Episode 16: Beneath the Floor of Memory
873 Words
00:37 a.m.
Nguyen An jolted awake to the soft vibration of his computer.
There were no alarms. No programs running.
But the screen was glowing faintly in the dark.
In the middle of the black background, a single blinking line appeared:
“Open the lowest floor.”
An tried typing something—no response. Then a sound played.
Not a voice.
A faint breathing.
Slow. Steady.
As if someone were asleep in a room without light.
Then a whisper followed:
“A memory floor no one records… where voices go unnamed.”
The whisper faded.
The screen returned to normal.
But on the desktop, a new folder had appeared:
"MEMORY_FLOOR_0"
An opened the folder.
Hundreds of files lay inside. But their names were different.
Not like the others—no “12-FarewellNote” or “09-SoulCall”.
These said things like:
“When Mom Knocked and No One Answered”
“The Nightmare at Fourteen”
“The Interrupted Question”
No narrators.
No speakers.
No recordings.
But they felt inhabited—like someone had truly lived in those moments.
An clicked on one at random.
A scene flooded into his mind.
A kitchen in the middle of the night.
A mother knocking gently at her child's door.
No reply.
She waited.
Until dawn.
The file ended with the sound of an alarm clock.
No dialogue. No voice.
But An’s chest clenched—as if it were his memory.
An flipped back through the notebook where he had recorded the other voices.
He noticed something.
Most of the voice files he had ever archived revolved around a sharp moment:
A breakup.
A goodbye.
A plea to be heard.
But the files in this Memory Floor didn’t burn.
They bled.
Quietly. Constantly. Beneath the skin.
Not all voices are loud.
Sometimes, silence screams louder than sound ever could.
The next night, An received a message from an anonymous number.
“You’ve opened Floor 0.
Now you must listen all the way through.”
Attached was a single file:
“00-An_Dossier.m4a”
His hand trembled.
He had listened to hundreds of voices.
But this one… was about him.
He pressed play.
“An cried on his 11th birthday.
He said he tripped and fell.
But the truth was—he overheard his parents say:
‘He’s always been the odd one out.’”
“An submitted a story once.
His teacher never read it.
So he tore it up and never wrote again.”
“An began archiving others…
So that no one else would feel forgotten like he did.”
The file ended with a soft slam.
Like a door shutting. Firm. Final.
An stared at the screen in silence.
That file—he had never created it.
Who was archiving his memories?
The next day, a subfolder appeared in Memory Floor 0:
"ERASED_VOICES"
Inside were names he didn’t recognize.
Le Hao Khanh
Dinh Mai Vy
Tran Quoc Luu
Three names.
An searched school records, social networks—nothing.
No class lists. No pictures.
They didn’t exist.
But each name had a single fragment—emotionally narrated, but without audio:
“Mai Vy once wrote a poem.
She printed it and pinned it in the library.
The next day, someone tore it down.
She never wrote again.”
An understood.
These were people who once tried to speak.
But their voices were erased before they could echo.
In the library, while checking old school files, An found a small piece of paper wedged beneath a wooden desk.
A line in careful handwriting:
“If a voice is erased and no one remembers—
Did it ever truly exist?”
On the back, a chilling message:
“Someone once tried to archive everything.
But they were forced to delete themselves.
Now it’s your turn.”
At the bottom—an unfamiliar symbol.
A droplet falling into a circle.
An had seen it before.
It was the wax seal on the unmarked letter in Episode 14.
Back in his room, An opened the microphone.
Not to record.
But just to listen.
Suddenly, a sound emerged—not from his speakers, but from beneath the floorboards.
A voice.
A girl’s voice.
“Do you remember the first footsteps you heard in this room?”
An froze.
It was Linh’s voice.
“I never left.
I just went deeper.”
“Some voices… can’t be archived.
They must be lived with.”
“The bottom floor isn’t for documenting.
It’s for realizing—
You’re part of the story too.”
An dropped his head onto the desk.
For the first time, he understood.
He wasn’t just the archivist.
He was a leftover voice.
One that had never been recorded.
He opened his oldest notebook.
Blank.
All the writing—gone.
But his hands still remembered what they once wrote.
He began to write again—not based on audio files.
But from memory.
From pain.
From the residue of what once tried to be heard.
He wrote about Vy. About Khanh.
About himself.
And for the first time, he named a file after his own voice.
"16-An_TheLastWhoLived.txt"
Not an audio file.
Just memory—etched in ink.
To be continued...
- Writer
