Lu Yan's Talk

Lu Yan's office was on the highest floor of the entire building. As the elevator ascended, Lin Shen stared at the floor numbers jumping twenty-seven times. With each jump, he felt the air pressure drop a little more. By the time he reached the top floor, every sound in his ears had become muffled, as if filtered through a layer of water.

Lin Shen took a deep breath as he stood at the door.

The address Lu Yan had given was on the top floor of an office building in the city center. The building's exterior looked much like any other commercial structure—glass curtain walls, revolving doors, an underground parking entrance marked with a sign reading "10 yuan per hour." But after entering the building, Lin Shen noticed two details: the receptionist didn't ask who he was looking for, and in the empty lobby, there were two elevators—one on the left and one on the right—and the receptionist directly pointed to the one on the left. The second detail was that the left elevator had no floor buttons—only a sensor pad. The receptionist swiped her wristband, and the elevator ascended automatically.

Twenty-seventh floor. The doors opened. A corridor carpeted entirely in dark gray, walls bare of any decoration, with recessed LED light strips every five meters. At the end of the corridor, beside the floor-to-ceiling window, stood a pair of three-meter-high white iron double doors.

Lin Shen walked to the door. He took the pencil out of his backpack's side pocket, held it for a moment, then put it back.

The door opened from the inside.

Lu Yan sat behind an extremely long black metal desk. Behind him was an entire wall of windows; the light-filtering film reduced the three o'clock afternoon sunlight to a soft grayish white. The room was large, but aside from the desk, two chairs, and a built-in display screen on the wall, there was nothing else.

Today he was still wearing a dark suit, his collar tied more neatly than yesterday. On the left side of the desk sat a glass of water; on the right side, a thin folder. The cover of the folder bore no markings at all.

"Please, sit." Lu Yan pointed to the chair across from him.

Lin Shen sat down. This time, his back wasn't against the wall—there was nothing behind him, four meters from the door. He placed his backpack at his feet and took out his pencil, setting it on his thigh.

Lu Yan didn't speak right away. He opened the folder on the desk, pulled out a photograph, and pushed it face-up in front of Lin Shen.

The photo was taken in this office—no, that wasn't right. The background showed the exact same floor-to-ceiling windows and black desk, but instead of a folder, there was an old-fashioned oscilloscope on the desk, its waveform flickering on the screen. Beside the desk stood two people—a man with his back to the camera, and a woman facing the lens, smiling. She was smiling happily, a faint crease at the right corner of her mouth.

Lin Shen recognized the man's half-profile—it was a younger Lu Yan by ten years, his hair still black.

"This is my wife." Lu Yan tapped the photo with his index finger. "Ten years ago. The first official launch of the Mirror Project. She was the chief engineer. At 3:07 PM that day, the first Mirror Reflection initiation experiment began. She was standing about three meters from the projection focal point—"

He turned the photo over. On the back, a date was written in pen.

"At 3:11. The channel became unstable. Her quantum state split between two worlds. Half here, half in Mirror A. In physics, it's called 'Schrödinger State Superposition.' Ordinary people call it—" He paused. "Ceasing to exist."

Lin Shen moved his gaze from the photo back to Lu Yan's face. Lu Yan's features were as calm as yesterday, but beneath his eye sockets, an extremely thin layer of bluish veins showed through the skin.

"You founded the Correctors because of her."

"I founded the Correctors to prevent the same kind of screw-up from happening again." Lu Yan put the photo back into the folder and closed it. The movement wasn't fast, but in the entire time from opening to closing, his fingers never touched the front of the photo—only the edges. "When a person crosses the Mirror, the membrane between the two worlds thins. Thin enough to reach a critical point—the membrane breaks, and everyone on both sides dies. It's not that the Correctors want to kill her—it's that the laws of physics want to kill everyone. Our job is—to remove the offender before the laws of physics make their move."

"So your job is to kill people who've fallen over from other worlds."

Lu Yan didn't deny it. He picked up the glass of water on the desk, took a sip, and set it down. "I don't think of it as killing people. I think of it as fulfilling an obligation. A teardrop can fall into the ocean, but it can't lower the sea by three centimeters."

"Those people all have names," Lin Shen said. His tone was steady, but the thumb of his right hand rubbed the pencil cap three times in succession.

"I know all their names." Lu Yan pushed the folder aside and looked up, meeting Lin Shen's eyes. His pupils were very dark, almost black, and under this light filtered through the tinted film, it was nearly impossible to distinguish the boundary between pupil and iris. "You have Jiang Fei's files. You saw that list—nine people. Every person's name, age, origin, crossing time, and correction completion date. I know them better than anyone else in this world. Because every single person who was corrected—was signed off by me personally."

His voice dropped a notch when he said that last sentence. Not emotion—it was as if his throat itself had aged for half a second.

"So you called me here today to add another name."

Lu Yan was silent for a few seconds. He brought the glass of water to his lips again, then set it down without drinking.

"Lin Shen. I called you here today not to add your name."

He opened a drawer, took out an envelope, placed it on the desk, and slid it toward Lin Shen. The envelope was unsealed.

Lin Shen opened the envelope. Inside were two bank cards and a printed treatment consent form. The form's header read "Hengxing Psychological Counseling Center," and below it, in small print: "Memory Reintegration Protocol—Completely Painless, 92% of Subjects Regain Normal Emotional Function Within Seven Weeks."

"Five million, in two installments—the first card, three million, payable upon signing. The second card, two million, upon completion of treatment." Lu Yan's voice returned to the tone of a notary reading a certificate. "In the seventh week after treatment, you will no longer remember the name Su Wan. In the tenth week, you will forget everything that happened in the past five days. In the fifteenth week—you will return to the state you were in before September 17th of last year. The you before that was an architectural designer who worked overtime every day, went to the gym three times a week, and occasionally went to photography studios to shoot architectural models. No anxiety disorder. No insomnia. No hundreds of suns drawn on the walls of your room."

He pushed the envelope forward a little more.

"You don't have to sign. You can stand up, walk out, and keep looking for her." He paused for a beat. "But the moment you walk out that door—the Correctors will directly list you as a Priority One Correction Target."

Lin Shen flipped the envelope over in his fingers. "Priority One Correction Target."

"Meaning priority elimination. Anytime, anywhere. No need for my signature. They won't care about your background, your profession, or whether your friend is called Gu Yang. They're only responsible for 'restoring order.'"

As Lu Yan said this, an airplane passed by outside the window. The engine noise was filtered by the soundproof glass into an extremely low-frequency hum that vibrated in the room for about seven seconds. Lin Shen felt a numbness in his gums.

"You're giving me two paths—pay to forget her, or die."

"Yes."

"There's a third path."

Lu Yan looked at him. "There isn't."

Lin Shen tapped the pencil on his thigh. The bone conduction transmitted the vibration of the tap to his spine.

"I went to the warehouse. I found her diary," he said. "In the diary, she wrote a lot of things—but what I remember most clearly isn't her handwriting. It's the words she erased. She wrote, 'I'm waiting for you.' Not 'don't look for me'—'I'm waiting for her.'"

"I know," Lu Yan said.

Lin Shen paused for a moment. "You know."

"The Correctors have their own surveillance system. Every page of the diary you saw in the warehouse—the time, the location, how you turned the pages—I can see all of it from here." He rotated the glass of water; the water swirled in the transparent glass for half a turn before coming to a stop. "Every time the correction mechanism erases a layer of her traces, it generates a formatting report. You call it 'erasure'—we call it 'reclamation.'"

"So you reclaimed every word of every page of hers."

"Yes."

Lin Shen put the pencil down, pressing his right hand on top of it, his index finger and thumb pinching the "L&S" engraving on the cap.

"Then you reclaimed her photos from my phone. You reclaimed the twenty-one little suns on the sign-off slips. You reclaimed that half-piece of shredded paper in the wall crack. You reclaimed an entire camphor wood chest. So much data processed—and you still think she shouldn't exist."

Lu Yan leaned back in his chair. The angle of recline was very slight, but in this empty room, the sound of that small movement was amplified.

"I reclaimed all of my wife's data," he said. "Ninety seconds after the experiment went out of control, she no longer existed quantumly—but her image lingered on the surveillance footage for about four hours. Her voice lingered a little longer on the recording devices. Her colleagues at the research institute remembered her intermittently for about three months. Her family remembered her for about nine months. Three years later, I found the last surveillance footage that still contained a frame of her—a shot from the end of the hallway on the seventh lab, capturing her back as she pushed open a door and walked out. After that, no new data."

He drank the last sip of water from his glass.

"After a person undergoes Quantum Erasure, their traces don't disappear immediately. There's a Decay Period. What you saw—the diary pages turning white, the photos vanishing, the backgrounds being replaced—these are all necessary stages on the decay curve. Su Wan is going through the exact same decay that my wife went through. And after ten years, I still haven't found a way to stop the decay."

"Then you should be helping me today," Lin Shen said. There was no anger in his voice, only a hoarseness corroded by acetic acid. "You, more than anyone, should want to stop this mechanism."

"I can't." Lu Yan stood up, walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, and turned his back to Lin Shen. Outside the window, the entire city's skyline was shrouded in a layer of gray by the afternoon mist—in the distance, the taillights of cars on the overpass had turned into tiny red dots in the fog.

"The correction mechanism wasn't written by me. It's a self-correcting algorithm inherent to the quantum system. It's like a deleted file—other people can recover it because there are still fragments on the hard drive. Her existence was marked by the quantum system at the root level as an 'incompatible process,' and the algorithm automatically began termination. I only accelerated the process." He turned around and looked at Lin Shen.

"I can make this process faster, and I can make it slower. But I cannot make it stop."

Lin Shen also stood up. He walked to the opposite side of the black metal desk, facing Lu Yan.

"How much slower have you made it?"

"Counting from the day you first discovered the shredded paper turning white—I've already held back the correction progress for four days. In those four days, I've kept Su Wan alive in your memory for an extra thirty-two hours."

Lin Shen said nothing. The only sounds in the room were the faint whisper of the air conditioning and the tiny mechanical ticking of the seconds hand on Lu Yan's watch.

"You think she loved you." Lu Yan clasped his hands behind his back; the burn scar on the back of his right hand was almost translucent in the backlight from the floor-to-ceiling window. "But she knew from the very beginning—that the correction mechanism would activate. Every second she stayed in this world was accelerating the cracking of the membrane between the two worlds. She knew better than anyone—staying was harming you."

Lin Shen removed his hand from the pencil and put it into his coat pocket. He touched the copper key at the edge of the envelope—the key to the back door of the warehouse, wrapped in tape, with a little sun emblem on the tape.

"That was her choice," Lin Shen said. "Not yours."

Lu Yan walked back to the desk. He picked up the treatment consent form and held it down at the upper-left corner—the signature line, blank.

"One last time asking you."

"No need to ask."

Lu Yan placed the consent form back on the desk. The movement was very slow. He picked up the telephone receiver on his desk and pressed a button. Before the person on the other end could speak, Lu Yan said first:

"Execute."

When he put the receiver back, Lin Shen saw it—his hand froze for one frame at the moment of setting the receiver down. Like a skipped frame in an old movie. Not because of injury or pain—it was a trained habitual pause. A motion he made every time after signing a correction order.

"There are three teams downstairs." Lu Yan didn't look Lin Shen in the eye; he looked at the display screen on the wall. "Go. Go as far as you can. But if I see you again—I won't hold back the progress anymore."

Lin Shen pulled open the door. The LED light strips in the corridor were lighting up one row after another—like a string of countdown numbers.After stepping into the elevator, he pressed the close button. The elevator began to descend. He pulled out his phone and dialed Jiang Fei's backup number.

"He's given the order. Three teams downstairs."

"I know. Don't leave through the front entrance. Stop at the tenth floor, then take the fire escape down to the fifth. I'll pick you up from the west side by the ventilation fans."

The elevator numbers jumped downward from twenty-seven. Twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two—when it reached the tenth floor, Lin Shen hit the emergency stop.

The air in the fire escape was much colder than in the hallway. White paint drips left over from renovations were scattered across the concrete steps. He ran down the stairs, his footsteps echoing between the concrete walls like a single person clapping. Pushing open the safety exit on the fifth floor—outside was a row of ventilation fan ducts, their iron walls icy cold, covered in a thin layer of condensation.

A black motorcycle slid out from the shadows behind the ventilation fans. Jiang Fei wasn't wearing a helmet, her gray-blue hair stirred by the wind from the ducts like waterweed. She reached out and tossed him the helmet hanging from the handlebars.

"How did the negotiation go?"

"Didn't sign." Lin Shen got on the bike. As he fastened the helmet buckle, he noticed the liner was still a little warm from Jiang Fei's body heat.

"Then let's run."

As the motorcycle burst out of the duct opening, he looked down at the pencil in his hand. The engraving of "L&S" on the cap had been rubbed by his thumb for five straight days—it was no longer visible. But when his fingers touched it, he could still feel a shallow groove in that spot.

He gripped the pencil tightly. As the motorcycle turned into the tunnel, he saw in the rearview mirror a line of black cars pouring out from the entrance of the office building. Their headlights lit up one row after another. The last ray of daylight before being swallowed by the evening dusk shone on the windshields of those cars, reflecting a blinding white.