On December 22, 2012, the sun rose as usual.
The world did not end in the predicted fire, and people were thankful to have survived the false alarm. Only Lin Fan, in the carnival after the disaster, felt a chill to his bones.
Nothing seems to have changed, but everything is "misplaced" again.
He found that the world he lived in was like a computer screen running old programs, with tiny "snowflakes" and "garbled codes" seeping out from the gaps in reality. The cafe that was there yesterday has become a flower shop today, and everyone, including his beloved wife Su Xin, swears that it has always been a flower shop. What frightened him even more was Su Xin herself - sometimes she was like a delicate doll with a set process, repeating the cold daily life; sometimes she would suddenly turn back into the gentle lover in his memory, but behind the deep affection, there was always a void in her eyes like reading data for a moment.
This is not forgetting, this is covering.
When his neighbors gave passionate speeches to the empty backyard, and when the city's streetscape flickered briefly like a TV screen with poor signal at midnight, Lin Fan finally realized: the apocalypse did not never happen, it just happened in a different way. They failed to escape, but sank into a huge "doomsday program" that was slowly collapsing. The real civilization may have been destroyed long ago, and they are just trapped in a redundant code simulating the "after-apocalypse", playing the role of unsuspecting actors in an electronic cage.
