When Lin Mo, a computer science student, started automatically taking "weird selfies" on her phone, she thought it was just a system malfunction—until she showed a stiff and distorted smile that didn't belong to her in the photo, and the background changed from the dormitory corridor to the morgue of an abandoned hospital. What's even more frightening is that these photos will always accurately predict the next "abnormality": a bleeding screen, a strange chat box that automatically pops up at midnight, an electronic noise whispering in the ear...
Also involved was her roommate Xia Xiao. The art student's brush began to draw strange symbols uncontrollably, dark red "blood" seeped out of the paint tube, and even vague calls for help were heard. The two girls pieced together clues in fear, and found that everything pointed to Zhou Yu, a senior who dropped out of school ten years ago, and a few words left by Zhou Yu: "It is imitating my social account to send a distress message to my mother."
The investigation took a turn for the better with the addition of Chen Feng, a top student in the Department of Physics. The three of them followed the abnormal data flow to the "Fear Bazaar" of the Deep Web. In the encrypted audio and faded school journals, they gradually came across the hidden truth: Grandpa Lin Mo's "consciousness digitization experiment" had not ended. A mental patient's fear consciousness was merged with early network data into a "meme", and Grandpa's "death" was just a firewall built with his own consciousness data.
When "memes" begin to imitate their memories and emotions, tear apart trust with forged chat records, and destroy psychological defenses with childhood shadows, Lin Mo must face countless "smiling selves" in the abyss of data, Xia Xiao must decipher the way out of life from contaminated paintings, and Chen Feng must find his way between physics and data.
