The Memory Manipulator

Chapter 8: The Scene ofMass Hypnosis

At 8:40 a.m., the conference room on the third floor of the municipal bureau was already full.The projection screen, glowing with a blue standby light, resembled a silent tombstone. Oneither side of the long table, Li Wen, wrapped in a shawl, sat in the far corner, her eyesdarting around; Zhang Hao, supported by two police officers, sat in the middle, his faceashen; several representatives from the town government wore stern expressions, theirfingers unconsciously tapping the table; the bureau's colleagues in charge of the case satscattered about, conversing in hushed tones.

Lin Mo stood by the window, watching the traffic below. His pocket watch ticked with eachsecond, like a countdown. It was 8:45, and Lu Mingyuan still hadn't appeared.

"Team Leader Lin," Xiao Li leaned closer and lowered his voice, "the search warrant has beenapproved. The search of the house on the west side will begin at 9:30. The technical teamhas already gone there."

Lin Mo nodded, his gaze sweeping across the conference room. Xiao Wang sat in the backrow, looking down at a tablet, his fingers swiping the screen. His black-rimmed glassesreflected the projector light, obscuring his eyes.

At 8:50, the conference room door was pushed open.

Lu Mingyuan walked in, having changed from his white lab coat into a dark gray suit, hisgold-rimmed glasses gleaming. He carried a black briefcase, his expression as calm as if hewere attending an academic conference.

"Sorry, there was a bit of traffic on the way." He nodded slightly to everyone, then walked tothe empty end of the long table and put down his briefcase. That seat faced the projectionscreen, like the speaker's seat.

No one spoke. The air froze.

"Dr. Lu," Lin Mo broke the silence, "you said you have important evidence to provide."

"Yes." Lu Mingyuan opened his briefcase and took out a laptop. "But before we begin, I'd liketo ask everyone here a question: Do you trust your own memories?"

His voice was gentle, yet it reached everyone's ears clearly. Li Wen gripped her shawl tightly,and Zhang Hao's breathing became rapid.

"Thirty years ago," Lu Mingyuan continued, his gaze sweeping across the conference room,"when this ancient town was still a wheat field, something happened. This event changedthree families and also changed the 'memory' of a small town. Today, we're going to look atthe original record of that event."

He connected the computer to the projector. The screen lit up, and a file icon appeared:"1993.8.12_Wheat Field_Original. MP4".

It's not in videotape format. It's a digital transcript.

"Wait a minute," Lin Mo interrupted, "The original videotape is with me."

"That's a copy," Lu Mingyuan smiled. "I transcribed it into a digital version last night and didsome… technical restoration to make the image clearer."

He clicked play.

The lights in the conference room dimmed. The same image Lin Mo had seen last nightappeared on the screen: a wheat field at night, searchlights, bulldozers, and a crowdarguing. But this time, the image was eerily clear .

Everyone's face was clearly visible. Chen Jianguo's youthful anger, Li Guohua's tremblinghand holding the camera, and Zhang Jianjun's resolute stance in front of the bulldozer.

Inside the bulldozer cab, Zhou Guofu's face was in shadow, but as he leaned forward, thelight illuminated the corners of his mouth- he was smiling.

A cold, impatient laugh.

Then the bulldozer moved forward.

The camera shakily pans across the wheat fields. This time, the clothes on the huddledhuman figure are clearly visible-a dark blue work uniform with reflective strips on the cuffs.

The same type of workwear that Lin Mo discovered in Chen Jianguo's country.

The human figure was run over. There were no screams, only the dull sound of bonescracking drowned out by the engine.

The video stopped.

But the sound continued.

It wasn't the young voice I heard last night. It was another voice, calm, steady, with a strangerhythm:

What did you see?

"Bulldozer. " Three overlapping voices answered: Chen Jianguo, Li Guohua, and ZhangJianjun.

What are the bulldozers doing?

"Level the land."

"Is anyone injured?"

Silence. Then, Chen Jianguo said in a trembling voice, "No...no one was hurt."

"You accepted the compensation, didn't you?"

"Yes." Three voices.

"That's the end of it. You will forget everything you saw tonight. When anyone asks, youwill say: There was no construction that night, you were sleeping at home. Understand?"Recording has ended.

The meeting room was deathly silent. Li Wen covered her mouth, tears silently streamingdown her face. Zhang Hao began to tremble violently, and the police officers restrained him.

"This recording," Lu Mingyuan's voice echoed in the darkness, "was made the day after theincident in Zhou Guofu's office. He hired a 'psychologist' to 'decompress' the three witnesses.In reality, it was a group hypnosis session."

He switched the screen, revealing a yellowed photograph of a document. Title: "Post-Traumatic Stress Intervention Record - August 13, 1993". Recorder's signature: Zhou Guofu.Expert's signature: Wu Qiming.

Wu Qiming. Lin Mo knew this name. An early expert in psychological intervention in China, hepassed away five years ago.

"Wu Qiming was my mentor," Lu Mingyuan said. "Before he died, he gave me this record,saying it was the biggest stain on his career. He used drugs and hypnosis to make threepeople 'forget' the deaths they had witnessed."

The projection switched, displaying several brain scan images.

"This is a simulation of modern functional magnetic resonance imaging." Lu Mingyuanpointed at the screen with a laser pointer. "The red area represents amygdala activityassociated with fear memories. The blue area represents hippocampal activity associatedwith fact encoding. In the three individuals' recall tests of the 1993 events, their amygdalawas highly activated, but their hippocampus showed almost no response."

He looked at Li Wen and Zhang Hao: "This means that your fathers 'remember' the fear ofthat night, but their brains refuse to associate the fear with the specific event. They 'know'that something terrible happened, but 'don't' know what it was. This cognitive dissonanceaccompanied them throughout their lives and has been passed on to you through theirwords and deeds."

Zhang Hao let out a sob.

"So," Lin Mo began, his voice exceptionally clear in the silence, "you orchestrated the murderat Dawn Square in order to uncover the truth. Using the same methods-drugs, hypnosis,suggestion-you made the children of the three witnesses also 'see' a murder that didn'texist."

"No." Lu Mingyuan shook his head. "I did not design the murder. Zhou Guofu was indeedkilled. I just used this murder to recreate the scene of the 'collective memory alteration'from back then."

He switched the screen, and a 3D model of Dawn Square appeared.

"At 3:15 p.m. on the day of the incident, the brightness of the two high-mast lights on thewest side of the square increased and the color temperature became cooler. At the sametime, a small sound wave generator installed on the roof of the building on the west side ofthe square emitted a high-frequency sound of 19.5 kHz - which is almost inaudible to thehuman ear, but can induce anxiety and mild dizziness."

The "beep" sound Shen Jing heard. The period when the fountain's sound stopped.

"The three witnesses had been taking a medication I formulated for a long time, makingthem sensitive to sound waves of a specific frequency and blue-violet light. Under thestimulation of sound and light, they entered a highly suggestible state." Lu Mingyuan lookedat Li Wen, "Ms. Li, when you saw the murderer, did he freeze' for a second before starting torun?"

Li Wen nodded blankly.

"Those are the intervals between sound wave pulses. The killer's actual movements arecontinuous, but your perception is fragmented, and your brain automatically fills in the gaps-filling in the image that you subconsciously fear the most: a stranger holding a murderweapon."

"Who is the murderer?" Lin Mo asked.

"I don't know," Lu Mingyuan said frankly. "My goal is not to find the real culprit, but to provethat'eyewitness testimony' can be fabricated. To prove that what happened thirty years agois still happening today-just in a different form."

He opened his briefcase, took out three sealed bags, and pushed them to the center of thetable.

"These are empty bottles of Calming and Tranquilizing Oral Solution' collected from thehomes of Chen Jianguo, Li Wen, and Zhang Hao. There are numbers on the bottom of thebottles." He pointed to the labels, "C-7, L-4, Z-9. This means: Chen Jianguo, seventhprescription; Li Wen, fourth prescription; Zhang Hao, ninth prescription."

"You're monitoring them," Lin Mo said.

"I'm recording," Lu Mingyuan corrected, "recording a systemic process of chronic poisoning.The medication they're taking does relieve anxiety, but long-term use will impair theaccuracy of their memories. And the 'Dr. Lu Mingyuan' who prescribed it keeps telling them:this is treatment."

He stood up, walked to the window, and turned his back to the conference room.

"After my daughter died, I studied memory, trauma, and how a community collectivelyforgets. I discovered that forgetting is not passive, but active. It is the result of countless tinychoices: choosing not to speak, choosing not to see, choosing to believe what the majoritybelieves. Until one day, the truth itself becomes heresy."

He turned around, his gaze sweeping over everyone.

"Zhou Guofu is dead, and I regret it. But thirty years ago, he chose to bulldoze a corpse,burying the truth with money and hypnosis. Thirty years later, someone killed him with aknife. Is this revenge? Maybe. But more likely... reincarnation.'

The conference room door was suddenly kicked open. A colleague from the technicaldepartment rushed in, his face ashen.

"Team Leader Lin! There's been an incident at the search site of that house on the west side!""What's up?"

"When we went in, the house was empty. But on the living room table…" my colleagueswallowed hard, "there were three things on it. A set of dark blue overalls with reflectivestrips on the cuffs. A pair of black sneakers. And a timer that was already running,connected to the projector.'

What should we project onto the projector?

My colleague handed me the tablet. It displayed a live feed: on the living room wall of thathouse, a line of text was projected, red and huge:

"The debt of memory is repaid with memory. Who's next?"

Below the text is a countdown: 47: 32: 18.

Forty-seven hours, thirty-two minutes, eighteen seconds.

"And another thing," the colleague's voice trembled, "we found a hidden camera in thebedroom, pointed at Sunrise Square. The memory card… contained the complete videofootage from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. on the day of the incident."

Lin Mo took the tablet and clicked play.

The image is shot from above, and the clarity is very high. People are coming and going inthe square. At 3:17, Zhou Guofu walked to the sculpture and answered a phone call. Then, aperson wearing a dark blue jacket and a hat walked quickly from the direction of the publicrestroom-empty-handed.

The two men were talking, and it seemed they were arguing. Zhou Guofu suddenly clutchedhis chest and collapsed. The man in the hat bent down and pulled a knife from ZhouGuofu's body -the knife was already stuck in Zhou Guofu's chest.

Then he turned and ran away. As he passed the flower bed, the flowerpots fell over bythemselves , before he had even run past them.

He ran to the west side of the square, took off his jacket-underneath was an ordinary grayT-shirt-stuffed the jacket and knife into a black garbage bag, and threw it into the trashcan in front of the workwear store. Then he took off his hat, looked up-

The camera captured his face clearly.

Young, pale, wearing black-rimmed glasses.

Xiao Wang from the technical department.

In the conference room, everyone's eyes instantly focused on the back row.

Xiao Wang sat there, motionless. The screen of his tablet was still lit, displaying drug analysisgraphs.

He slowly raised his head, took off his glasses, and wiped them with the corner of his clothes.

"47 hours," he began, his voice eerily calm. "That's the time between the moment the manwho died in the wheat field was injured and when he was run over by the bulldozer on thenight of August 12, 1993. The forensic doctor later determined that he was only seriouslyinjured at the time, and that he could have survived if he had been taken to the hospital intime."

He put his glasses back on and looked at Lu Mingyuan.

"Dr. Lu, you've been waiting for this day, haven't you? Waiting for me to finish yourexperiment."

Lu Mingyuan did not answer, but just looked at him with a complicated expression.

Xiao Wang stood up and walked to the center of the conference room. He took a silver USBdrive out of his pocket and placed it on the table.

"This is the complete surveillance video, as well as the record of me hacking into the lightingsystem and adjusting the lights. There is also the record of me giving Chen Jianguo extramedication-I went to his house before he fell from the building and added double the doseto his tea. He hallucinated and climbed over the balcony by himself."

He turned to Lin Mo and gave a bleak smile.

"Captain Lin, I tampered with the pocket watch in your office. I want to remind you-timecan be altered, but the truth cannot. I just sped things up."

Two police officers stepped forward and handcuffed him. Xiao Wang did not resist.

"That man," he said finally, his voice as soft as a whisper, "the man who died in the wheatfield was my father. Thirty years ago, he was a security guard at the construction site. Thatnight, he was on duty and saw something he shouldn't have. Zhou Guofu killed him, and theneveryone buried him together."

He was led out of the conference room.

The door closed.

On the projection screen, the countdown was still ticking: 47:31:05.

Lu Mingyuan put away his computer and picked up his briefcase.

"My part is over," he said. "As for Xiao Wang… he's my patient who started treatment forpost-traumatic stress disorder with me three years ago. I never expected the treatment toturn out this way."

He walked toward the door, turning back before leaving.

"Officer Lin, the debt of memory must eventually be repaid. It's just that the way it's repaidcan sometimes exceed everyone's imagination."

He's gone.

In the conference room, only the ticking of the countdown and a group of people crushedby the truth remained.

Lin Mo looked at the red numbers flashing on the screen.

Forty-seven hours.

There's enough time for a lot to happen.

That's enough to bury many things.

He took out his pocket watch. On the dial, the hour and minute hands formed a sharp angle.Like a knife.

Or, the blade of a bulldozer.

Meanwhile, the second hand is calmly moving toward the next hour.

Moving towards the next moment that needs to be remembered or forgotten.