Ch. 002| The Wrong Signage

09:04 in the morning.

Li Kaichen hadn't slept. He hadn't left that chair since he'd finished the backup before dawn. For ten-odd minutes somewhere in there he'd kept his eyes shut, but that wasn't sleep.

He opened his laptop.

The news app's headlines: TSMC's share price, some legislator's controversial remark, a celebrity divorce. He had to scroll to the third page of the local section before he found it:

"Pre-dawn reports of sky anomaly from some Taipei residents. Weather Bureau: thin upper atmosphere, ionospheric disturbance not ruled out."

The whole thing ran 180 characters. It quoted a Weather Bureau spokesperson saying "preliminary assessment is a natural phenomenon, not earthquake clouds, not an astronomical event," carried no photo, and had comments disabled.

He switched to a second source. CNA. Same copy, down to the punctuation. A third. SET. Same. He scrolled through a dozen-odd outlets — the same item everywhere. Filing times all fell between 04:50 and 05:10. One window, the whole island, everyone publishing inside twenty minutes.

He knew where this kind of single-window unified line comes from. A Weather Bureau night-duty officer takes a public report at three in the morning and triggers the protocol — that's not far-fetched. But a dozen-plus outlets running identical copy inside twenty minutes, punctuation and all, that's copy handed down from upstream.

---

He opened Threads, searched "sky pre-dawn." Thirty or forty posts. Most were two or three lines plus a blurry photo or screenshot. "Just now in Neihu I think I saw a line in the sky." "Riding through Banqiao before dawn, nearly went off the bike, the sky was really wrong." "Did anyone else see it, I don't dare sleep alone."

09:08. He grabbed the first thumbnail. For every post — the handle, the timestamp, the location keyword, the attached thumbnail — he captured all of it, into a folder on the desktop called "0317."

By the time he reached the seventeenth post, he scrolled back up. The first one was gone. Not the grey card that says "this post has been deleted" — the entire post, handle and all, had vanished. The URL he'd just screenshotted, when he tapped it, bounced him back to the home feed.

He scrolled back. The second one was gone too.

He kept scrolling down, faster now. The third one he saw was still there; he tapped in — it loaded halfway and the screen jumped away. He went back, and that one wasn't there either.

09:41. Of the 17, 9 remained.

He entered all 17 posts into a Numbers spreadsheet. The columns were the ones he used on the job: source, handle, post time, sighting location, sighting content, attached image, contact status.

09:56. Four left. 10:08. Two left — one a cat avatar that read "before dawn my roof was watching the sky, there was a line of light, like the kind of feeling of the cataract in your grandma's eyes," the phrasing strange. The other an IG-linked clip in which the sky held nothing at all, just a person smiling at the camera, then saying after the smile, "no but it really was there just now."

These two hadn't been deleted — his hypothesis was that they'd missed the point, and the deletion rule had let them be. The sample still wasn't enough. But the people he needed to find weren't the ones in these two.

He copied the folder to the encrypted drive. Three copies, same as before dawn.

---

When he'd finished the backup he went to make coffee. It was 10:26 when he got back to the desk.

He opened the 7 RAW files he'd compared the cloud layers against before dawn.

He wanted to check one more time. First frame of the burst. Second. Third. Then he switched to the street-corner shot, the one he'd time-stamped at 03:09.

He looked for two minutes, then set the coffee down.

What he was looking at now and what he'd looked at before dawn were not exactly the same.

The rift hadn't moved. The clouds hadn't moved. It was the edge of the clouds — the kind of edge he'd noted before dawn with the three words "too even" — that this morning looked less even.

Not the same as a normal cloud. The edge of that lower band still shouldn't be so smooth, was still wrong. But against his memory from before dawn, the degree of "wrong" this morning was — a little smaller.

He closed Capture One, reopened it, reimported. Same.

He knew a RAW file doesn't change itself. RAW is the digital version of film-era negatives — once data is written, that's the data, unless someone goes in and touches the original.

He opened Finder and checked the file info. Modified: 04:33 before dawn. Imported: 04:33 before dawn. Nobody had touched it.

He took the original Sony α7 card out of the drawer, connected it to the reader, created a new catalog, and imported the first frame of the burst straight off the original card. The cloud was the same. "Less even" was the same.

He took the 3 TB encrypted drive from before dawn out of the drawer too, plugged it into the computer, and imported from the drive folder into a third new catalog. Also the same.

He opened Terminal and ran SHA-256 three times: the first frame off the original card, the first frame of the local RAW, the first frame of the encrypted backup. The three hashes matched to the character.

The file hadn't moved at the byte level. But what his eyes saw wasn't what he'd noted before dawn.

He opened the notebook he'd written in before dawn, turned to the page where he'd noted "cloud edge more even than the twenty-thousand-shot average." The words were still there. His own handwriting.

He turned to the next page. On it, before dawn, he'd written the number 001, and below it, nothing.

He looked at that line of numbering for about ten seconds. Then he turned back a page.

He wasn't sure he could still use the same words now to describe the cloud on the screen in front of him.

He didn't write anything. He shut the notebook.

---

11:12. He started making calls.

From the spreadsheet he picked out the 2 accounts that had left a full contact trail. One was the Neihu poster — "I think I saw a line in the sky in Neihu" — whose bio said logistics driver. The other was the Banqiao poster — "nearly went off the bike before dawn" — whose bio listed a LINE ID.

He tried LINE first. The man picked up.

"Hello?"

"Hi, sorry to bother you, I'm a freelance writer. I saw the post you put up before dawn about the sky. Could I take two minutes of your time?"

The other end went silent for about three seconds.

"I deleted that post."

"I know. I wanted to ask about what you saw before you posted it."

"Didn't see anything, really." The man's voice dropped. "I just thought the sky was weird, went home, slept on it, and in the morning figured I'd spooked myself."

"What kind of weird did you see?"

"Just… there was light?"

"What shape was the light?"

"I don't remember."

"Do you remember the time?"

"Three… I don't know. I wasn't looking at a clock."

"Do you remember where you were?"

"Banqiao. I was on Wenhua Road, I don't remember exactly what section."

Li Kaichen paused. From any section of Wenhua Road, looking up toward the northeast, the rift from 03:17 before dawn should have sat somewhere east and high.

"The light you saw — was it a long line, or a blob?"

The other end went silent longer.

"I… can't say."

"That's all right. Last question. Why did you delete the post just now?"

"No reason. Got bored of it."

The man hung up.

---

He dialed the next one. The Neihu logistics driver didn't pick up. The second call didn't go through either.

In the "contact status" column he wrote: Banqiao (LINE): reached, vague, no time, no shape, self-deleted. Neihu (phone): no answer ×2.

12:00 noon. He went into the remaining 15 accounts that had left no contact trail, one by one on Threads, checking avatars, bios, who they followed, who followed them — a reporter's standard routine for digging up a person.

Of the 15, 8 accounts were already gone. The account names didn't come up in search at all, as if they'd never existed.

He tried reverse-searching the thumbnails he'd grabbed in the morning. The linked URLs the two thumbnails turned up both led to "page not found."

He tried the Wayback Machine. Of the 8 accounts, 2 had snapshots. The last snapshot — a month ago. This pre-dawn's post didn't exist in Wayback.

As if these accounts had never posted that thing this pre-dawn at all.

13:42. He went out.

---

That afternoon he ran down every witness in the spreadsheet who'd left a location lead, walking the site himself wherever he could. Neihu, Banqiao, Xindian, Yonghe, Xinyi — 5 districts. He covered roughly 80 kilometers. Ate a sandwich somewhere in the middle.

On the road from Neihu to Banqiao, passing a stretch of the Huanhe Expressway, the corner of his eye caught a sign on the right.

It was a hand-shaken-drink shop. Four characters on the sign.

He saw it for a fraction of a second at 80 kilometers an hour.

He felt that those four characters — he didn't recognize them. They were Chinese, all right; the strokes were Chinese strokes, and they sat where characters should sit. But that combination of characters — he couldn't read it. Traditional versus simplified, variant forms, look-alikes — he could rule all of those out. He looked at the four characters, knew he ought to recognize them, but his head couldn't supply a pronunciation.

He held his speed and drove straight, watching for the next interchange. Three kilometers on he took the off-ramp, looped back along the outer road, drove to the alley where the drink shop stood, found a legal curbside spot, stopped, and locked the car.

From the parking spot he walked back along the sidewalk to the stretch under the Huanhe Expressway, then took the levee-side service road until he was directly across from the sign, the main carriageway and the guardrail between them. The sign was about 200 meters off.

He kept along the service road toward it, and when he'd closed to roughly 50 meters, the characters on the sign were —

"Pearl Black Tea."

Four characters. Normal. The kind of hand-shaken-drink sign he saw every day.

He stood at the 50-meter mark for a few seconds. Then he walked the service road back to the alley where he'd parked and got in the car.

His vision held steady at 1.0 in both eyes. The four characters he'd seen at first glance, at 80 an hour, had not been "Pearl Black Tea."

He settled back into the driver's seat, opened the waterproof notebook, paused. "Sign characters looked different" was too weak; "sign characters turned for a moment into another script" was too strong — he couldn't prove it. He closed the notebook and set it back on the passenger seat.

---

At the Yonghe location he met a witness still willing to talk. A man in his fifties who ran a plumbing-and-wiring shop on Yonghe Road and had just knocked off and gotten home a little past three before dawn.

"Yeah, I saw it. Told my wife, she said I was nuts. I said that thing wasn't a plane. Planes move. That thing didn't move."

"Do you remember what that thing looked like?"

"Just a line."

"Straight? Crooked?"

"Straight." The man thought a moment. "Should've been straight."

"Color?"

"No color. It was just there. I can't say, either."

Li Kaichen took out his phone and played the man the video he'd shot himself.

The man stared at the screen for 5 seconds. Then he said, "Yeah. That's it."

Li Kaichen held himself back from reacting at once. "Why did you say just now that you couldn't say what color it was?"

"Because I couldn't bring it back." The man looked at Li Kaichen. "Now I see your video and it comes back. When you asked me just now, my head was black."

"And you remember now?"

"Now I remember." The man frowned. "Strange. Why couldn't I bring it back just now?"

Li Kaichen didn't answer. He played the video again. This time the man finished and nodded. "Yeah. Exactly the same."

Li Kaichen asked the man for his contact details. The man obliged readily, leaving a LINE and a phone number.

---

In the "contact status" column he wrote: Yonghe (on-site): firsthand sighting, recall restored after prompt, video a complete match, contact left.

In the still-unnamed column at the far right of the spreadsheet, he filled in content for the first time. He typed the column header as "unprompted completeness."

Banqiao: low, self-deleted. Yonghe: restored after prompt, zero without prompt. Neihu: no answer ×2. The other 11: account and post vanished together. The last one: still visible on Threads, no contact, no trace.

---

Driving away from Yonghe, he spot-checked Threads on his second phone. At noon 7 accounts remained, by 14:42 that afternoon 6, by 14:56 5, by 15:08 4.

The remaining 4 were: the 2 that had "missed the point," the Yonghe plumber himself, and the one still visible on Threads that had left no contact lead.

The 3 that had disappeared since noon — one Xindian, one Xinyi, one a nickname only, no location. Together with the 8 from before noon, that made 11 accounts gone along with their posts, all inside exactly 6 hours, from 09:08 when he grabbed the first thumbnail to 15:08 that afternoon.

---

23:46 at night. He sat back down at the desk and looked over the whole spreadsheet again.

Of the 17 posts — 2 had missed the point, remained, sighting content unconfirmed. 2 had left a full contact trail: Neihu no answer ×2, Banqiao reached then self-deleted. 1 he'd met in person on-site, recall restored only after the video prompt: the Yonghe plumber. 11 had vanished, account and post together. The last one was still visible on Threads, no contact, no trace, untraceable.

In the bottommost cell of the spreadsheet, he typed a line. Halfway through, he stopped.

What he'd typed was: "Only one who remembers fully without prompting: Li Kaichen."

He stared at the line for about 20 seconds, then deleted the name after the colon, leaving only the criterion:

"Only one who remembers fully without prompting."

No name after it.

---

He closed Numbers.

He opened Threads. Searched "sky pre-dawn" one more time. Two results — the cat avatar and the smiling IG clip. Everything else gone.

He changed the keyword to "3:17 sky." Zero results.

He searched "Weather Bureau anomaly." Only that one original Weather Bureau article was left. Beneath it, not a single comment, not a single citation, not a single repost.

As if the whole thing had never happened.

Only the 7 RAW files and one stretch of video on his computer. And that plumber in his fifties out in Yonghe today.

The plumber was, on this thread, so far the only person whose memory could be restored after the video prompt. But he wasn't someone who could "restate the details unprompted" — that column, to this point, still held only Li Kaichen.

---

Li Kaichen opened the notebook. He turned to the page where he'd written the number before dawn. Below that line, he kept writing:

03:17 pre-dawn, whole-island filing in one window, unified line inside twenty minutes.
17 posts; 11 silenced, account and post together, inside six hours.
At least 1 person exists whose memory returns after a prompt.
A sign along the Huanhe Expressway in New Taipei — characters unreadable for an instant, normal again at 50 meters.

He paused.

Then in the blank space at the far right, he wrote one line in small characters:

Only one who remembers fully without prompting.

No name after it.

He set the pen down.

---

Outside the window was the midnight sky over Da'an District, 23:50.

He looked up for a moment. Nothing there.

He shut the notebook, put it back in the drawer, switched off the light.

Before he walked back to the bedroom, he went to the desk one more time, woke the computer, opened Capture One, and looked once more at the first frame of the burst.

The edge of the clouds — a little more normal still than at noon.

He shut the computer down.

【Ch. 002 End · Li Kaichen's place, Da'an District → five-district field run → Li Kaichen's place, Da'an District】