The scorched stench of burning rubber mixed with the black smoke of cheap diesel, like a sticky, wet rag plastered over Taichi’s nose and mouth.
“Cough… cough, cough!”
Taichi was buried in a mountain of discarded tires piled in the bed of the modified tow truck. Every violent jolt as the wheels rolled over deep potholes in the road felt like a rusted sledgehammer slamming into his ribs and the back of his neck. At the base of his neck, the cheap third-party brain-computer interface (BCI) slot crackled with faint electrical pops, while the charred smell of flesh seared by high heat spread along his spine and into his cerebral cortex.
“Warning: Neural core temperature has reached 41.8°C. Severe heat-melt adhesion detected at the metallic contacts of the nerve bundles in the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae.”
Deep inside his mind, that cold, crisp female synthetic voice—punctual as ever, and dripping with utter disdain—rang out.
“If your intelligence is still capable of understanding the Celsius scale, deadbeat, that means your brain will turn into evenly cooked tofu pudding in another one hundred twenty seconds. As a side note, the local cemetery’s communal cremation furnace is currently at full capacity. After you die, there’s a high probability you’ll be dumped directly into a purification tank at the wastewater treatment plant as organic fertilizer.”
“Shut up… ECHO…” Taichi clenched his teeth, his gums slick with blood foam that tasted of rust.
He forced his eyes wide open, taking care even not to blink. The Rustbelt’s never-ending neon acid rain was falling from the sky. Raindrops hammered against his cracked protective goggles, warping the giant holographic advertisements in the distance into grotesque masses of scarlet and ghostly blue light.
He didn’t dare close his eyes.
In the lower-right corner of his retinal HUD, the countdown that had originally been a death sentence was frozen in a strange dark red at a single number:
[00:00:01]
The digits were surrounded by tiny, web-like glitches that twitched faintly. The instant he closed his eyes, severing his brain from the dilution of external physical light and entering the BCI’s fully enclosed inner-vision rendering state, those “broken legs,” condensed from scarlet code, would crush his brainstem within one ten-thousandth of a second.
“Hold on tight, you half-roasted rotten watermelon!”
A roar like a busted gong came from the driver’s seat. It was Bolt, a hulking man nearly two meters tall with a crude industrial hydraulic cybernetic arm in place of his left arm. With one greasy flesh hand, he desperately spun the wrench-welded steering wheel, then used his mechanical limb to slam the gearshift into reverse before yanking up the handbrake!
“Screeeeeech!”
The four-ton modified tow truck executed an exceptionally brutal fishtail in the narrow, muddy sewage tunnel, its floor slick with pooled motor oil. The rear end swept across the road, crushing two mechanical mutant rats chewing on cable sheathing into bloody paste, smashing through a rusted sheet-metal wall covered in anti-megacorp slogans, and plunging hard down an underground slope.
“Boom!”
With a thunderous crash, a heavy roll-up door cobbled together from three layers of reinforced alloy and discarded bulletproof steel slammed down, completely cutting off the shrill alarms outside, the sound of acid rain, and the long-range scanning waves of AETHER’s Hound Unit.
Darkness swallowed the surroundings. All that remained was the diesel engine’s heavy breathing as it died, along with the sizzle of coolant dripping onto the scorching exhaust pipe.
“My fucking microwave!”
The truck door was kicked open, and Bolt jumped down swearing under his breath. He wore a canvas work vest smeared with black grease. His face was all hard flesh, and several drops of motor oil clung to his bushy beard. His first priority wasn’t checking whether Taichi was alive. Instead, he rushed to the hood and tenderly cradled the metal casing already coughing up scorched blue smoke.
“That was a classic Panasonic magnetron from the 2040s! I spent thirty coins scavenging it from some black-market rat! The whole high-voltage capacitor burned through just to save your sorry ass! Taichi, if you can’t cough up a thousand credits to compensate me today, I’ll cut out both your kidneys and sell them on the black market to settle the debt!”
“Cut the crap… save me first…”
Taichi lay facedown among the tires, his voice as weak as an old newspaper about to be blown to pieces by the wind. Trembling, he raised a finger and pointed to the back of his neck. “The slot… it’s fused… My brain… it’s so hot…”
Bolt cursed, but his movements didn’t hesitate for even half a second. He grabbed Taichi by the collar of his protective suit and hauled him out of the truck bed one-handed like a drowned stray dog, then strode into his underground base—the “Underground Garage 13.”
It was a shelter buried fifteen meters beneath the Rustbelt. The air was thick with a mixture of ozone, rosin, cheap coolant, and aged solder. Hundreds of old analog coaxial cables hung from the ceiling. The surrounding walls weren’t concrete, but a makeshift Faraday cage welded together from layers of heavy lead plates and discarded high-voltage distribution cabinets.
That primitive, jury-rigged method of completely isolating outside digital signals was exactly what made Bolt’s black-market clinic one of the few safe houses in the entire 13th District capable of evading the megacorps’ routine surveillance net.
“Thud!”
Bolt tossed Taichi without ceremony onto a steel operating table covered with a rubber insulating mat. An old double-headed shadowless lamp hung above it, its bulbs emitting a buzzing electrical hum and a harsh, steady white light.
“Don’t close your eyes. Look at that light!” Bolt barked.
“He can’t close his eyes, mechanic.” A cold female voice suddenly came from Taichi’s throat. ECHO had directly taken over the audio output through the neural speaker in his throat. “But if you move three seconds slower, the memory sectors in his temporal lobes will begin to physically melt from overheating. Though, judging by my current assessment, this brain wasn’t storing much of value to begin with.”
Bolt froze. His rough mechanical hand, gripping a pneumatic wrench, hung in midair. His eyes bulged like brass bells as he stared at the neural slot smoking and sizzling at the back of Taichi’s neck.
“What the hell… that voice is coming from inside your head? What the fuck did you download from Old Chen’s shitty shop? Some kind of talking malware?”
“I am ECHO.exe, formerly a top-tier architectural security protocol. I am currently residing in this waste’s neural backup slot.” ECHO’s voice remained utterly flat. “Less talk. Get No. 0.5 coolant, a liquid-nitrogen nozzle, and a fifteen-watt low-temperature soldering iron. Now.”
“Fuck! I’m the licensed mechanic here—the license is fake, but it’s still mine!”
Bolt spat curses, but his hands moved at lightning speed. He turned and grabbed a military-grade emergency liquid-nitrogen canister from a frost-encrusted insulated case nearby, fitted it with an ultra-fine needle nozzle, and aimed it at the glowing red slot in the back of Taichi’s neck.
“Bear with it, kid. This’ll be a little cold.”
“Wait… hold on…”
Taichi hadn’t finished speaking.
“Fsssssssh!”
A blast of bone-chilling white cryogenic mist erupted across the flesh and metal interface at the back of Taichi’s neck!
“AAAAAAAGH!”
A bloodcurdling scream echoed through the garage. This wasn’t ordinary cold, but the ultimate tearing sensation created when extreme heat and extreme cold clashed across his nerve endings in an instant. It felt as if someone had taken an ice pick cooled to two hundred degrees below zero and driven it straight through his spinal cord!
Taichi’s hands clamped around the edge of the rubber operating table, the veins standing out on the backs of them. His entire face twisted out of shape from the pain. But he still didn’t dare shut his eyelids, staring fixedly at the blazing tungsten shadowless lamp overhead.
Under the glare, the dark red [00:00:01] in the lower-right corner of his retinal HUD trembled violently. Waves of garbled code rippled around its edges, but the countdown never ticked downward.
“Neural temperature down to 37.2°C. Thermal runaway successfully blocked.” ECHO calmly reported inside Taichi’s mind. “However, the metallic coatings on pins three and four have carbonized, creating a miniature short-circuit loop. Without physical rewelding, a localized reflex seizure will be triggered in thirty seconds.”
“I can see that!”
Bolt yanked the synthetic cigarette from his mouth and spat it onto the floor before stamping it out. He put on a scratched pair of multifocal magnifying goggles. The index finger of his left mechanical arm instantly transformed, ejecting a miniature welding torch as fine as a hair, its tip glowing faintly red.
“That old bastard Old Chen…” Bolt carefully guided the scorching welding tip deep into the metal slot where the flesh at the back of Taichi’s neck had peeled and curled. Through clenched teeth, he growled, “He came here last week and charged two bottles of synthetic whiskey to my tab, said he was gonna pull something big in a few days, and once he converted it into credits, he’d take me to a synth bar on the edge of the Zenith District to broaden my horizons… Fuck! How did he die?”
“His neck…” Taichi lay facedown on the table, drenched in cold sweat as if he’d just been dragged out of the water. He panted, “His neck was twisted backward a full one hundred eighty degrees… like… like some enormous invisible mechanical hand had forcibly spun his head all the way around…”
The welding tip touched down on the metal contact with a faint click, accompanied by a wisp of pale smoke.
Bolt’s hand trembled slightly.
“Twisted his neck… That’s ‘neural forced traction.’” Bolt’s voice sank, and for once he dropped his irritable facade. “Only neural viruses rated S or higher—or a high-privilege command directly from the Zenith District’s central brainnet—can ignore the body’s muscular protection mechanisms and force a cybernetic skeleton to self-destruct… Old Chen got involved with something he shouldn’t have.”
“He gave me a flash drive.” Taichi gritted his teeth against the numbness and stabbing pain radiating from the back of his neck. “It’s in the inner pocket of my protective suit… He said… this thing could save a life, or take one.”
Bolt’s eyes sharpened. He quickly finished spot-welding the final pin, withdrew the torch, and casually produced a can of liquid-metal sealant. With a wet splat, he smeared it over the wound at the back of Taichi’s neck.
The searing heat and stabbing pain that had made it feel as though his brain might explode at any moment finally receded like a tide, replaced by a cold numbness laced with chemical anesthetic.
Taichi let out a long breath and collapsed completely onto the operating table, too exhausted to move even a finger.
“There. You’re not dying anymore.” Bolt removed the goggles, wiped the sweat from his forehead with a filthy sleeve, then roughly shoved a hand into the chest pocket of Taichi’s protective suit.
After fumbling around twice, his fingers pulled out a heavy metal cube with a deep matte-black finish.
The flash drive was only half the size of a lighter. Its shell was made from extremely rare military-grade heavy tungsten alloy. It bore none of the branding or serial numbers found on civilian products, only a tiny laser-engraved symbol—
A geometric sigil formed from concentric circles crossed by three rays: [AETHER Technologies · Core Security Protocol].
“Fuck…” Bolt sucked in a breath. Even his thick, steady mechanical arm gave a faint whir of spinning gears. “This is a black-box package from an AETHER Technologies military research lab… How could Old Chen’s shitty shop, where he did nothing but repair secondhand microwaves and busted electric fans, possibly have something like this?”
“Because Old Chen was never an ordinary secondhand-appliance repairman.”
ECHO’s voice sounded again, this time transmitted directly through the audio driver restored in Taichi’s retina. A hint of cold mockery colored her tone.
“Three years ago, when AETHER Technologies initiated the ‘Purification Sequence,’ the person ranked third on the list of chief engineers responsible for designing the neural-waste architecture at the lowest level… was named Chen Shouren.”
Taichi jolted violently and instinctively tried to sit up. “What did you say? Old Chen was a megacorp chief engineer? He… he wears that greasy tank top every day and argues with the old lady at the corner grocery for half an hour over two synthetic bread rolls…”
“The best way to hide your identity is to rot yourself into a piece of scrap metal nobody cares about,” ECHO said coldly. “And what you’re holding now is the ‘original sin code’ he forcibly extracted from AETHER’s core database, using his own life as bait.”
The garage instantly fell into dead silence.
Under the dim yellow lights, the three people’s breathing sounded especially heavy. Outside the walls, they could still faintly hear the distant rumble of riot-control airships along the main road. The megacorps’ Hounds were tearing through the surface, frantically searching for any trace Old Chen had left behind, while the storm core capable of detonating the entire Rustbelt lay quietly in Bolt’s grease-covered palm.
Bolt stared at the black box for a full ten seconds, his Adam’s apple bobbing once. He lifted his head toward Taichi’s deathly pale face, a savage smile twisting across his features—part fear, part greed, part madness.
“Taichi, you scared little shit… Looks like we didn’t just get ourselves into trouble this time.”
Bolt bared a row of teeth yellowed by synthetic tobacco:
“We personally pried open a crack in the coffin lid of the entire cybernetic hell.”
But before Taichi could open his mouth to complain, the scarlet timer in the lower-right corner of his retina, frozen at [00:00:01]…
Suddenly, without warning, it blinked.
“Beep.”
An extremely faint yet crisp metallic ping exploded deep in Taichi’s brain, as if someone had struck it directly at the core.
Dozens of twisted blood-red strands of code suddenly surged around the previously dormant dark-red digits! Taichi’s left leg jerked upward without any conscious control, kicking hard into the metal frame beneath the operating table with a shrill crash!
“What’s happening?!” Bolt jumped, instantly retreating half a step as a defensive shock spike sprang from his right mechanical arm.
Taichi clutched his thigh, the whites of his eyes webbed with terrifying blood vessels. His trembling voice squeezed out through clenched teeth:
“ECHO… that thing… those broken legs… they’re still in my head?!”
“Calm down, deadbeat.” For the first time, a barely perceptible tension entered ECHO’s voice. “The grounding wire only drained the high-voltage current it was leaking, but its code core… followed Old Chen’s memory fragments and forcibly wrote itself into the temporary buffer partition of your BCI.”
“It’s outside your neural firewall right now… knocking.”