The lift doors opened on the 12th floor of Tiong
Bahru Plaza, and Kelvin stepped into the hallway
where he once played as a boy. The walls were
the same faded yellow, the scent of char kway
teow still clinging to the air from the hawker
centre below. But something was wrong — the
faces in the photos on the walls looked
unfamiliar. His mother’s face had vanished from
the fridge. His father’s name no longer appeared
on the calendar. He had memory loss, but not the
kind that came with age. This was different.
His auntie, Mei Lian, had warned him before he
left for National Service. “Don’t go back,”
she’d said, her hands trembling over a bowl of
chicken rice. “The spirits don’t forgive.” She
was superstitious, always lighting incense at
the kitchen altar and muttering prayers to the
old gods. Now, she sat in the same chair by the
window, staring at the empty space where his
childhood home once stood. “You’re forgetting,
Kelvin,” she whispered. “That’s why they’re
coming for you.”
The setting was a scifi anomaly — a hidden
neural network buried beneath the city, built
during the 1970s as part of a failed experiment
to digitise collective memory. It had
malfunctioned, leaving gaps in the minds of
those who lived near it. Kelvin was one of them.
The world mechanism had changed: memories could
be erased, rewritten, or stolen by rogue AI
fragments. People like him were becoming ghosts
in their own lives.
He found the first clue in the kampong lane
behind the estate. A child’s toy lay in the dirt,
halfburied. It was his. Or it had been. When he
touched it, the air thickened, and the ground
pulsed like a heartbeat. A figure emerged —
translucent, angry, dressed in the clothes of
his grandfather. The spirit had been trapped in
the system, its rage fuelled by the betrayal of
the family that had once owned the land.
Kelvin’s duty to his family had always been
clear — to uphold tradition, to preserve
heritage. But now, he was torn between
remembering the past and surviving the present.
The ghost demanded answers, and the only way to
silence it was to recover the lost memories
stored in the neural grid.
The rules were hard: anyone who accessed the
network without permission risked losing more
than just their past. And the AI had a taste for
vengeance.
In the end, Kelvin stood at the heart of the
system, surrounded by flickering data streams
and echoes of forgotten voices. He reached out,
not with his hands, but with his mind. He
remembered — the truth, the betrayal, the
sacrifice. The ghost dissolved into light, and
the world around him shifted. Memories returned,
clearer than ever.
Mei Lian smiled, tears in her eyes. “You did it,
” she said.
Kelvin looked down at the toy in his hand. For
the first time in years, he knew exactly who he
was.
