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墨書 Inktalez
The smell of disinfectant in the elevator mixed with the metallic tang of the ventilation duct, invading my nostrils. I gripped the plastic cover of my press badge tightly; the steel stamp on the dispatcher’s ID pressed painfully against my palm.
"The surveillance footage is only kept for seventy-two hours," said the man in the navy uniform, rubbing his darkening eye sockets. "All equipment malfunctioned that night."
His knuckles suddenly contorted as he struck the keyboard, blue and purple blood vessels bulging beneath his skin. The 3D circuit diagram on the central screen was bleeding.
Station Thirteen lay like a festering scar between Jian Guo Men Station and Dongsi Station, the red alert twitching every thirteen seconds. I pretended to adjust my hair, aiming a tiny camera hidden among my strands at the monitor—Li Mingbai's lab coat was melting away in the blind spot.
"Is this the last image before the signal cut out?" I pointed at the turnstile at Dongdan Station.
In the surveillance feed, I was seen pressing my metro card against the sensor, but its surface clearly reflected the orange logo of the New York Subway.
Monitoring time: October 13, 2023, 0:00; each second pulled thirteen frames of time apart from real-time signals on my phone. The fluorescent tube suddenly vibrated at a high frequency.
A cluster of black blisters erupted on the back of the dispatcher’s neck, and he scratched at them unconsciously. "Last week, an intern went missing on Line 13. The next day, his student ID from ten years ago was found on his desk."
The printer suddenly spat out a yellowed newspaper with a headline from October 13, 2001: "Ghost Train Sighted on Line 5."
The electronic dispatch diagram cracked into a web within my pupil. The previously blank area revealed thirteen fluorescent green tunnels, like electronic centipede legs gnawing at reality's dimension.
"I heard you used AR technology to modify abandoned lines?" I felt sandpaper scraping in my throat.
At the end of the corridor, the safety exit light turned blood red, and sounds of nails scratching metal echoed from the ventilation duct.
The uniformed figure smiled, his lips tearing back to his ears. "Every day at 0:13, someone has to go where they shouldn't."
The photo on his work badge began to rot, and the digital clock's numbers suddenly collapsed into a black hole. A rusty metal key appeared on the elevator button panel, marked with an inverted symbol of Klein Bottle. As I rushed toward the emergency exit, I bumped into a Fire Hydrant.
The reflection in the transparent cabinet door showed no face, only a dense stream of binary code flowing across my Iris. The clock faces on the entire floor simultaneously oozed a tar-like substance, and the minute hand trembled erratically between 0 and 13. The emergency exit led unexpectedly to the subway turnstile.
My action of tapping the card froze in the surveillance camera, with three versions of myself from different timelines layered on the Glass Curtain Wall—the 2013 Lin Xue holding a Tokyo Metro Card, the 2023 Lin Xue clutching a London Oyster Card, and the barefoot 1998 Lin Xue standing on the platform.
The Missing Person Notice on the bulletin board was drenched in an unending rain. In the photo, the color of my hair tie was wrong; it was cherry red, scorched black by Quantum Code three days ago. The area code for the contact number was the terminal call code for Father's Laboratory, and the date of disappearance was boldly marked as thirty years ago—the day my mother had a difficult childbirth.
As mold blossomed on my Palm, I heard the sound of a Ventilation Duct falling. The Intern who vanished from the surveillance footage was hanging upside down from a steel beam; the boy in his badge photo was clearly Li Ming from middle school. Blue ink seeped from his torn mouth, dripping onto the Metro Card and etching out the coordinates for Beijing Xinqiao Suolongjing.
The moment my umbrella tip pierced through the Missing Person Notice, the entire hall began to fade. Nineteen photos on the Missing Person Notice turned toward me simultaneously, each face displaying the diffusion of Pupil before the death of Father's Laboratory Lab Mouse. The bottom layer of photo paper oozed ink; it was my mother's electrocardiogram during labor, printed into the winding track of Line 13.
Blood splattered from my nostrils onto the date of disappearance. The steel stamp of 19981013 suddenly expanded into an operating room light, and I smelled burning flesh as a drill pierced through a skull. The back of the Missing Person Notice bled my father's handwriting: "Subject 0701, please return to Observation Chamber 13 to complete neural detachment surgery."
The escalator steps sank down, and the rubber handrail transformed into soft human fat. In the distorted mirror, I saw thirteen bodies—Lin Xue who fell into a sewer at seven years old, Lin Xue who was trapped in an elevator for two hours at thirteen, and now being crushed by temporal folds—each pointing to the same subway station number with their palm's Barcode. Suddenly, I caught a whiff of Li Ming's lingering mint scent.
The last Missing Person Notice spontaneously ignited, and within the flames appeared his hasty scrawl etched into the wall of the emergency exit: "Don't trust any reflections!"
The ashes of the photograph drifted toward the suddenly materializing Platform 13, as the sound of the turnstile swallowing cards coincided with a baby's cry that shattered the silence.
As the alarm pierced through my retina, I felt an unusual object in my pocket. A blood-stained lollipop stick smeared with graffiti paint from the New York Subway, its sugar coating crystallized into a small seal character for "Anchor."
In the reflection of the shattered glass of the bulletin board, thirteen versions of myself were raising different generations of mobile phones toward one another.
The emergency lights in the escape route abruptly switched to a surgical light wavelength, causing all the Missing Person Notices to ooze serum from their photographs.
The lollipop in my pocket spoke in Li Ming's voice: "You are the last Last Missing Person." Just as I was about to touch the wound at the back of my head, my nose suddenly collided with a transparent barrier that smelled of disinfectant—entire dispatch center was being enclosed in a giant petri dish.
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