Twenty-Seventh Floor

The elevator in the old municipal building only has floors 1 to 26 on the panel. But Bai Lu, the archivist on the night shift, knew that there was another button that couldn't be pressed - 27. What is kept there is not a document, but "a life that was not chosen." Whenever a person makes an important choice, life is split into two parts: the part that goes is the reality, and the part that does not go away will not disappear, but will be filed away and locked in a metal cabinet on the 27th floor. Most of the time, they are quiet. But when the life that a person gives up is "too painful and too unwilling", it will crawl back to reality from the files, entangle the living self like a shadow, and replace itself inch by inch. People who have suddenly changed their temperament, old friends who have changed their accents, and people who recognize themselves in old photos as other people's wives... It's not a mental problem, it's a "leaked secret" that is occupying him. And Bai Lu's job is to change files, match files, and close files: to walk into the moment when those people were given up, to let "the real him" face to face with the "life that he did not choose", and to give an explanation that was many years late. He did it very skillfully, as if he was born to guard this floor. Until one day, he dug out a file without a file number on the bottom of the innermost filing cabinet - it had his own name and date of birth written on it. Archived: fourteen years ago. ——It turns out that the floor he was guarding was actually himself.