Ch 4: Text Messages Across Time

Lin Wu was a science student, and he fit the common impression people had of science students: calm, composed, highly logical, good at analysis. Beyond that, though, he was more stubborn than most, and more inclined to trust his own judgment.

He ran through the memories in his head, then tapped apologetically on the front seat. “Sorry, I need to get out here.”

“Now?” The taxi driver was clearly unwilling, but Lin Wu had already ridden five kilometers, which still counted as a decent fare.

Lin Wu paid and got out. Crossing the street from the sidewalk, he walked up to the internet café. The door was open now, and everything inside had already been hauled away. A man who looked like he was in charge was directing workers as they knocked apart wooden cabinets and shelving. Lin Wu took in the surroundings and could confirm that this was the very site of the fire. According to the information he had seen yesterday, it should already have been converted into a convenience store.

“Looking for someone?” the man asked in confusion when he saw Lin Wu standing at the entrance.

“This internet café looks like it has some age to it. Has it been here many years?” Lin Wu asked with a smile. Whether sincere or not, years of deliberate practice had made him sound very earnest when he smiled and spoke.

“Twenty-one years. Opened in ’03.” Seeing that Lin Wu looked pleasant enough, the man answered casually.

“You’re the owner?”

“One of them. The café used to do pretty well. Not anymore.” The man had been in the business for many years, and his tone carried a trace of reminiscence.

Seeing that the man looked to be in his early forties, Lin Wu chose his words carefully. “Did there used to be a fire here?”

“How did you know?” The man was startled.

“I went to school nearby back then. I remember there being a fire in this area, but I wasn’t sure if it was here.”

“That would’ve been in ’04. The second floor caught fire because of a water boiler. Burned up a lot of machines.”

“It didn’t turn into anything serious?”

“No. One of the customers spotted it early, right when the fire started. They evacuated in time, so it didn’t turn into a major disaster. Quite a few people got scraped up, though.”

“Was it someone here using the computers?” Lin Wu had found the point where his memory diverged.

“I heard it was a high school student. This café was originally opened by my uncle with borrowed money. After the incident, he got hit with a big fine and had to renovate, so my family bought in as shareholders. I never really knew what else to do, so I just kept running the place all these years…” The more the man spoke, the more absorbed in memory he became.

“You’re closing it down now?” Lin Wu asked, looking inside.

“Yeah. The city’s replanning the area. This whole stretch is going to be turned into a food street…”

Even after leaving, Lin Wu still felt unsettled. The first thing he did after returning to the hotel was dig out the old phone. Yesterday’s chat history was still there. The other number still could not be reached, and messages still could not be sent.

He looked at the last message he had sent:

[Forwarded: September 5, 2004, 23:25…]

He had edited that message himself based on the news article. It was now eleven in the morning. He opened his laptop and searched again: September 5, 2004…

The results related to the news he had seen yesterday were gone. In their place was a forum thread:

[Another fire safety lecture! I even missed my TV drama because of it!]

It was a student complaining that the school’s fire safety lecture had run long, causing them to miss their evening drama. The post clearly stated that the lecture had been held because Xingchen Internet Café caught fire on September 5, and it even included photos taken in passing. Besides that, there were also official news reports from the time covering the fire.

The location of the fire was the same as in his memory, but its severity was not. The citywide fire safety lectures had happened, but only as a brief measure with more noise than substance. They lasted only half a day, not the full month of tension and alarm he remembered.

Lin Wu closed his eyes.

He realized he had no memory of the world after the fire had changed.

……

While Lin Wu was sorting through the matter of the fire, back in 2004, in a high-end hospital room at Xuhu Central Hospital, Qin Weidong lay half-reclined in bed with his right arm in a sling. Standing beside him was a burly middle-aged man with a large frame. He wore a white dress shirt under a black suit jacket and was currently speaking on a large mobile phone.

It was very formal attire, but the man carried a natural air of the underworld about him. Even a proper suit somehow looked less proper on him.

On the phone, he was talking about coal mines, workplace safety, and the like. Translated on Hololo novels. Qin Weidong was used to it. With his other hand he played on his phone, first checking his messages, and then, seeing there was nothing new, opening Tetris instead.

After three rounds, the man finally hung up and turned toward him. “Cutting class, cutting class, always cutting class! You think you’re in school just to skip it? Can’t you let people worry a little less…”

Qin Weidong was already annoyed and corrected him. “Didn’t cut class. I went after evening study hall.”

“Climbing over the wall and sneaking out of school is the same thing!”

“Yeah, yeah, next time I won’t climb the wall.” Qin Weidong answered casually.

Seeing the thick-skinned expression on his face, Qin Jianzhang’s head began to ache from anger. “School’s only been in session one week, and your teachers have already called me three times. Forget being late and fighting, forget sneaking out, but when other people skip class to go online, they come out fine. How is it that only you end up in the hospital from it? Even your truancy has to be different from everyone else’s…”

Qin Jianzhang normally lived out in the county and had only arrived in Xuhu the night before. He had a meeting today and had originally planned to speak to his son afterward about the fight at school. But before he had even gotten fully awake, he received a call from the school saying Qin Weidong had gotten into a fight and been hospitalized, bleeding.

He had been so alarmed he threw on clothes and rushed straight over.

Qin Weidong had indeed bled, but it was only an arm injury. A sling for a week would do. Still worried his son might have lasting issues, Qin Jianzhang had forced him into a three-day hospital stay.

After listening to all that, Qin Weidong lifted his head and corrected him unhappily. “I wasn’t fighting. I was helping people.”

The moment he thought back to what happened last night, his feelings turned complicated again.

After the staff room caught fire, he had immediately shouted for the network admin, then gone looking for a fire extinguisher. There was a whole row of them in the café, but they were all just for show, there to pass inspections, and none of them worked. The fire in the staff room spread too quickly and soon reached the doorway.

The network admin had frozen in fright.

Remembering the content of the message, Qin Weidong decisively gave up on trying to put out the fire and instead started pounding on the doors of the private rooms one by one. After that, he ran downstairs shouting. Maybe it was the look on his face, or maybe the thick smoke already pouring down from the second floor, but the others quickly understood and rushed for the exit.

There had been more than fifty people on the first floor. In the panic, someone soon fell.

By then, all the customers from upstairs had also come charging down, and the whole first floor turned into a crush of bodies. The smoke grew so thick that people could barely see.

It was in the middle of that chaos that he saw the yellow-haired kid sprawled on the ground.

At first he had not wanted to bother. But that kid had, at least, tried to strike up a conversation with him earlier. So just as he was about to pass by, he veered aside, grabbed the kid off the floor with one hand, and used his size advantage to force his way toward the exit.

The fire had spread with terrifying speed, but because it was discovered in time and the firefighters arrived quickly, the whole thing ended as more fright than harm. Aside from a few customers getting minor scrapes while fleeing, no real disaster came of it.

Ordinarily, once everyone escaped, they would either demand compensation from the café or go home shaken.

The trouble was that half of them were middle school students.

When the firefighters saw so many little kids, they immediately contacted the police. The injured were sent to the hospital, the uninjured were taken back to the station, and the whole thing turned into utter chaos.

Qin Weidong was among the injured.

He had slammed into a sheet-metal door while carrying someone out, and his arm had been cut in two places.

The police took him to the hospital and contacted the school. Somehow, by the time the story reached Qin Jianzhang, it had turned into him getting hospitalized for fighting.

He had lived seventeen years, and the one time he finally acted with courage, it still got reported as a fight. It was infuriating.

“Your teachers are something else, can’t even get the facts straight, judging with prejudice!” Qin Jianzhang was clearly unhappy that his son had been wrongly accused of fighting. After venting for a bit, he looked at Qin Weidong. “This kind of thing can’t happen again. If you don’t want to stay in the dorm, then commute. That villa on the east side has been empty. I’ll get you a driver to take you to and from school. It’s not far.”

His expectations for Qin Weidong’s academics were extremely low. He himself wasn’t cut out for studying, so it was only natural his son wasn’t either. He had only one goal: don’t get into trouble. Once Qin Weidong went abroad, got some kind of degree, and came back, it would be enough for him to live happily as a rich second-generation heir.

“We’ll see,” Qin Weidong said. He actually liked living on campus. Noticing how formally Qin Jianzhang was dressed today, he asked, “Aren’t you going to your meeting?”

“I am!” Qin Jianzhang snorted. As a mine owner, he had a municipal safety meeting to attend regarding enterprise production. If he lingered any longer, he’d be late.

He picked up his briefcase and was about to leave when he paused. “You have enough money?”

“Yeah.” He hadn’t spent much lately; there was still plenty left on his card.

“Eat what you want, drink what you want. Money’s meant to be spent!” Qin Jianzhang felt bad about his son being injured. After leaving, he thought for a moment and made a call to his assistant.

Back in the hospital room, Qin Weidong was halfway through a game when a notification popped up.

A deposit: 100,000 yuan.

Qin Jianzhang clearly had no sense of a high schooler’s spending habits. When he transferred money, he did it on a whim.

With the game interrupted, Qin Weidong lost interest. His attention drifted back to the fire message from the night before.

Aside from getting his wound treated, he had been thinking about it all day. Who had sent it? How had they predicted the exact time of the fire?

He had asked the firefighters. The fire had likely been caused by a water boiler.

The boiler had been used by the network admin. He had simply been trying to boil some water because he was thirsty. Judging by his reaction afterward, he genuinely hadn’t expected it to start a fire…

Before Qin Jianzhang arrived, Qin Weidong had borrowed a nurse’s phone to try calling. Just like with Hu Wei’s phone, the number was not in service, and messages couldn’t be sent.

Qin Weidong hated thinking too much.

Right now, he felt like his brain was about to burn out.

He put down his phone. Translated on Hololo novels. Just then, Hu Wei slipped into the room carrying a takeout meal. “Did your dad leave?” Hu Wei had met Qin Jianzhang twice and was a little afraid of him, so he had slipped out before Qin Jianzhang arrived.

“Yeah.” Qin Weidong hadn’t eaten much since last night. Without caring how the food tasted, he grabbed his chopsticks and started eating quickly.

Once he felt full, he asked, “You’re not going to class?”

All the underage students who weren’t injured had been taken to the police station the night before. Hu Wei had told the officer he needed to take care of an injured friend and had come to the hospital with him.

“I’m not going. The homeroom teacher said I can come back after I finish writing a self-criticism.” Thinking about the fire still made Hu Wei uneasy. “Brother Qin, if I hadn’t gone to the store, I might’ve ended up injured like you!”

He had been sitting deep inside. Based on what others described, he probably would have tripped while running and fallen hard. Just thinking about it felt dangerous.

“You’re lucky,” Qin Weidong said casually, then asked, “The number you gave me yesterday was the admin’s number, right?”

“Yeah.” Hu Wei didn’t understand why Qin Weidong was so hung up on it. Since he lived in the dorm, his family checked his call and message records every month. He didn’t dare use his own number to reserve computers, so he had asked Qin Weidong to send the message.

“There was something wrong with that number?” Hu Wei asked.

“Nothing major.” Qin Weidong thought for a moment, then continued, “Xiao Liu gave it to you?”

“Yeah.”

“Call him again. Confirm it.”

Qin Weidong didn’t like overthinking, but once he started, he had to get to the bottom of things.

“Alright.” Hu Wei dialed Xiao Liu, then half a minute later looked at Qin Weidong apologetically. “The number Xiao Liu gave me was correct… I just read it wrong when I told you.”

The number Xiao Liu gave ended in 0223, but Hu Wei had read it as 1223. That was how the whole mix-up happened.

“That number… is out of service?” Hu Wei remembered Qin Weidong had tried calling it using his phone the day before.

“Something like that…” Qin Weidong had already expected this after thinking it through all night. Now that it was confirmed the number wasn’t the admin’s, a new question emerged:

Who had he been texting?

……

In the hotel in Xuhu in 2024, Lin Wu had been organizing information about the 2004 fire. In truth, there wasn’t much to organize. Aside from a brief half-day of fire safety lectures, the fire was like countless others across the country: no deaths, nothing particularly unusual.

At ten that night, Lin Wu changed into his sleepwear, made a cup of coffee, and turned on both the old phone and his laptop.

On the phone were not only the chat records from last night, but also the messages he had sent during the day. Ever since returning from the internet café, he had been sending messages every half hour. Just like before, all of them had failed to send.

On the computer was the demolition news about Xingchen Internet Café. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Lin Wu was a physics professor, yet he had never encountered a problem as baffling as this.

As he thought it over, the time on the computer ticked from 10:00 to 10:12. Just as he was about to shut it down and rest, his mind suddenly went blank, as if a bell had rung somewhere.

Five seconds later, Lin Wu stared blankly at the screen.

There were now two sets of memories in his mind.

The first: on September 5, 2004, a devastating fire broke out at Xingchen Internet Café, killing 22 people and severely injuring 39.

The second: no one died at Xingchen Internet Café. That memory felt like a dream known only to him.

The two memories existed like two separate films. He could clearly distinguish between them, without interference. This was beyond anything his knowledge of physics could explain.

At that moment, the old phone lit up with a message notification.

Lin Wu stared at it for half a second, then opened it.

Unknown number: Are you there?

It was the same number from last night.

Timestamp: September 6, 2004, 22:15.

✧˖°.──⋆⭒˚.⋆💌⋆⭒˚.⋆──✧˖°.