Observation 47

The city initially just wanted to right its wrongs. Wrong medical records, wrong death certificate, wrong kinship, wrong address, wrong accident liability. People believe that given enough evidence, the system can correct life back into the right place. Later they discovered that it wasn't just the tables that had been corrected. A person may have two childhoods at the same time. A missing person may come back in the archives and still be absent at the doorstep. A marriage can be restored by the system, but the parties no longer recognize it. Cities began to call this phenomenon "overwriting." Overwriting is not always a disaster. It has rescued medical records, restored identities, and allowed people who had been mistakenly deleted to regain wages, housing, and names. But every correction raises the same question: Who has the authority to confirm that this is a correction and not another seizure? At the beginning of the story, Lin Weilan didn't know that this problem would fall on her. He is just a person who cleans up abnormal data for others, and is used to leaving backups before deleting them. Until that afternoon, he received a voice message from his missing mother. She only said one thing: Don't drink the white one. And the blue coffee cup on his table is turning white.