock the next morning, the worst-case scenario had played out: there were four identical people in the room, two awake, two still out cold. Gao Wen looked at the other him who’d woken up first, and neither of them said a word. They just wordlessly grabbed pillows and smothered the other two still sleeping versions of themselves.
Gao Wen had never been in a fight in his life and wasn’t exactly a natural brawler. Luckily for him, neither was his opponent. He and the other surviving Gao Wen were locked in a struggle, each trying to choke the other. Gao Wen grabbed a water glass from the desk and smashed it over the other him’s head. Before he could recover, Gao Wen jabbed a shard of glass into his temple. Slowly, the struggling stopped.
That day, Gao Wen went to the lab, and when he came back, he was driving a rental car with a bag of food, three suitcases, a load of cling film rolls, and a big bag of activated charcoal. After filling his stomach, he dealt with the three corpses, then drove straight to the outskirts of town and chucked all three of them off a cliff. Once that was done, he sat in the car and chain-smoked a whole packet of cigarettes. He didn’t feel any joy at having survived. Because he had no idea if he’d be so lucky tomorrow.
After that bloodbath, Gao Wen dropped out of university, gave up his flat, and used the inheritance his dead parents had left him to buy a second-hand car. He uprooted himself from the second-tier city and came to this remote little town in the southwest. He rented a bungalow in town and kept to himself, not talking to anyone except for when he needed to buy essentials. He cut all ties with his old teachers and friends, spending all his spare time trying to figure out the weird thing that had happened to him.
Gao Wen conducted a series of simple experiments. To see how far the copying went, he tried sleeping in different clothes. When he woke up at seven the next morning, the other him was similarly clothed. To see if the copying could happen to other living things, he bought a chick from a farmer. When he went to sleep that night, he taped the chick to his hand. When he woke up the next morning, he had two identical chicks, and the day after that, there were four. Gao Wen was both thrilled and terrified when he killed those four chicks. He knew he could never breathe a word of any of this to anyone.
One thing he was really curious about was how the copying actually happened. To try and get to the bottom of it, he bought a camera and tripod, set it up at the foot of his bed, and after dealing with the other him as usual the next morning, he watched the recording from the night before while sipping his milk.
To make sure he didn’t miss a thing, Gao Wen slowed the playback down, watching it frame by frame at twenty-four frames a second. The earlier part of the recording was normal, but then at seven o’clock, another him just appeared out of thin air, with absolutely no transition between one frame and the next. Gao Wen knew he was never going to figure out the reason for this on his own.
The recording also revealed something else he hadn’t noticed before. From eleven o’clock at night until seven the next morning, he just lay there sound asleep. Then, after seven, there was another him lying next to him. The newly created copy opened his eyes. The original him was still fast asleep. It finally dawned on Gao Wen: the very first him, the real Gao Wen, had died under that pillow that morning. Every day, he was killing yesterday’s version of himself. The him that existed today was just a fake copy of the him from yesterday.
Once that penny dropped, Gao Wen just stood there facing the camera and let out this uncontrollable, manic laugh. It echoed around the empty room like he’d just heard the funniest joke in the world.
After finding out the truth, Gao Wen fell into a manic despair for a while, then just sort of went quiet, like a fire that’s burned itself out. He knew there was no way things could ever change. There was no chance in hell a copy would just sit there twiddling its thumbs, waiting for the original to wake up. That morning’s slaughter had made that crystal clear. When it comes to fighting for survival, even against yourself, you don’t pull any punches.
So, he just had to suck it up. He pretended nothing was amiss and just carried on with his life, calm as you like. Get up, deal with the body, go home for lunch, read in the afternoon, work out in the evening. He planted bougainvillea in the yard and took good care of it every day. His own life only lasted twenty-four hours, but those flowers could live on for ages, bursting into iridescent colours every time the spring breeze blew. They were the only bright spot in Gao Wen’s existence.
Not long after the bougainvillea had finished blooming, Gao Wen had a visitor in his yard. This skinny ginger cat squeezed through a gap in the fence and cautiously eyed up Gao Wen’s place. Gao Wen cooked it some chicken breast. The cat followed him inside. When he went to bed that night, the cat curled up in a corner, a fluffy little ball.
The next morning, he was woken up by the cat meowing. He opened his eyes and saw one cat perched on his legs, and another identical cat sitting on the floor. Both of them were meowing away at him. He immediately realised what had happened and swung his legs out of bed. Both cats were spooked by his sudden movement and bolted out of the house, one after the other.
Gao Wen chased after them barefoot, grabbing a small knife from the dining table as he went. The cat might have been small, but it was quick on its feet, darting all over the yard. He managed to grab one of them and slit its throat with the knife. The other one squeezed through a gap in the fence and scampered into the woods.
Gao Wen dumped the dead cat in the yard, wanting to head back inside to wash the blood off his hands. The other him had already woken up and was standing in the doorway, staring blankly at him. “What happened?”
“That cat copied itself. I grabbed one, the other one bolted,” Gao Wen gasped out, trying to catch his breath. “Get dressed and give me a hand.”
They got their gear on—hats, masks, shades—took the knife and the raw meat, and headed into the woods. They went along making cat noises and scattering strips of raw meat everywhere, trying to lure the ginger cat out. The cat was clearly spooked, and they spent the whole morning searching without a sniff of it. It wasn’t until the sun was right overhead that they found a few specks of blood. They followed the trail to a small stream, where the ginger cat was lying on a mossy rock, whimpering, one of its back legs still bloody.
Gao Wen walked over to the cat, crouched down, and picked it up by the scruff of its neck. He didn’t want to hurt the poor thing at all; it was just a harmless creature, forced to share his cursed existence just by coming into contact with him. But two squared is four, two to the power of four is sixteen, two to the power of eight is two hundred and fifty-six, two to the power of sixteen is sixty-five thousand five hundred and thirty-six. He didn’t have a choice.
After killing the cat, Gao Wen dug a hole with his hands and buried it by the stream. He turned back and looked at the original him, who was also watching him in silence. Gao Wen had absolutely no desire to fight himself to the death right now. His will to survive had never been so weak.
He pulled the small knife out of his pocket and held it out to the original him. “Kill me. You’re the original. You should be the one to live.”
The original him didn’t say anything, just took the knife from his hand. Gao Wen closed his eyes. Finally, it would be over.
The pain didn’t come. Gao Wen opened his eyes and saw that the original him had slashed open the main artery in his own arm. He looked Gao Wen straight in the eye with an eerie composure. “New things are built on the ruins of the old. New life is born from the death of the old. That’s the way things should be.”
Gao Wen was speechless. He helped the original him sit down slowly, and the last thing the original him said before he lost consciousness was, “Bury me with the cat.”
After burying the original him, Gao Wen went back home alone, his hands covered in dirt. The yard felt empty. The bougainvillea, its spring blooms all gone, swayed forlornly in the breeze. Gao Wen went into the bedroom, sat down on the chair, and buried his face in his arms. He’d never felt so exhausted.
On the opposite wall hung the calendar he tore a page off every day. The calendar looked down at him from its high perch. The words Gao Wen had written himself on the day he discovered the truth were still there on its cover: “Wishing you happiness and joy today.”
Waking up from that dream, I found myself lying in my bedroom, staring up at the blank ceiling. My smartwatch told me I’d been out for over twelve hours, but my head still felt fuzzy, and my limbs were as heavy as if I’d just run a marathon. Everything that had happened yesterday, including everything I’d seen on the bus, felt distant, like something from a past life. More than just waking up from a deep sleep, it felt like being reborn.
I swung my legs out of bed, got dressed mindlessly, and headed to the kitchen to fix myself some food. Another grey day. The living room, without any lights on, was as gloomy as evening. I ate my brunch without really tasting it, my brain still feeling like cotton wool. After washing up, I found myself drawn to the bedroom, sitting down at the computer, opening my usual film editing software, and starting to sketch out storyboards. I didn’t know why I was doing it, but I knew it was what I should be doing. In that moment, I felt completely in sync with Gao Wen from the story.
This time, the process was a lot tougher than usual. Normally, no matter the type of film I was making, I didn’t have to adjust my preferences, because it was my own work. But this time, I was trying to recreate someone else’s vision. I wanted it to have Li Boyan’s stamp all over it, not mine. I had to consciously hide myself from start to finish, carefully mimicking Li’s style. I was sketching out the storyboards, struggling to remember that dream. One Day had a cold colour palette, but the shots were steady, no jarring shaky cam or quick cuts; it had this gentle, unfolding feel to it. Judging by Li’s work, her personality was more grounded and melancholic than I’d imagined.
The creation process was slow-going. I was racking my brains in front of the computer at night, and during the day I had to worry about Ye Tang. You didn’t need AI or the medics’ expert opinion to see that Ye was on the brink of death. There wasn’t much I could do for her. I regularly changed the water in the vase in her room, swapping out any wilting petals for fresh flowers. I also played her favourite films and songs in the room now and then, based on what Liu Miao and Lin Maocheng had told me she liked. To help her sleep better, I’d put that black gift box I’d brought back from the capital on the bedside table next to her bed. Even though I was doing everything I could, Ye’s condition was getting worse day by day. I knew that if I couldn’t let her see One Day before she passed away, then all of this would have been for nothing.
After three weeks of toiling, I finally finished the recreated version of One Day. To be honest, I wasn’t exactly happy with it. While it essentially told the whole story, many of its little bits and pieces were different from the original. But even so, it was the only comfort Ye Tang was likely to get now. To make sure no one else interrupted, I decided to screen this film she’d been waiting for during my night shift.
The special care unit was dead quiet at night. After swapping shifts with my colleague, instead of doing my usual rounds in the hospital, I snuck into Ye Tang’s room with my backup of One Day. The film was barely twelve minutes long. I wouldn’t need much time, and the chances of getting caught were slim. But I was still sweating buckets, and my hands were shaking as I switched on the transcranial direct current stimulation kit. That mix of nerves and excitement felt exactly like the first time I went to a film festival and screened my work to a crowd. As I hit the play button, I even felt a strange sense of holy duty.
The film started.
I sat by Ye’s bedside, my eyes glued to the EEG monitor screen, waiting for the film to end. I’d made this film, so I knew every single shot inside out. Just by looking at the timecode on the progress bar, I could instantly picture the corresponding scene. While I mentally ran through the plot, I kept an eye on the changes in the brainwave patterns. For the first couple of minutes of the film, Ye’s brainwaves stayed pretty steady. But as the story switched from the present to the past, the gamma waves on the screen started to ramp up. These brainwaves, flickering between 30 and 150 Hertz, are closely linked to some high-level brain functions, like understanding and memory. The surge in gamma waves meant her brain was really working hard. I’d never seen patterns like that on her EEG before.
The film kept rolling. After his experiments, Gao Wen finally found out the truth: every day, he was killing yesterday’s version of himself. The him that existed today was just a replica of the him from yesterday. As the story got to this point, the screen showed alpha and gamma waves syncing up across different frequencies, and theta and gamma waves doing the same, with the alpha-gamma link being stronger. This kind of interaction usually pops up in healthy people when they’re thinking or remembering. I had no idea what Ye Tang was recalling. It wasn’t looking good.
I took a deep breath, squeezed my hands together, trying to talk myself out of stopping the film. Ye couldn’t feel my anxiety. Her face and body were still relaxed. Her brain was putting on what might be its last big show. When the film reached its climax, the bit where Gao Wen killed the cat by the stream with his own hands, the gamma waves on the screen had this short, sharp spike, reminding me of a firework shooting up and then bursting into a splatter of amazing colours. After that, the power of every type of brainwave started to drop off, like the embers of a firework quietly fading into the dark night.
I jumped up suddenly and looked at the vital signs monitor on the other side of the bed. Ye Tang’s heart rate was plummeting, about to drop below the danger zone. Just as I was dithering about whether to press the alarm button, her smartwatch, which had been resting on the bedside table, suddenly started ringing. I picked it up, and the screen showed a virtual number from overseas.
I turned my gaze to Ye Tang in the bed. She’d wasted away so much, you wouldn’t have recognised her from when she was first admitted. That one look brought me back to my senses. I put the smartwatch back where it was. At that exact moment, her blood pressure and heart rate crashed below normal, and the vital signs monitor started blaring out a frantic alarm. The medics would be here any second to try and resuscitate her. At least the film was over.
Seeing there was absolutely nothing more I could do, I felt a sense of calm wash over me. One way or another, I’d managed to grant Ye Tang her wish. Even if the outcome wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped for, there was no point dwelling on it. I sat down by the bed and took her hand in mine. Her hand was dry and warm, not at all like someone on their way out. Feeling the heat coming from her palm, I felt more relaxed than I had in ages.
The smartwatch on the bedside table started ringing again, the shrill sound cutting through the quiet of the room. I couldn’t bring myself to let go of Ye Tang’s hand to check who was calling, so I just sat there by the bed, letting my mind wander. I had no idea who was on the other end of the line, or where they were calling from. All I knew was that whatever they wanted to say, it was too late for Ye Tang.
The sharp ringing of the smartwatch just kept going. But I couldn’t bring myself to care. In that moment, whatever was happening in the world outside just didn’t matter. I sat quietly in the darkened room, holding tightly onto Ye Tang’s hand, just waiting for the medics to arrive.
Translation Editor: Shin, Mark
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