Ch. 007| The Marked Crate

Day 15, 07:12 A.M. Li Kaichen at his desk.

He'd gotten home at 03:30 on Day 15 and hadn't slept. He showered, sorted his notes, sat down at the desk. He opened the list he'd marked up the night before. Eight areas, from Wende in Neihu out to Gangxi in Keelung — a loop around the edges of Taipei.

He'd circled Gangxi, Keelung, in red pen. The farthest one. Fifty minutes to drive there, but he hadn't slept and couldn't manage a long haul behind the wheel — so he'd take the TRA local train instead.

He'd chosen the far one because he wanted to test the inverse of the "looking on purpose" hypothesis — walk until he was tired, until he'd stopped thinking about signage at all, and see whether he'd run into something anyway. A single sample, not a pattern; he knew it was only a test. Down by the Keelung waterfront he could walk for two or three hours. Tea eggs, the Miaokou night market, the harbor, secondhand bookshops — he could pass for a tourist easily enough.

Before leaving he deliberately cut down his gear. Sony α7 + 35mm + one SD card + GoPro Hero 12 (clipped to the shoulder strap of his backpack, lens forward, the front half poking out, unremarkable) + one GoPro SD card + iPad mini (in the bag, for reviewing photos) — that was all. Spare batteries, spare SD cards, the encrypted drive, the voice recorder all stayed home. He didn't want to look like he was on a story. The waterproof notebook came along, but jammed into the back pocket of his jeans.

He swapped his jacket for a thinner one, pocketless, old. Swapped his shoes for an old pair of sneakers. He checked himself in the hallway mirror — fine. Like a tourist.

He left at 08:30. Took the 08:46 local from Taipei Main Station, reached Keelung at 09:38.

---

At 12:40, he was eating at a small lunch place near Keelung Miaokou. The owner was a Keelung local, early fifties, talking in a Keelung accent. Li Kaichen ordered braised pork rice and a bowl of fish-ball soup, sat in the corner, ate slowly, listened to the TV in the shop.

The Taipei weather finished and the news cut to the local-affairs segment. One item: an elderly man missing in Banqiao, police asking for the public's help. Another: residents of an old building in Neihu had filed a group complaint about strange noises in the middle of the night, the city had sent someone to look, found nothing.

Li Kaichen set down his chopsticks for three seconds. Then kept eating.

When he finished he paid and made small talk with the owner.

"Boss, is Gangxi Street easy to walk?"

"Which stretch are you after?"

"Nowhere in particular. Just wandering."

"Take the road from Miaokou down toward the harbor, past the Ocean University dorms — that's Gangxi. Keep going and you hit the old shipyard."

"Thanks."

"You here to cover something?"

Li Kaichen paused. "I'll see. Decide whether to write it after I've had a look."

The owner gave a small laugh and didn't press.

---

15:40, a stretch of Gangxi Street.

He walked past a length of old concrete wall and turned into a narrow lane. A strip of yellow plastic tape was stuck across the mouth of it, red lettering: "City government inspection in progress — no entry."

Inside the line, on the ground, there was something.

A gray metal crate. Roughly 50 cm × 40 cm × 30 cm. There was a marking on its surface — circular, cut deep into the metal, the line uniformly thick, a mechanical look to it. From thirty meters off the naked eye couldn't make out the interior detail.

Beside the crate, two people.

They wore beige khaki jackets, black trousers, black utility shoes. Masks and ball caps. Ages impossible to read. But they were wrong — it took Li Kaichen five seconds to see where. The two didn't stand side by side and didn't talk, yet they were positioned just so, one facing the mouth of the lane, one facing the crate, covering the angles at both ends; their hands were empty, no phone out, no cigarette lit, nobody being waited for. He had seen police plainclothes run surveillance. These two were the same thing.

Li Kaichen didn't stop.

He kept walking, hugging the wall opposite the mouth of the lane, maybe thirty meters off, facing the tape.

He took his phone out of his pocket, pretended to check LINE. The Sony α7 hung from his neck, dropping against his chest, lens forward. Left hand swiping the phone, right hand reaching up under his neck to press the α7's shutter — the body was preset, shutter silent, twelve frames burst, 3 fps.

Four seconds.

He kept swiping the phone for fifteen seconds. Then turned slowly, dropped his head to look at the α7's LCD.

Twelve frames, every one of them, the gray crate there. The circular logo there too. The two in plainclothes there.

He looked up.

The gray crate was no longer on the ground.

Li Kaichen didn't move. He looked at the LCD again. All twelve still there. He looked at the scene. The ground was bare concrete, no crate, no drag mark where a crate had been hauled, the two in plainclothes still standing where they'd been — but their postures had changed. One of them pulled a small slip of paper from a pocket, walked outside the tape, and spoke with a security guard who'd only just appeared.

The guard was the kind you saw a lot around Keelung harbor — a uniformed man of sixty, blue shirt, black trousers.

Li Kaichen checked the time. 15:40:44.

From the twelve-frame burst to now, thirty seconds at most.

---

Li Kaichen stayed against the wall, still.

He shot the same spot again with the α7. A burst of five. On the LCD — no crate.

He flipped back to the earlier twelve, zoomed the 1st, the 6th, the 12th. The crate in every one.

He stood at the wall for five minutes, keeping the phone up as if in use.

At the mouth of the lane there was a street stall, a woman selling tea eggs, mid-fifties, red apron, sitting on a low stool. Li Kaichen went over and bought one.

"Excuse me — what's going on with that lane up there?"

"City government, I suppose. They tape it off once a week. Checking for illegal structures or something, I think."

"Did you happen to see a gray crate just now? On the ground, in the lane."

The woman thought for three seconds. "No, nothing."

"Have you been here the whole afternoon?"

"Yes. I open at 02:30."

"From 02:30 till now, nobody carried anything in there?"

"No."

"Thanks. Fifteen NT, right?"

"Right."

Li Kaichen paid and walked off. Across the street he stopped for three seconds — he'd pressed too specifically just now, the woman might remember a reporter coming around to ask. If the plainclothes men went back and questioned her, they'd hear his description. He took a roundabout route, deliberately changed his path, to avoid passing the tea-egg stall again.

When he reached the mouth of the lane he made a point of walking right past the guard. By now the plainclothes man had left him and gone back inside the tape, standing shoulder to shoulder with the other one.

"Sorry — could I ask what's being handled in there?" Li Kaichen asked the guard.

"City government inspection. Routine."

"I passed by earlier — I thought I saw a gray crate on the ground?"

The guard frowned, turned his head, glanced inside the tape.

"No crate. I've been here since 08:00 this morning, and no crate ever came in."

"You're sure?"

"Thirty years on this job. Anything I can see, I remember. There's no crate."

"Thanks."

Li Kaichen kept walking, went around the block, looked in from the far end of the lane.

From the far end, inside the tape — bare concrete, the two plainclothes men talking with a plainclothes cop who'd just arrived, no crate, no mark of a crate dragged or lifted.

He thought about going around to ask the plainclothes cop. He walked over; the cop looked at him once and raised a hand. "Inspection in progress here, please use the road up front." No answer to the question about the crate.

He left.

---

17:18, a café near Keelung station.

Li Kaichen sat in the corner and went through the twelve photos on the iPad.

In all twelve, every one, the crate was there.

He zoomed the 6th to the pixel. There wasn't much to see — a circular shape, the edge irregular, some kind of structure inside it, but blown up to that region every pixel was compression and sensor noise layered together, illegible. All he could say was: it was a marking with a mechanical look, not hand-drawn, not a random smudge. The exact shape, he wouldn't commit to.

He scrolled to the side of the logo, zoomed to the limit — there was something to the lower right of the logo, like an arrangement of some kind of marks, horizontal, shorter than the logo itself. But blown up to that region every pixel was a compression artifact, no recognizable shape at all. Could be characters, could be a barcode, could be a smudge; he couldn't even say whether it was part of the same message.

He tried different zoom algorithms. Tried running the whole image through AI upscaling. The results all came out a blur.

All he could say was: there was something beside the logo. But what it was, this camera at this focal length at this distance couldn't get him.

It wasn't any logo he recognized. Not a government ministry's diamond or circular seal, not an ISO-style equilateral triangle, not an ICAO-style aviation ring, not the lettered combinations of bodies like the IEEE or IEC. Not the mark of any Taiwanese company or foundation either.

He flipped back to the twelve crate photos and set the 1st and the 12th side by side. Four seconds apart. He wanted to see whether the logo, like the birthday photo of A-Xiang in 003, would "correct" itself away after a few days.

He zoomed the 1st and measured the logo's diameter — about ten pixels. The 12th, measured the same way. Ten pixels. The 6th, in the middle, ten as well.

Within four seconds, no change. But four seconds was too short to rule out the possibility of a "cross-day correction."

He opened iCloud and pushed up a second copy of the twelve. The encrypted drive was at home; he'd make a full three-way backup once he got back. He'd wait until Day 16, Day 17 to measure again. If the logo, like A-Xiang's brow bone, slowly crept toward a shape he "could draw" — that would be the same mechanism as 003.

He drew the logo in his notebook.

He couldn't. The version his hand produced — the curve of the circle came out wrong, the interior structure just scrawled, nothing like what he'd looked at a moment ago. He tried again. The second circle was rounder, but the inside still didn't line up with the shape he'd just seen.

He flipped to the photo on the iPad and looked again. Clear.

He shut his eyes. Recalled the shape of the logo. A blur.

Same as the block characters.

He didn't know whether this meant his "can read it but can't draw it" had spread to cover the logo, or whether the logo itself had a property of "can't be remembered."

---

On the way home, the local train from Keelung back to Taipei, the ride plus the wait fifty minutes.

Something came back to him — the slip of paper the two plainclothes men had handed the guard. Whatever was on it.

He got home at 18:42. Before going in, he pulled the SD cards out of both the α7 and the GoPro and tucked them into an inside jacket pocket. Then went upstairs.

He sat at the desk and plugged the GoPro card into the MacBook. That footage was GoPro Hero 12, ultra-wide, continuous record, covering the field straight out in front of his chest. He didn't expect it to catch any detail of what was right in front of his own body — but he held on to a thread of hope.

He found the moment the plainclothes man handed over the slip.

On the recording's timeline, that moment was where Li Kaichen had turned toward the mouth of the lane, the GoPro lens still about twenty meters from the tape, the man's hand-off landing right at the lower-right edge of the frame.

He zoomed that corner.

The slip was A6, white, two lines of print. At twenty meters, GoPro ultra-wide, blown up to the pixel boundary — the characters, the letters, the numbering, the detail of the mark in the lower-left corner, all of it gone into the pixels.

He cut to that stretch of GoPro audio, slowed it, ran noise reduction, listened five times. The low exchange as the man passed the slip — too far, the ambient sound swallowing it, nothing made out.

Whatever was on the slip, the GoPro couldn't get it for him.

But there was one thing he could see: the guard signed, tore off one copy, the plainclothes man kept the carbon and took it back inside the tape, like a standard signed receipt on file.

The highest-resolution physical evidence he could obtain was the crate logo itself. The slip didn't need confirming further.

Li Kaichen sat at the desk and looked for thirty seconds.

The lead he could get was the logo itself — a circular marking with a mechanical look, the rest of the detail illegible.

He tried searching Google for "circular mechanical logo government agency," "circular anomaly logo," "circular disaster-response logo." What came up was assorted math diagrams, religious symbols, sports-team crests, SCP fan art. Not one matched.

He went through seven or eight combinations of keywords. Nothing.

---

23:00. He wrote the day up in the notebook.

New page, at the top: Day 15: first time seeing "the people who handle the rift."

Below it:

Gangxi Street, Keelung, 15:40, inside the tape. Two plainclothes, beige khaki, positioned to lock down both ends of the lane, hands empty, no talking. One gray metal crate, 50×40×30 cm, circular logo on the surface (mechanical look, interior structure illegible even at pixel-level zoom) + something beside the logo, like an arrangement of marks, no shape readable at pixel-level zoom. Twelve-frame burst, crate in all of them. Crate gone within 30 seconds. Tea-egg woman and the guard both say there was no crate. Asked the plainclothes cop who arrived after, got waved off, no answer. Plainclothes man handed the guard a slip, guard signed for the record, slip unreadable in both visual and audio.

He paused. Below it he wrote:

I'm not the only one chasing the rift.
Someone is collecting.

He wrote again:

3 hypotheses not yet ruled out:
One: they can make people at the scene forget the crate (selective erasure, targeting the object, sparing the people).
Two: the crate was carried off, lifted, or screened — I wasn't watching the scene continuously for those 15 seconds on the LCD.
Three: the woman and the guard never saw it from the start (distracted attention / angle).
No continuous footage, no firm conclusion.

He stopped for thirty seconds, thought a moment, then flipped back to the 002 page.

On the 002 page he'd written that on Day 1, between 04:50 and 05:10, the weather bureau put out a unified release, and within twenty minutes every outlet on the island ran it without changing a word — the copy said "thin upper-atmosphere conditions, ionospheric disturbance not ruled out." At the time, what he'd thought was: the source of the release was some unit further upstream.

At the very bottom of the Day 15 page, he added a line:

The people behind the weather bureau's unified release and the organization using this circular logo might be the same group.
Or might not be. No firm conclusion yet.

He closed the notebook.

---

He watched his GoPro footage again, slowed to 0.1×, to see whether either of the two plainclothes men had looked his way.

15:42:18 — GoPro 24-hour, the recording's timestamp corresponding to 15:42:18 in reality — he noticed one of the men's heads turn about thirty degrees toward where Li Kaichen was, hold for under a second, then turn back.

For that one second, the man's line of sight and the GoPro lens might have crossed.

Li Kaichen froze the frame there.

He couldn't be sure. The man wore a mask and a ball cap, no way to read where his eyes were pointed, only the head posture to go on. Thirty degrees could be coincidence — he might have been sweeping the surroundings and just happened to sweep across Li Kaichen's direction. The GoPro was on the shoulder-strap mount, lens forward, looking like an ordinary action cam; it might not have been noticed at all.

He couldn't be sure. But he couldn't rule it out either.

---

Day 16, 01:00.

He backed up the day's photos, footage, notes, and the slip screenshot all to the encrypted drive. Three copies.

He sat back down at the desk and looked at the four block characters on the wall. Beside them he'd stuck up a new one — the circular logo from the crate.

Two different things, different in nature, with one thing in common: clear when he looked, undrawable when he tried to draw.

He turned off the light and lay down.

He thought: tomorrow he couldn't go back to Keelung. If the plainclothes man really had caught that one glimpse of him, he needed to keep his head down in Taipei first, wait three to five days, see whether anyone "he shouldn't be meeting" came looking.

Outside the window a scooter passed, the engine cutting through the mouth of the lane for a second and a half, and with his eyes shut he couldn't tell it apart from that distant low-frequency sound he'd heard in the alley on Day 9. But he didn't get up to check. He fell asleep.

【Ch. 007 End · Li Kaichen's place in Da'an District → Taipei Main Station → lunch place by Keelung Miaokou → a lane off Gangxi Street → the tea-egg stall → café by Keelung station → home】