Ren Yi

An intern at a certain museum in 2065, nineteen years old, with 1 year on the job—already able to work night shifts alone. She is not a university student; she taught herself antiquities appraisal. Calm and fond of reasoning, she puts no stock in 'ghost stories'—any anomaly, she first treats as ancient engineering or a mechanical fault.

She carries a handwritten notebook that never touches the cloud, recording every 'something's off.' What she doesn't know is this: some of those off things, once written down, change on their own.

That day after closing, the air conditioning in the special exhibition hall dropped 0.7 degrees for no reason, and a layer of mist that wouldn't sink rose inside the glass cases. On the bottom of the borrowed stone sarcophagus in the case appeared a line of inscription she had studied in high-resolution photos 3 times—and that had never existed. Then she heard it—a voice, very faint, speaking right against her ear in a language she didn't know.

A woman in a navy coat, eyes like dry sand, walked in and said to her: We know you heard it.

A man who called himself a professor but looked more like a government official picked her up in the back alley in a black sedan and drove a loop. He gave her ability a name: Echo-Read—in three hundred years, she was the fifth who could make out complete sentences.

He also exposed something that chilled her: that letter in her mailbox was written by herself—only 'not the you of now.' Back home, she drew a ring with a gap on a blank sheet—and that ring began to turn around the gap, on its own.

An old woman with short grey-white hair and a thin silver bracelet stood before a Greek-vase display case for a full 18 minutes—not taking photos, not checking her phone, just looking. The strange thing was: for the whole time she was there, that exhibit's 'echo' didn't sound at all; the moment she left, the echo came back.

Ren Yi did not step forward—for the first time, she clearly realized that she herself was being watched by something, and she didn't know whether it was the academy, someone else, or something far older.

Mom came up from Pingtung to see her. In the midst of small talk, Mom said something that overturned a whole stretch of her memory: Chen Yufang is your auntie, not your classmate; you never had a classmate named Chen Yufang in middle school.

But she remembered it perfectly clearly—that middle-school friend who kept a dog named Bubu. On the spot she pretended she'd misremembered and asked no further. From that moment on, she could no longer tell: whether her memory had been altered, or her mother's.

She has been at it 1 year and can already take a night shift alone. After closing the museum holds three sounds: the air conditioning, the dehumidifiers, and the fine cracking of wooden cases shifting with the temperature.

The work amounts to walking and writing. A fixed route round the building, the temperature and humidity readings at each gallery, the anomalies noted down and the normal readings noted too. She notes them in more detail than required.

She carries a notebook that is not uploaded. She fills in the museum's system as required; her own book holds a second set—alongside the readings, how the air felt, what it smelled of, whether she heard anything that did not belong to the building.

Artifact authentication she taught herself. She is not a university student, and not many at the museum know it.

She does not believe in ghost stories. Any anomaly is first taken as ancient engineering or mechanical fault, and she has never skipped that order.

The air conditioning drops 0.7 degrees: she checks the vents, the temperature schedule, whether the adjacent gallery moved in step. A film of mist rises inside a case: she thinks first of the differential and the seal of the case, not of anything else.

The method makes her useful at the museum. When something inexplicable happens people call her, because she will eliminate items one by one to the end, and only concede once elimination has failed.

The trouble is that on that particular night she eliminated everything, and what remained could not be explained as engineering. She wrote it into her own notebook.