Volume One: Rust-Colored Cybernetics and the Final Message Packet
Acid rain fell onto the corrugated galvanized-steel roof of Abandoned Port 13, making a maddening, dense, relentless tap-tap sound.
The rainwater mixed with the heavy-metal exhaust and machine-oil toxins discharged from the Steel Middle Tier in the upper levels, trickling down rust-streaked drainpipes and pooling across the concrete in greasy puddles that reflected garish neon. No real sunlight ever reached this place. Its only light came from an old holographic billboard flickering atop an elevated highway several hundred meters away, endlessly replaying an advertisement for synthetic protein bars that had expired ages ago. The hologram spasmed constantly because of its aging circuitry, scattering ghastly white patches of light and interference across the ruins of the port.
Taichi crouched low, half his body tucked beneath the base of a discontinued Type-Nine supercomputer server.
His entire body was wrapped in a heavily worn brown rain cape whose rubber seals had long since peeled away. His hands, pathologically pale from years without sunlight, clutched a pair of plastic-insulated tweezers so tightly his knuckles had gone white. His fingertips trembled faintly. Every breath carried the weak wheeze of lungs irritated by the acidic air, yet he remained utterly focused—almost painstakingly cautious—as he pulled a charred flash-memory chip from a neural data slot blackened beyond recognition.
In the lower-right corner of his retinal HUD, a line of red warnings stabbed at his retina alongside low-frequency interference:
Plaintext [Warning: Brain-computer interface (BCI) core temperature: 41.2°C] [System flash-memory cache: Neural waste accumulation 89%] [Warning: Class-13 electromagnetic interference detected. Immediate network disconnection and offline operation recommended.] "Damn it... Why's today's waste so hot...?"
Taichi muttered under his breath, his voice so faint it was nearly swallowed by the rain. He raised his sleeve and viciously wiped his forehead, smearing away the machine-oil stink and drops of acid rain.
He was a data cleaner. In the Rustbelt, the absolute bottom of a city where even stray dogs couldn't be bothered to stop, his job was to clear the neural waste accumulated in old servers for black-market clinics, underground net cafes, and even gang hideouts.
Neural waste was the useless emotional code and memory garbage left behind when people died inside the brainnet—or when cybernetics-obsessed lunatics over-modified their bodies—during a brain-computer connection. If not cleaned out regularly, the waste clogged servers like grease in a pipe and could even trigger catastrophic neural-signal overload.
The job paid next to nothing. After spending an entire day crawling through piles of abandoned hardware reeking of scorched metal, he could at most trade his labor for two packets of synthetic protein bars with a metallic aftertaste and half a bottle of cheap industrial coolant. But Taichi liked the work for one reason alone—it was safe.
At least it was safer than following a gang to steal a megacorp's high-voltage cables, and more dignified than selling his organs and cybernetics to a black-market clinic.
Taichi was terrified of dying.
There wasn't a trace of the brutality belonging to a true street tough in his personality. In this city filled with rebar, metal cybernetics, and violent conflict, he was like a gray rat hiding in the shadows of a pipe. His greatest wish was to save thirty thousand federal credits, buy a secondhand physical environmental isolation suit, then curl up in his underground hovel—less than five square meters—and eke out an existence through cheap holographic simulation games until this long, freezing cyberpunk age finally ended.
"As long as I don't go online and click some stupid bounty, and as long as I don't look up at the Zenith District, I can make it to forty..." Taichi repeated this survival philosophy to himself again and again as he carefully slipped the charred flash-memory chip into an antistatic bag.
Suddenly—
Krrt!
A burst of electromagnetic interference, like an electric needle stabbing behind his ear, exploded directly through Taichi's nervous system from his behind-ear neural patch. The communications channel was forcibly opened, and a rough, hoarse voice laced with the grinding rasp of metal sandpaper thundered in:
"Hey! Taichi! You dead yet, you son of a bitch?! If you're dead in that pile of waste, grunt once!"
The sudden voice made Taichi's whole body jerk. The plastic tweezers in his hand nearly sliced through the fragile neural wire. He hurriedly pressed a hand against the heated metal patch behind his ear and answered in a lowered voice, his tone full of grievance and fear:
"Bolt... Could you keep it down? My brain-computer interface is already overheating. You nearly burned straight through my brain... I'm still stripping waste at Port 13."
The voice on the other end belonged to Bolt, an underground mechanic who ran a black-market repair garage in the Rustbelt. Bolt had once been an expert, but after offending the military-industrial giant Styx Heavy Industries, he had lost his right arm. Now he survived by modifying secondhand cybernetics and scrap metal for street punks.
"Cut the goddamn crap!" Bolt's heavy, bellows-like breathing came through the channel. Behind it was a chaotic roar of metal parts crashing onto the floor and the shrill, frantic buzz of some alarm. "Old Chen's in trouble! Old Chen's used-appliance shop just got sealed off!"
Taichi froze.
The hand holding the antistatic bag stopped in midair. The noise of acid rain striking the metal roof seemed to drain away in an instant. His mind went blank for three full seconds. Then an icy chill crawled up his spine and into his brainstem.
"Old Chen? ...What happened to Old Chen?" Taichi's voice trembled, carrying a panic and pleading he didn't even realize were there. "He... He promised this morning he'd solder that old cooling fan for me... Bolt, you're joking, right? Old Chen wouldn't even dare hit a stray dog. What could've happened to him?"
Old Chen was the only person on this trash-strewn street who ever showed Taichi a gentle smile.
In this metal city where even breathing the air was taxed and even smiling was labeled hypocrisy, Old Chen ran a tiny shop specializing in old transistor radios, vintage CRT displays, and analog-signal appliances. He never charged Taichi for expensive tool fees. Whenever Taichi finished cleaning discarded wire scraps off the repair bench, Old Chen would silently push over a pot of hot synthetic tea boiled in an old kettle, or slip him two lengths of secondhand copper wire with excellent insulation.
That was the only warmth Taichi had ever felt in this frozen world.
"You think I have time to joke with you?!" Bolt roared over the comms, but a faint catch in his rough voice betrayed both a suppressed sob and extreme dread. "AETHER Technologies' Stability Hounds... those gray-suited executioners cleared out all of 13th Street five minutes ago! They claim Old Chen's little shop was secretly receiving an illegal high-grade neural data broadcast. Old Chen was inside the shop... He... He twisted his own neck until it snapped!"
Taichi's pupils contracted sharply into thin slits.
Twisted his own neck until it snapped?
Old Chen only repaired old analog appliances that never went online! He used the oldest model of second-generation BCI, one that couldn't even connect to the public cloud network. How could he have gone berserk?!
"The megacorp's people claim Old Chen's old appliances were the source of a virus," Bolt said in a low voice, trembling violently. "They're carrying a high-pressure vaporizer. They're going to vaporize Old Chen's body, the vacuum tubes and old instruments in his shop, and everything else inside right there on the spot! Erase every trace of data!"
"No... That's impossible... Old Chen couldn't have..." Taichi clutched his head as his breathing quickened. The heart-rate warning on his HUD instantly shot up to 130.
"Taichi! Listen to me. Under no circumstances are you to come back to the district!" Bolt shouted. The background filled with the hum of a high-frequency electromagnetic scanner. "The Hound Unit's thermal imagers are sweeping toward the abandoned port! They're going to wipe all the data on the entire street! Shut down every electronic device on you right now and crawl into a waste shaft to escape—"
Bzzzt—
A burst of piercing static erupted. Bolt's voice was cut off as if someone had forcibly strangled it underwater, vanishing without a trace. Only deathly white noise remained in the communications channel.
That was the hallmark of a megacorp military-grade EMP forcibly suppressing signals in the area.
Taichi crouched beneath the supercomputer's base like a puppet. Rainwater dripped from the edge of his cape onto his trembling hands, cold enough to bite.
Run. His first instinct was to run.
His survival instinct screamed inside his skull: Run! Find the deepest data-trash pile and burrow inside. Shut off the BCI. Pretend you'd never known Old Chen. Pretend you were nothing but a ghost passing through today! As long as he survived this sweep, the megacorp wouldn't notice a bottom-feeder like him who didn't even have a citizen registry code.
Hadn't he survived this way all along? When gangs got into shootouts, he played dead. When law enforcers extorted him, he bowed and begged. When faced with injustice, he closed his eyes.
But... Taichi's hands clenched his cape so tightly his fingernails dug deep into his palms.
The scene from yesterday afternoon surfaced before his eyes with perfect clarity.
Old Chen had been standing in the back room of his shop, surrounded by old vacuum tubes and oscilloscopes. With hands covered in calluses and soldering-iron scars, he had pressed a physical metal flash-memory chip, its casing already beginning to rust, into Taichi's palm. His expression had been strange. There had been none of his usual gentleness—only an indescribable heaviness and sorrow.
'Listen, Taichi,' Old Chen had said softly, his voice light as dust that might be scattered by the neon wind at any moment. 'If one day my shop doesn't open... go to the heat-resistant metal compartment beneath that old CRT oscilloscope base and take the backup memory packet. Don't open it. Don't look at what's inside, no matter what. Throw it into the deepest waste shaft and vaporize it... Promise me.'
At the time, Taichi had thought Old Chen was just making a stupid old-man joke, and had casually stuffed the flash-memory chip into his pocket.
Old Chen hadn't gone berserk out of nowhere. He had known all along that he was going to die! He had even known the megacorp would come to settle the score!
"I can't go... I can't go..." Taichi curled up in the corner, his body convulsing violently. Tears mixed with rainwater as they slid down his cheeks. "Those are AETHER Technologies' Stability Hounds... If I go, I'll definitely die... I'm just a data cleaner. I don't even know how to fire a gun..."
He was afraid. Fear was a thick, wet, icy hand clamped around his throat, making every breath taste of blood.
But his feet seemed to have a will of their own.
Clumsily and crookedly, he crawled out from beneath the server base. Gritting his teeth and forcing himself to ignore his weakening legs, Taichi used the darkness of the rainy night and the shadows of abandoned pipes along the street to inch toward Old Chen's used-appliance shop on 13th Street like a frightened little rat.
With every step, he cursed himself in his head for being insane. But whenever he thought of the pot of hot tea and Old Chen's gentle smile, he couldn't make his feet stop.
Ten steps. Twenty. Fifty...
Taichi lay on the second-floor windowsill of an abandoned building fifty meters from the shop, pressing his body tightly against the damp brick wall. Through a crack in the shattered glass, he peered down.
The alley below had been sealed off by ghastly white laser barricade lines.
Two four-legged heavy machines, each two and a half meters tall and coated in matte-black light-absorbing paint—the Stability Hounds—stood silently outside the appliance shop. The red thermal-imaging array eyes on their mechanical heads scanned every inch of the surrounding air at fixed intervals, producing the teeth-grinding whir of servo motors.
Inside the ruined storefront, Old Chen lay rigid amid a floor covered in shattered vacuum tubes. His neck was twisted at an unnatural ninety-degree angle. His eyes were wide open, his pupils dilated, and acrid black smoke poured from the old-model brain-computer interface in his chest.
A megacorp eradicator in an immaculate gray suit and white clean-room gloves stood coldly beside Old Chen's corpse. In his hand was a heavy high-pressure vaporizer of futuristic design, its muzzle radiating a high-frequency blue glow.
"Cleanup operation commencing." The eradicator's voice came through his mask without the slightest human fluctuation, like a mechanical synthesis. "Target: Neural data carrier No. 0942. Determination: Reception of illegal high-entropy signal. Executing dual physical and data formatting."
"No..." Hidden in the shadows of the second floor, Taichi clamped both hands over his mouth. His eyes were red, and tears streamed uncontrollably down his face.
All he could do was watch. There was nothing he could do. If he charged down there, the vaporizer would turn him into a puddle of organic molecular ash in less than a ten-thousandth of a second.
The eradicator raised the vaporizer. The blue light at its muzzle flared to maximum intensity, and high-voltage arcs cracked through the air.
In the ten-thousandth of a second before the vaporizing beam capable of erasing everything swallowed Old Chen's corpse—
The old-model flash-memory chip in Old Chen's pocket, already burned out, suddenly suffered a microscopic neural short circuit under the extreme excitation of the high-voltage electromagnetic field!
Hummm!
A weak but extremely high-frequency near-field electromagnetic signal erupted indiscriminately across a radius of one hundred meters, like the final radio wave emitted before death!
In the lower-right corner of Taichi's retinal HUD, his old-model BCI interface—still in automatic environmental-waste reception mode—forcefully captured and downloaded the signal without any firewall interception!
Plaintext [System prompt: Near-field broadcast neural-waste packet captured!] [Loading data... Resolution 12%...45%...] [Warning: Loaded data contains extremely high neural entropy!] "Guh... AAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
Taichi's brain was instantly pierced by a thick iron rod heated white-hot!
It wasn't clear intelligence or a complete memory. It was Old Chen's ultimate terror and despair before death, along with some vast, indescribable pressure!
The violent psychic impact crashed through Taichi's fragile neural firewall like a tsunami. His legs gave out, and he slammed to his knees on the floor. The agony twisted his entire face. To keep from screaming and attracting the Stability Hounds below, he bit down hard on the back of his hand. Blood immediately seeped between his teeth and dripped from his chin onto the floor.
Countless chaotic, twisted fragments of interference, tinged blood-red, flashed wildly before his eyes.
Within that murky chaos of neural afterimages, Taichi saw no concrete secret. He only vaguely sensed a suffocating, colossal shadow—apparently emanating from some cold, immense metal megastructure high in the sky—accompanied by the electromagnetic interference of thousands upon thousands of agonized screams and a mechanical voice whispering coldly in the depths of his eardrums:
'...District 13. Sweep pending...'
The pressure was so terrifying that a mere fragment of the emotion left behind made every nerve ending in Taichi's body feel as though it were being scorched by fire!
What exactly had Old Chen encountered?!
And just as that immense mass of emotional waste surged into the deepest part of Taichi's mind, a black code buried beneath Old Chen's final-message packet, heavily encrypted and dormant for who knew how long, was completely activated by the intense neural pain!
Plaintext [Warning: Illegal physical intrusion detected in backup memory slot!] [Executing forced formatting... Failed!] [Physical permissions elevated... Loading code: ECHO.exe]
The next instant, an incredibly venomous, arrogant roar with the tearing rasp of metal exploded directly in the deepest part of Taichi's mind:
"Huh?! I've been sleeping in a darknet waste archive for three whole years! And the second I open my eyes, I've been downloaded into the head of a loser who can't even afford a low-level firewall?! Kid, is your brainstem made of synthetic-protein scraps? You stink so bad you're making me want to puke!"
Taichi was scared out of his mind. He screamed frantically inside his head: "Who are you?! Who's talking in my brain?! Get out! Get the hell out of my brain!"
"Shut up, idiot!" The voice in his mind cut him off angrily, dripping with arrogant disgust and fury. "You think I want to be in your busted skull? If your neural frequency hadn't matched that old bastard Old Chen's, I wouldn't even bother looking at you! And if you don't want the gray suit downstairs to turn your head into steam, look toward three o'clock on your right!"
Taichi froze.
Enduring the agony that felt as if his skull were about to split open, he instinctively lifted his head and looked toward three o'clock outside the window.
In the lower-right corner of his visual HUD, streaks of blood-red neon error interference—Glitch—suddenly spread across the previously calm holographic display.
The transparent air began to distort unnaturally.
Directly above Old Chen's corpse, the rain stopped in midair.
Then a pair of "feet" composed of countless red error codes and broken neural signals appeared out of nowhere. The feet had no flesh, only pulsing red Glitch interference. Accompanied by a tap-tap of footsteps, they came down hard into a puddle formed from rainwater.
The eradicator and the two Stability Hounds noticed nothing. They were a data ghost visible only to those whose brain-computer interfaces had been corroded by the Glitch curse!
"Tap... tap..."
The red code-feet hovered in midair and turned.
They "looked up" at Taichi hiding behind the second-floor window.
The next second, Taichi's vision turned completely ghastly red. The system UI displayed the bloodiest ultimate warning in its history:
Plaintext [Warning: You have been completely locked onto by an S-rank data remnant (Glitch curse)!] [Neural system being eroded by high-entropy code...] [Time remaining until complete brainstem burnout: 00:02:59] [Time remaining until complete infection: 00:02:58] "Tap."
The red footstep crossed the suspended neural cable toward Taichi, trembling on the second floor, and took its first step.