Humanity Is Forgetting

Zhao Wenbo had spent twelve years researching mobile communications. One morning, he suddenly found he could no longer understand the technical documents he had written over the past seven years. It wasn't amnesia. It wasn't an illness. It wasn't a decline in intelligence. He recognized every word on the page, yet could no longer grasp the knowledge they conveyed. That same day, everyone in the world lost the same ability at once. The next day. Another kind of knowledge vanished. The third day. Another one. At last, humanity understood: Civilization was permanently losing a part of itself every day. The textbooks were still there. The databases were still there. AI still remembered the answers. But humanity could no longer understand why those answers were correct. Then Shen Yan, a digital restoration engineer at the National Archives, discovered that he could relearn knowledge that no one else would ever be able to understand again. It was just very slow. And there was no way he could save everything. Medicine. Energy. Industry. Computers. Law. Currency. Language. Time. The self. Every night at midnight, he had to face the same question: What would humanity be prepared to give up today?