Chapter 4: The Person in the Surveillance Footage Acted Before I Did

It was at 1:17 a.m. that I decided to check the surveillance footage.

The decision itself wasn’t abrupt. On the contrary, it felt as though it had been planted in my mind in advance—I could even clearly recall the process of deciding to do it: rational, complete, with no sense of coercion at all.

That was what unsettled me most.

The lights in the residential property office were still on. The night-shift guard was a young man I didn’t know very well. When I explained why I was there, he froze for a moment.

“Haven’t you already checked it?” he asked.

My heart sank. “When?”

“Last night,” he said casually. “You even asked me to pull all the footage from the past three days.”

I stood there for several seconds before I managed to find my voice again.

“You’re sure it was me?”

“Of course.” He pointed to the logbook. “You signed in.”

I looked down at the page.

The signature was mine.

The stroke order, the way the pen lifted at the end—everything was correct.
The only problem was that I had absolutely no memory of writing it.

The surveillance room smelled faintly of dust.

The monitor was divided into sixteen screens, the timeline scrolling slowly along the bottom. The guard opened one of the folders.

“This is the time segment you wanted to see,” he said.

The footage loaded.

Timestamp: Last night, 23:48.

I saw myself.

Not a vague resemblance, not something that could be mistaken—this was unmistakably me. I was wearing my dark jacket, stepping into the frame with decisive movements, no hesitation, no wasted motion.

He stopped directly beneath the camera and looked up.

In that instant, the blood in my body went cold.

Because—
he knew exactly where the camera was.

It wasn’t a casual glance. It was brief, precise—like a confirmation.
As if checking whether he was being recorded.

I had never looked at a camera like that.

The footage continued.

That version of me swiped his card and entered the building. No hesitation. No looking back. He walked faster than I usually do, with a longer stride, his shoulders and back held tense.

“That’s how you were,” the guard said. “Didn’t say a word.”

I didn’t respond.

I was focused on a detail.

When he reached the elevator, it was already waiting on the first floor. As the doors opened, he didn’t step inside immediately. Instead, he turned slightly and stood there for two seconds.

As if listening.

Only after those two seconds did he enter the elevator.

And of those two seconds, I was absolutely certain—
I was not present in that memory.

“Can you pull the hallway footage?” I asked.

The guard nodded.

The screen switched.

The hallway lighting was dim, the camera angle limited. I saw that version of me stop on the second floor and walk up to an apartment door.

It wasn’t mine.

He stood very close—almost pressed against it. He didn’t knock. He didn’t ring the bell.

He simply glanced down at his watch.

Then he turned and left.

The entire sequence lasted less than five seconds.

“Do you know the people who live there?” the guard asked.

I shook my head.

But at the exact moment I did, a belated realization formed in my mind—
I knew when something would go wrong with that apartment.

Not now.
Later.

I asked the guard to pause the footage.

The screen froze on the image of my back as I walked away.

“When you were watching the footage last night,” the guard suddenly said, “you asked me something kind of strange.”

“What?”

“You asked whether there were any ‘blind spots’ in the surveillance coverage.”

I closed my eyes.

That sentence—this was the second time I’d heard it today.

“And then?” I asked.

“And then you said,” he recalled, “‘It’s fine. Some things don’t need to be seen.’”

I opened my eyes and stared at the figure on the screen.

He was standing in shadow, exactly where the light couldn’t reach—
as if he had known in advance.

At that moment, I could no longer dismiss everything as a psychological issue.

Because if this were a hallucination, its logic was far too complete.
And if this was dissociation, then the other “me” was clearly—

far more familiar with the rules than I was.

When I got home, I sat in the dark and opened the notebook again.

On the last page, a new line had appeared.

The handwriting was clean, calm—utterly at odds with my current state of mind:

“You’ve seen me now, haven’t you?”

I stared at the words, my fingers trembling slightly.

And finally, I understood something—

Those records were never meant to help me remember.

They were meant to help me catch up to him.

And the moment I do,
one of us will have to disappear.