Employee Handbook Rule Nine: Do Not Look Back

Lin Wan, an archives administrator, infiltrates a tech company controlled by an Employee Handbook to investigate the truth behind her sister Lin Shuang's disappearance. She soon discovers that every rule in the handbook is turning into a matter of life and death: don't turn back when leaving the office area after 10 p.m.; three attendance irregularities trigger the termination process; don't cancel meetings for other people; don't ask why a dish has sold out; replacement employee ID photos must match the one taken when you joined. And across the entire company, she is the only one who still remembers the colleagues who have "left."

She checks the attendance machine, reads the pencil writing on the back of the janitor's closet door, and searches the elevator's old card reader. She discovers that people who are "let go" leave no bodies, no paperwork, and no police reports. Their records show only a single status change: they are still in the building, sharing its corridors with the living. The living can't see them, unless they turn around.

On August 21, three years ago, the entire thirteenth floor was emptied overnight. Lin Shuang, who joined the company thirteen years ago, was one of the earliest developers of that System. Lin Wan was never really trying to find the truth. She was trying to figure out how to tell it so that people would believe her.