Vanishings and Memory Gaps

People start going missing. Quietly, from the accounts on their messaging apps, from their friends' memories, from every record, the person wiped out together with the traces.

Sighting posts put up in the small hours vanish within 2 to 6 hours, accounts and all. One batch of samples ran to 17: the first thumbnail captured at 09:08, 9 left at 09:41, 7 accounts after midday, 6 at 14:42, 4 at 15:08. From the first screenshot to that afternoon, exactly 6 hours, and 11 accounts had gone along with their posts. The web archive rolls back to a version a month old, as though the post had never existed.

The few that survived have something in common: the content is off the mark. One, under a cat avatar, reads "pre-dawn my roof was looking at the sky, there was a line of light," the wording strange; another is a short video linked from a social platform, nothing at all in the sky in the frame, only a person laughing into the lens and saying afterwards, "Nah, there really was something just now." The ones that missed the point, the deletion rule let through.

The people who can be reached converge on much the same account. The one in Banqiao opens with "I deleted that one," then "I didn't see anything," "I just thought the sky was weird, went home and slept, and in the morning I thought about it and decided I'd spooked myself"; asked why he deleted it, he answers, "Got bored," and hangs up. The one in Neihu didn't pick up either of two calls.

Chasing something like this can only be done with a table. The columns carry over from the interview work: source, account, time of posting, place of sighting, content of the sighting, attached image, contact status. Another column appeared later at the right-hand edge of the table, the header typed in as "Unprompted Completeness," used to record how much detail a person can still produce on their own when nobody has reminded them. Most of the cells in that column are filled in with "low," "zero," or "account and post vanished together."

But the erasure isn't always thorough. A man in his fifties in Yonghe who runs a plumbing-and-wiring shop said, the first time he was asked about the colour, that his head was black; after watching a stretch of phone video he said, "Yeah. That's it." Pressed further, he frowned at himself: why couldn't I bring it back just now?

Showing the person concerned a piece of footage, a photograph, can sometimes let him "remember" — a memory that has been altered will, in front of physical evidence, now and then loosen.