12:17 A.M., Please Confirm Your Name

In Qiheng City, people don't simply disappear. First, the city erases their names, then makes everyone believe they never existed. At 12:17 a.m., a residential building in Qiheng City with only sixteen floors suddenly sent out a fire alarm: “Someone is trapped on the seventeenth floor.” Zhou Jiming, a fire-safety engineer, checked the building plans, stairwell height, elevator programming, and exterior facade. Every piece of evidence proved that the seventeenth floor did not exist. But when he entered the emergency stairwell, he found that an extra floor had truly appeared above the sixteenth. Even stranger, after he rescued a middle-aged woman from that floor, there was no trace of her in the property records, identity files, neighbors' memories, or even the phone of her own son. The next day, a stop vanished from the city map, and the last bus gained a passenger. Zhou Jiming gradually discovered that twenty-three years earlier, an underground accident had occurred in Qiheng City, one that no one remembered. The list of victims had seventeen lines, but only sixteen names. The blank seventeenth line was waiting for the whole city to fill it with someone.