Rewind

At 4:17 a. M., Digital traces around the world automatically rolled back twenty-four hours. The messages you have sent will disappear, the files you have written will be overwritten, and the account records you have transferred out will be cleared. If the digital world declares something "never happened," it really never happened. ——But Lin Zhou copied every record with pen and paper. He found that there was a line missing from his note. He found that the contents of the recorder had no trace on the computer. He discovered that engineers in three different cities were experiencing the same type of failure at the same time. He tracked down and found an account called system_check_0417, a seven-year-old project called "Rewind Protocol", and an execution subject named after himself. He left all the evidence on paper, on film, and on tape. Because the digital world cannot be trusted. But what really frightened him was not that the system was deleting information—it was that someone was using his body, in his dreams, and in his vague consciousness in the early hours of the morning, to execute deletion instructions for the system. And that person's surname is also Lin. The man named Lin Zhou was erasing the traces of Lin Zhou's life from the system every day.