Gu Mingye

A high schooler in 2065 Qingcheng City, seventeen years old, attending evening self-study at a cram school on Shuyuan Street. He was no different from anyone else—save for one thing: he could always hear certain sounds that others couldn't.

He thought it was tinnitus, the result of too much stress, of a frayed mind. He carried a handwritten notebook that never touched the cloud, jotting down those 'wrong' things one by one.

That Friday, after cram school let out, he waited on the platform for the last train. After the 00:20 train passed, the platform lights flickered once more, and the announcement said the next train was about to arrive—but on the timetable, there was no such 00:37 train at all.

In the carriage sat only a single old man with his head bowed, who said to him: young man, you're not someone who should be getting off here. When the train reached a place called 'Platform Thirteen,' he got off. There, a green oil lamp was burning.

Back in the daylight, he found that some people looked at him differently now. The convenience store clerk, the taxi driver, certain people on the platform—when they looked at him, their gaze didn't land on his face but on his 'body,' as if they'd seen something else there, and then quickly looked away, keeping their distance.

He began to learn to tell them apart: which people were the ones who could see that thing on him.

He finally told his mother about that night. He thought she would take him for someone whose mind had gone wrong; but his mother only asked one thing: at the place where you got off, was there a green oil lamp? He said yes.

His mother told him: grandma used to say similar things to me too. It turned out that on the women's side of their family, for several generations, there was always one person who could hear and see these things—and this generation, it had skipped over to him.

At grandma's old house in the Old River District, he opened a wooden box she had left behind. Inside were three things: a talisman of red paper and black ink with the character '返' (Return) written on it; a photo from 2010 of grandma and great-grandma in front of an old temple; and a hand-drawn map of the Old River District with 5 circles marked on it.

He couldn't say what these things wanted him to do—he only knew that grandma had left them behind for the one who would hear.

The sounds started in his early teens. Not continuous—in bouts, and mostly in quiet places: a room late at night, an empty corridor, a platform.

He saw a doctor. The hearing test was normal, the doctor said stress, prescribed something for sleep and told him to stay up less. He took it for a while. The sounds did not thin out.

He stopped going. Not from giving up: he had begun to notice the sounds had a pattern—when they came, where, how long they lasted, all of it could be written down. Tinnitus does not have a pattern.

He put it in the notebook and did not tell his mother. At that point he still believed saying it aloud would amount to admitting something was wrong with him.

The notebook is not uploaded. His classmates all use tablets; he uses pen and paper, and when asked he says he is used to it.

The real reason is that he does not want what he records seen by any system. He cannot explain why he thinks this way; the notion arrived not long after the sounds began.

The format is simple: time, place, what was heard, whether anyone was nearby. The content of what he hears cannot be written as words, so he substitutes marks of his own devising.

He keeps the notebook on him. During evening self-study at the cram school it stays in the innermost part of his bag, and does not come out.