Chapter 10 — Room 404 Sea View

The station's equipment inventory, a thirty-plus-page document that had just arrived by official mail, referred to 404-B as a "side rescue warehouse," not a hotel room in any conventional sense. In the warehouse, according to the list, there are life buoys of all kinds, ambulance stretchers, backup signal generators, and short-frequency radios used specifically for coastal rescue communications.

Vu found the old cable route from the warehouse to the roof by comparing the original electrical drawing with the actual situation, following each remaining cable segment along the ceiling of the floors. It is connected to the signal lights used to direct rescue ships away from dangerous offshore reefs, a system independent of the hotel's electricity grid, with its own backup power to ensure operation even when the entire area's power goes out.

“The system is designed to be independent of the main power source,” Vu explained in a team meeting that morning. "That means cutting off the power on the fourth floor at 04:18 cannot cause the signal lights to turn off. Someone must proactively cut off the separate backup power of the lighting system, a completely different operation."

Nhi revised the digitized drawing of the project on the spot, in front of the whole group so everyone could witness the process, replacing the word "room 404" with "rescue warehouse 404-B" according to the official terminology in the station's records. As soon as she saved the file, a copy automatically created another room in the same location, a familiar phenomenon that had happened many times before.

This time she didn't panic and didn't immediately close the camera like the first time. She systematically examined the file history, opened each hidden layer of data in the software, and discovered that the software was automatically referencing an old data layer that had been embedded in the original file many years ago, never completely deleted despite being hidden from the default display interface.

“The original restoration documentarian, before I joined the project, copied the old salvage warehouse drawings as a frame of reference, but did not read the accompanying annotations carefully,” she explained to the group, her voice now calm, analytical instead of panicked. “That data layer remains hidden in the file, automatically reactivated every time the system detects a major change in the relevant area.”

Room 404 existed on the drawing board because of an eighteen-year-old procedural error, a technical error entirely explainable by software logic. But that error, although essentially a data glitch, unintentionally hid a much more important truth: the 404-B rescue depot had been the central contact point on the night of the landslide, and its disappearance from official records was not accidental but intentional by those who wanted to erase its tracks.

Dat, sitting at the end of the conference table, said this did not explain why Nhi's mother disappeared, it only explained why the room appeared strange on the drawing. Nhi replied that she understood that, but at least now they knew they were looking for traces in the right place, instead of wasting time wondering whether the whole phenomenon was just a mass hallucination or a simple equipment failure.

Mr. Tu, after the meeting, brought the unnumbered key he gave to Nhi on the first day, which has now been identified as the key to opening the electrical box outside the cliff, where the backup power system for the signal lights is installed. Inside the electrical box, after opening with witnessed by the entire survey team and fully recorded, and an old recording tape, placed in a moisture-proof plastic bag that has yellowed over time.

The group transferred the tape to a professional sound studio the same day, renting specialized equipment to read back the old magnetic tape format, which was no longer popular. It took the technician nearly two hours to calibrate the reader before it could produce an audible sound.

The sound was muffled, mixed with noise from the wind and ocean waves, but Nhi's mother could still be clearly heard reading the coordinates. Her voice was calm, professional, in the style of a duty officer familiar with the emergency reporting process. She reported that someone was trapped under the embankment, asked to release the rope from the warehouse, and described the location in detail using topographical reference markers familiar to the rescue team.

A man's voice answered through the walkie-talkie, his voice was tense and broken: "Don't open the door towards the sea, the floor is cracked. It's dangerous."

Nhi's mother responded immediately, without any hesitation in her voice: "If you don't open it, they won't be able to get out."

The tape stopped suddenly at the sound of metal hitting, a sharp sound interrupted the exchange, then there was complete silence, no other sound was recorded on the remaining tape.

Nhi sat quietly in the studio, her ears still hearing her mother's voice even though the tape had ended a long time ago. She didn't know if the following paragraph, if it ever existed, was still recorded somewhere or if it was lost forever along with the person who held the radio on the other end of the line. But now, she has audio evidence confirming that her mother was at the rescue warehouse in the last minutes before the landslide, and was actively trying to save people, not a victim accidentally caught up in the disaster.

404 is not a haunted room, not some supernatural phenomenon that requires a mystical explanation. It was the code for a rescue mission that had been erased from the drawing board, a deliberate act of human intervention, and now, layer by layer, it was being reconstructed as it really happened.

The studio technician, after playing back the tape three times as requested by the group, suggested trying to filter out the noise with specialized software to see if any more details could be recovered from the silence after the metallic sound. He warned in advance that the likelihood of success was not high, because the quality of the original tapes had deteriorated over time.

Nhi agreed, ready to wait even if there was only a small chance. The group sat back in the studio, silently watching the audio waveform display as the technician ran each filter layer, gradually eliminating wind, wave, and background noise from the old equipment.

After nearly an hour of processing, a new sound appeared more clearly in the seemingly empty silence - the sound of urgent footsteps, followed by a very soft voice, almost a whisper, difficult to determine whether it belonged to Nhi's mother or someone else. The content is not clear, only a few discrete syllables can be distinguished, not enough to form a complete sentence.

“Can it be improved further?” Vu asked, looking at the screen intently.

“Not with the current equipment,” the technician replied, shaking his head. “It takes a more specialized forensic audio lab, maybe in a big city to have enough technology to separate clear voices from this level of noise.”

Nhi notes down the contact information of such a laboratory that the technician recommends, decided to send the original audio tape there as soon as possible, although the cost of in-depth appraisal is certainly not small. She had gotten used to paying for expenses incurred outside the project budget herself since the advance payment was cancelled, and she did not intend to stop at this final threshold.

On the way out of the studio, Dat walked next to her and was silent for a moment before speaking. “I'm sorry for saying that earlier,” he said, his voice somewhat apologetic. "About the fact that the evidence still doesn't explain why your mother disappeared. Listening back to that tape, I realized I had no right to ask for a complete answer right away, when you were the one who had to live with that absence for the past eighteen years."

“You don't need to apologize,” Nhi replied, looking out at the sea turning gray under the cloudy late afternoon sky. "Your question is the right one. I've been asking myself the same thing every day, since I found the first rectangular mark on the drawing."

They stood side by side for a while on the studio steps, not saying anything, just looking at the sea, somewhere out there, under the waves crashing against the rocks, there might still be the last pieces of truth that neither the tape nor the drawings could completely reveal.

Vu came to pick them both up by car and asked more about the newly filtered audio, even though he himself was present and witnessed the entire meeting. On the way back to the hotel, no one spoke much, each person was deep in their own thoughts, only the steady, crackling sound of the radio broadcasting the weather report from the local radio station, predicting that a monsoon was about to arrive in the next few days, bringing with it the possibility of prolonged heavy rain along the coast, enough for the group to have to recalculate the entire progress of the field survey in the coming days, before the sea level could rise higher than usual.