Vanishing Doorplate

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.

He went back home and checked his bills, utilities, everything was normal. He called the property management, where a mechanical female voice said, "Your address information shows normal, please verify your identity information." He verified it countless times, ID number, phone number, facial recognition, all the information matched. But the doorplate was just gone.

In the following days, he lived like a ghost. Delivery drivers couldn't find his home, packages were always delivered to the wrong place. The community's smart access control system didn't recognize his face; he had to rely on neighbors to open the door for him to enter. He tried to call the police; they pulled up his identification, and everything was normal. But his residence, in the system records, seemed to have become a non-existent point.

He began to fear. Fear of being completely erased, fear of turning into air, fear of even the trace of his existence disappearing. He wanted to confide in someone, but he found that no one could understand. They lived in a perfect world built by artificial intelligence, where everything was accurately recorded by numbers. And he, like a sudden glitch in the system, was ruthlessly abandoned.

One day, he went downstairs again and saw a woman. She was wearing the same uniform as the property staff, but her expression was blank, like a program. She walked to his door, holding a new doorplate with "302-B" written on it.

"Mr. Zhang, your personal identification information has been updated, and you have been re-evaluated by the system as a Class B citizen, please verify your information." The woman said mechanically, the cold metal doorplate in her hand like a knife, deeply piercing Uncle Zhang's heart.

He stiffly took the doorplate but no longer had the strength to attach it. He knew that this was not the doorplate of his home; it was a label marking his being assigned to another class. He looked up at the upper floors; each doorplate reflected cold light, as if mocking his powerlessness. He finally understood that his disappearance was not accidental, but a carefully planned social exclusion. He was abandoned by this AI-dominated world, and it all began with the disappearance of his doorplate.