The Sea That Never Was

In 2197, reverse-causality researcher Lu Chuan fell to his death from a high-rise. There was no second person, no clear evidence of foul play. The only anomaly was a thirty-seven-second dream he left behind: a black sea, a gray-white city, a group of people who had never been born, and a sentence aimed directly at Lin Mo, a forensic dream analyst: “Go find your daughter.” But Lin Mo has no daughter. For seven years, however, he has repeatedly dreamed of a girl named Lin Xia. She grows up, remembers their previous meetings, calls him “Dad,” and talks about a life that never happened in reality. As Lin Mo investigates, he discovers that Lin Xia comes from future branch F-0717, pruned by the prediction System MNEMO. The Black Sea City is also home to many more “unborn”: people who never entered reality, yet retained their memories, personalities, and will to survive. Meanwhile, a more dangerous question emerges: as society increasingly relies on accurate predictions, those predictions enter the feedback loop of decisions and behavior, gradually concentrating the probabilities of the future into just a few paths. What humanity gains may not be greater certainty, but fewer and fewer possible futures. As the unborn demand the right to live, society demands safety, and MNEMO strives to preserve a predictable and orderly civilization, Lin Mo must face a question with no standard answer: If a future never happened, does that mean the people in it never lived? And does humanity have the right to preemptively cancel possibilities that have yet to unfold, all for the sake of a safer reality?