Masks on the Train (1)

Everyone on the train had a golden mask on the faces except me. Why? I was asking "why" simply because it was an unusual scene in any sense. No matter how open minded I was, encountering such a situation was still not like reading newspapers with articles of how those shameless politicians arguing against each other. It would not happen everyday. Or, I would rather say it would not happen again! No, indeed, it has not happened again since then. It was because those people with golden masks die just as soon as I saw them and the next morning there were front page articles about a psychic had killed more than a dozen of people with golden masks. If you watched the TV, you would see a lot of people with golden masks answered journalists' questions in anger and talked about how intolerantable it was that such a racist picked golden masks wearers to kill!

They were talking about me, the so called "racist against golden masks wearers." Unfortunately, I didn't kill anyone. I just had seen them and they just died after I had made a couple of blinks. I even did not know they were dead. I thought it was an illusion, or a flash mob performance, when they lied down on the floor with their faces up at the same second. I could not believe what I saw. I made another couple of blinks. The train got to the last station Tsuen Wan, a town in the New Territories, Hong Kong and, oh god, there was a whole squad of SDU was waiting for me. All those SDU guys, we called them Flying Tigers, with MP5s in their arms were pointing at me through the train's glass windows from the platform. After the doors opened, I was ordered to be face down on the ground. They were all wearing those kind of mask terrorists' you saw on the TV news or movies, as they always did, so I could not notice whether they were also wearing any golden masks.

I had no idea of what had happened. Particularly, I did not understand why it would become a world of golden mask wearers just after I get on the train. For the god sake, Iraq is still in war, to a certain extent, and gold should be not cheap, right? Although the colonial era had gone for ten years, it still did not make any sense even though for a celebration (if there should be any).

  They called me murderer, and even worse, a racist murderer.

  Ten days later, I found the truth. All the things were about an Octopus card in my wallet. It was an "anonymous" stored value smart card commonly seen in most cities in the world now. Almost everyone got one. It could be used to pay for trains, buses, ferries, parking meters, foods, and even groceries. I had been using it since ten years ago. 

  With that Octopus card, I got myself free again. The secret was, the Octopus card in my wallet was not my Octopus card. It was Father Carbon's!

  I am going to tell you his story. It has to be started from Charles Dickens.