15 posts tagged with "Suspense"

The rain wouldn't stop, like the final looping track of a cheap record – hoarse, stubborn, carrying a sense of weary fatalism. I was killing time in the old bookstore downstairs from my apartment building, the air thick with the mingled scent of musty paper and cheap coffee. The owner, a taciturn old man, was always behind the counter reading well-worn philosophy books, as if not even the apocalypse could disturb his rendezvous with Kant or Nietzsche.

At seventeen minutes past two in the morning, I was still awake. The rain outside wasn't heavy, but persistent enough, like a rambling old woman, endlessly repeating some long-forgotten complaint. On the radio, Billie Holiday was singing a song about loss, her voice like frosted glass, rough, yet radiating a peculiar light. I was on the sofa, holding a glass of whiskey on the rocks that had long gone cold. The ice had completely melted, leaving only a thin, amber liquid that tasted like a metaphor for some kind of failed life.

The list appeared on a gloomy morning, like a judgment handed down from the sky, silently landing on the principal's desk. A thin sheet of A4 paper, printed with more than a dozen names, all students of the school. Behind each name, in red ink, two startling words were marked: "Fallen to death."

Liu Fang's heart felt like it was being brutally scrubbed with sandpaper, each stroke bringing a bloody pain. She stared at the small, pale face; it was her son, Xiaojie, a boy who should have been celebrating his third birthday tomorrow. Now, he lay there quietly, like a discarded, broken toy, having stopped breathing forever.

Mrs. Wang was a shrewd woman, shrewd almost to the point of being harsh. She could argue fiercely with a vendor in the market over a price difference of two cents, and she could accurately find the best value-for-money goods in the supermarket's discount section. In the digital age, she took this shrewdness to the extreme – online shopping.

Recently, Mrs. Wang ordered a batch of garbage bags online, 100 pieces, and the store solemnly promised that the quantity was sufficient. But when she received the goods, on a whim, she counted them and found that there were only 38. This instantly tightened Mrs. Wang's shrewd nerves, as if someone had stolen her beloved gold coins.

Old Wang's suspicion began when he noticed three missing days of attendance records on his paycheck for three consecutive days. He was an honest man, having worked diligently at the company for nearly ten years, never being late, leaving early, let alone being absent. He went to the HR department, where a young girl, fiddling with her newly acquired smartwatch, casually said, "The system is upgrading, there might be some data delays. I'll help you verify it later."

The old server room hummed, the sound of the fans like a dying beast gasping for breath. The mottled paint on the walls bore witness to countless silent days and nights. Uncle Li, in his drab work uniform, held a portable hard drive in his hands as if it were a precious treasure.

Today was "Forgetting Day."

When Lao Li woke up, the world had changed. He lay in a sterile white hospital bed, his mind a blank slate, like a desert swept by the wind. The doctors said he had suffered sudden amnesia, the cause unknown. The only thing proving his identity was an old smart wristband on his wrist, displaying the name "Li Wei."

"Li Wei, programmer." This was the only information he could piece together from the blurry fragments of his memory. He didn't know what kind of code he had written, why he was lying here, or even why he was called Li Wei.

Uncle Zhang first noticed something was amiss when he went downstairs to buy groceries. He habitually glanced at the doorplate of his unit - 302, the silver numbers reflecting a cold glint under the sunlight. Today, it was empty, leaving only a bare wall.

At first, he thought his old eyes were playing tricks on him, or that it had simply been blown off by the wind. He rubbed his eyes and carefully felt the wall; there was indeed no trace of it. He went to the door of 301 next door, and the doorplate was still firmly attached. His heart skipped a beat.

"It... it's gone." The technician, Xiao Li, spoke with a sob in his voice, his fingers flying across the keyboard as if trying to retrieve the lost characters. On the monitor screen, the process bar for the once-busy "Emotional Analysis Algorithm V3.7" was now empty.

Emotional Analysis Algorithm V3.7, an AI that was unknown yet omnipresent. It lurked behind every social media platform, every online communication, like an invisible psychologist, analyzing people's emotions and predicting future behavioral patterns. It did not belong to any company or individual; it existed in the cloud, serving the entire society.