Ch. 005| Someone She Thought She Knew

October 23, 19:00.

Ren Yi finished dinner. A convenience-store bento, sesame-oil chicken rice, 87 yuan. She couldn't say whether she'd actually tasted any of it, but the box was empty. She threw it into the kitchen trash along with the plastic bag, washed her hands, and went back to her desk.

The nine sheets of white paper were still where she'd left them. The fountain pen was back in the pen holder, in its usual spot.

Outside, it had gone dark. Late October in Xinshu—at seven in the evening the amber streetlights had just come on. Everything was the same as yesterday.

But she now knew that at least one thing she owned was something she'd assumed she remembered the source of, and in fact didn't.

She needed to know whether there were others.

---

Memory fades on its own—use something long enough and you remember using it, not the moment you bought it. That's normal. The first laptop her dad bought her, she'd used it for five years and couldn't recall how she'd opened the box that day.

What she wanted to list wasn't "things whose source I can't recall"—that would fill half the apartment. What she wanted to list were the candidates she "couldn't recall acquiring, and that showed signs of possibly being the same kind of thing as that fountain pen"—whether object, habit, or person.

The pen had already been confirmed anomalous—the broken ring it wrote rotated by itself. The other items were, for now, only candidates.

She took out a small notebook she'd never written in—not her usual Moleskine, but a muji clear-cover booklet she'd bought even earlier, found last Thursday at the bottom of a drawer, originally meant for logging receipts, the shrink-wrap still unopened.

She tore off the wrap, turned to the first page, and wrote with a convenience-store ballpoint (not that fountain pen):

Candidate list, pending verification.
Criterion: can't recall **acquiring** it, and shows signs of possibly being the same kind of thing as that fountain pen.
1. Dark green fountain pen. **Status: anomaly confirmed** (the broken ring it writes rotates by itself).

She paused, and started thinking about the second one.

---

The Moleskine she carried everywhere—A6 format, black, the elastic band already a little loose. She opened it every day, wrote in it every day, closed it every day. She remembered every line she'd written in it, the order of every page, where she'd last crossed onto a new spread.

She couldn't recall where she'd bought it.

Her habit at Eslite was to buy the Midori kraft-cover model; Moleskine had never been on that list. She ran through every entry point she could remember—a birthday gift, handed out at internship training, brought back from the airport by her parents—and not one of them was this notebook.

She flipped back to the first page of the Moleskine. She hadn't written her name on the inside cover—since primary school she'd had the habit of writing her name on the inside cover of every new notebook, just as she did on uniforms, textbooks, lunch boxes; it was her ritual of confirming ownership.

This one didn't have it. She couldn't remember why she hadn't written it.

She turned to the first page and looked at the date of her first entry. September 12, 2064. That was the first day of her museum internship. She remembered that morning—she'd already had this notebook on her.

She remembered using it. She didn't remember getting it.

2. Black A6 Moleskine notebook. **Status: candidate, no evidence of anomaly** (reason for inclusion: I didn't write my name on the inside cover, inconsistent with a habit I've had since primary school).

---

She looked up, out the window. A few windows in the apartment building across the way were lit. In the nearest one, the kitchen, a woman she didn't recognize was washing dishes.

She thought of a habit. Locking the office drawer before leaving work.

Every day before she left, she'd lock the drawer on the right side of her desk—the one holding the inventory ledger and the seal—with a small brass key she kept herself. She'd been doing this for a year. She'd assumed it was museum SOP.

At the joint training session last year—it came to her suddenly—the SOP had included no such rule. The other interns didn't lock theirs. Locking the office drawer wasn't a regulation.

She remembered locking it every day. She couldn't recall the moment she'd first started doing it, nor why she'd ever begun.

3. The habit of locking the office drawer before leaving work. **Status: candidate, no evidence of anomaly** (reason for inclusion: not in museum SOP, the other interns don't lock theirs, I assumed it was a rule—that misbelief is itself suspect).

---

Then she thought of something more unsettling.

Chen Yufang.

Her friend from secondary school. She remembered the two of them crying together on stage at their high-school graduation, remembered the mixed-breed dog at Chen Yufang's house named Bubu, remembered the birthday sticker Chen Yufang had sent her this year.

She couldn't recall how the two of them had first met.

She sat for about a minute, confirming that the thought wasn't a trick of her mind. She closed her eyes and forced herself to think back—to any early scene involving Chen Yufang, the first handshake, the first words exchanged, the first time they'd sat together.

Nothing.

---

She took out her wrist terminal. She hadn't looked at it in seven hours. The screen lit up; the LINE icon showed 11 unread notifications. She ignored all of them and opened her chat with Chen Yufang directly, scrolling to the very top.

On LINE, their first message: August 28, 2061, 21:14 in the evening. The content: "Don't forget to bring your gym clothes tomorrow."

August 28, 2061—Ren Yi was fifteen, had just started her first year of senior high, the day before term began.

They'd been in the same class in their first year of senior high. She'd always assumed they'd met because they were in the same class that year.

She closed LINE, opened Facebook, went to her friends list. Under Chen Yufang's entry, the date they'd become friends: May 4, 2060.

May 4, 2060—Ren Yi was fourteen, in the spring term of her third year of junior high, the year of the one "I saw it, others couldn't" event she remembered: the day in chemistry class when the liquid in the test tube crept up a centimeter.

They'd gone to different junior high schools.

And they'd already been Facebook friends since May 2060.

---

She sat back in her chair and forced herself to work through 2060 in chronological order. That year she was in her third year of junior high; after school she'd take the bus with two other classmates to a nearby cram school. On Friday nights after cram school she'd ride her bike alone to the 7-11 across the street to buy apple juice. On one mock exam in April she'd bombed math. All of that she remembered.

Chen Yufang wasn't in any specific scene from that year.

She'd gone to a café on Wenheng Road with Chen Yufang many times, but couldn't recall when the first time was, or which of them had suggested it. Chen Yufang's house was down some alley off Yongqing Road in Dongcheng; she'd been there, but the occasion of her first visit, what she'd worn that day, who'd taken her there—all of it she couldn't recall.

She remembered meeting Chen Yufang in the classroom on the first day of senior high, and by then they'd already known each other—she remembered smiling, and Chen Yufang smiling too, as if a rapport had already been established.

She remembered the result, already knowing each other. She didn't remember the process of getting to know each other.

---

She pulled the metal box out from under the desk again. She flipped through the 2060 photos—her mother had the year's paper photos printed and put into this box, labeled with the year. The 2060 stack was thinner than the others; she hadn't taken many photos that year—too busy in her third year of junior high, never one for photos.

That year she had eleven photos total. Only one was a photo with Chen Yufang.

She pulled it out and laid it on the desk. On the back, in her mother's handwriting, in pencil: "December 21, 2060, the Wankou riverbank, with Yufang."

Ren Yi looked at the front of the photo. Herself at fourteen and Chen Yufang at fourteen, the Wankou riverbank, a winter evening, the sky a grayish blue, both of them in heavy coats, flashing V-signs, smiling a little stiffly.

She remembered this. She didn't remember who'd suggested it, why they'd gone to Wankou that day, why Chen Yufang had gone with her. She remembered this, but not what came before this.

---

Holding the photo, about to put it back in the box, she paused, and looked again at the background.

Behind the two fourteen-year-old girls was the low concrete wall along the Wankou riverbank, the kind people usually covered in graffiti. They were standing; the wall came up past their waists, and beyond it was the gray Wankou River on a winter evening.

There was a design on the wall.

Not large. Maybe 20 centimeters wide. Drawn with something—not spray paint, not chalk, more like someone had drawn it slowly with some kind of dark oil-based marker, the edges a little irregular.

Ren Yi looked at it for about ten seconds and confirmed she hadn't misread it.

It was a broken ring. The break was at the upper right. The line broke off between the third point and the fourth.

The same design as the watermark at the end of her letter, the same as the ring she'd drawn herself.

That year she was fourteen, in the background of that photo with Chen Yufang, this design was already there. The thickness of the line, the position of the break, the angle between the third point and the fourth—exactly the same as the design she now looked at every day, not a shape any random graffiti artist would have happened to draw.

---

She sat for about ten minutes, doing nothing.

She put the photo back in the metal box, pushed the box back under the desk, picked up the muji booklet, and beneath "3," wrote the fourth entry:

4. Chen Yufang. I don't remember how we first met. In the background of that December 2060 Wankou photo, there's a broken ring on the low wall—the line thickness and the position of the break are exactly the same as the one I have now. **Status: candidate, possibly a coincidental graffiti, but cannot be verified at present**.

---

She closed the booklet and set it beside the Moleskine. She wanted to message Chen Yufang on LINE, "Do you still remember how we first met?"—she typed three words, "Do you still," then stopped.

If Chen Yufang was connected to the Academy, asking would be the same as telling her she was suspicious. If Chen Yufang was nothing, just a friend from secondary school, then it would look like she'd forgotten how she and a friend had met, and it would hurt her feelings.

She held down the delete key, erased the three words, and closed LINE.

She couldn't verify it now, and she couldn't ask now either. Professor Sekhet hadn't given her any contact information, and even if he had, she couldn't very well call him with a reason like "my friend might be one of the Academy's people."

---

At 23:00 she poured herself a third glass of water in the kitchen, came back to the desk, sat down, opened the muji booklet again, and looked at the four entries.

She hadn't written a fifth. She wasn't sure there would be a fifth.

The pen was anomalous, so not being able to recall its source was a real red flag. The Moleskine, the drawer-locking habit, Chen Yufang—none of them yet had independent, repeatable evidence of anomaly tying them together. It might genuinely be a problem; it might just be that she'd started treating everyday forgetting as evidence too, started becoming paranoid.

But she also knew that even if it were only the pen, even if the other three were all coincidence—the pen alone was already enough to keep her going.

The photo was back in the metal box. On that low wall, the year she was fourteen, the design was still there.

【Ch. 005 End · Ren Yi's apartment】