“Bang!”
Another dull yet violent impact. Taichi’s entire right arm spasmed and flung outward. His elbow slammed into the scrap-metal tool rack beside the operating table at an angle that was completely contrary to human ergonomics, knocking a whole row of pneumatic sockets of various sizes clattering to the floor.
“F-fuck…” Taichi was in so much pain that his eye sockets felt ready to split. Cold sweat dripped from his chin onto the metal tabletop with a soft tap-tap.
He couldn’t control his limbs.
It felt as if another invisible soul had forcibly squeezed into his neural network, wielding crude electrodes to stimulate the motor neurons in his cerebral cortex directly, again and again. Every jolt made Taichi’s muscles erupt in spasms beyond their limits. Even his jaw was clenching violently out of control, producing a teeth-grinding clack-clack that made his molars ache.
“Warning: Motor nerve reflex region under attack by residual code No. 0942. BCI temporary buffer partition utilization has reached 94%.”
ECHO’s voice vibrated frantically deep inside Taichi’s brain at a frequency of thirty thousand times per second, dragging along shrill static like a nonstop ringing in his ears.
“If you don’t perform external physical shunting, this high-entropy code will punch through the Level-Two firewall in forty-five seconds and rewrite your nervous system into a completely uncontrollable puppet. For the record, data simulations indicate that your first action after losing consciousness will most likely be tearing the socket out of your own cervical spine with both hands.”
“Bolt! Do something! Quit watching the show!” Taichi forced a warped howl from his throat.
Bolt stood two meters away, gripping a pneumatic heavy-duty rivet gun as thick as a human arm. Its safety was already off, and the carbon-steel rivet gleaming coldly at the muzzle was aimed straight at Taichi’s head.
“Goddamn it! Stop moving, you little shit!” Bolt was drenched in sweat, the veins in his forehead bulging like earthworms. “How the hell am I supposed to know whether you’re Taichi right now or that thing that almost twisted Old Chen’s head off a minute ago?! If you lunge at me, I’ll nail you to the lead-plated wall!”
“You stupid mechanic,” ECHO said coldly through Taichi’s throat. “If I were a vengeful ghost, your hydraulic prosthetic would have already shorted out and exploded from electromagnetic resonance during the three seconds you just wasted spouting nonsense. Now get those pieces of junk from your shop and do exactly as I say!”
The cold, emotionless synthetic female voice jolted Bolt. He gritted his teeth and spat a mouthful of bloody saliva onto the floor. “Fuck! Now you’re giving me orders? What do you need? Spit it out!”
“First, find a discarded industrial flash chip with a capacity greater than 128 terabytes. No civilian model with a firewall. I want the most primitive raw-wafer flash memory you can find.”
“Second, find an old television with a cathode-ray tube, or CRT. Remove its flyback transformer and lead deflection coil.”
“Third, weld the grounding wire from this piece-of-shit operating table directly to my auxiliary neural port and make sure it holds!”
“You’ve lost your mind!” Bolt’s eyes widened, and the rivet gun nearly fell from his hand. “Put a CRT’s high-voltage deflection coil over a man’s head? That’s an antique from the last century, built to fire electron beams! The lead radiation and high-voltage static inside will burn this kid’s scalp right off!”
“Better than turning into mindless ground meat!” Taichi screamed through the agony. “Bolt! Listen to her! I don’t want to die!”
Bolt cursed, slammed the rivet gun onto the table, then turned and charged toward a trash mountain in the deepest part of the garage, piled high with discarded household appliances from the last century.
A tremendous racket of metal and plastic being violently torn apart rang out. With his hydraulic prosthetic capable of exerting two tons of force, Bolt dug through the heap like an enraged black bear. In only ten seconds, he had yanked out an old fourteen-inch black-and-white CRT monitor, its casing covered in yellow-brown stains and its screen a full five centimeters thick.
“Crack!”
Bolt couldn’t even be bothered to look for a screwdriver. The hydraulic claw of his right prosthetic snapped shut, crushing the monitor’s plastic casing. He ripped out the heavy glass cone behind it, still connected to copper coils, along with a large slab of radiation-shielding lead that shimmered with a metallic sheen.
Then he rummaged through a parts bin and pulled out an old industrial-grade flash chip, thick as a brick and its surface covered in scratches. It was a black-box storage module salvaged from a decommissioned deep-mining robot.
“I’ve got everything! What do I do?!” Bolt rushed back to the operating table with an armful of dust-covered parts.
“Listen carefully.” ECHO in Taichi’s mind issued rapid-fire calculations. “The essence of an S-rank Glitch is high-entropy neural current that cannot be compressed through normal algorithms. The grounding wire only drained the surface surge. The code’s ‘consciousness anchor’ is still locked in Taichi’s temporal lobe.”
“Modern digital firewalls are completely useless against this kind of chaotic high-entropy code. Modern software pursues logical consistency, while a vengeful ghost is born from the collapse of logic itself. To trap it, we need a ‘physical analog sandbox’!”
“Use that lead deflection coil to make an electromagnetic Faraday cap and clamp it over Taichi’s head, using the physical magnetic field of the cathode ray to interfere with the outward diffusion of the neural current in his brain. At the same time, use the industrial flash chip as an external ‘scapegoat buffer slot’ and short it directly to the third auxiliary port in his cervical spine with old-fashioned solder!”
“Taichi, the instant the hardware connects, you must actively empty your surface consciousness and simulate your neural signal as a ‘null value (NIL),’ luring those red broken legs to transfer their target into the external flash chip!”
After hearing this nearly insane bit of improvised alchemy, Taichi sucked in a breath. “Empty my consciousness into a null value? What if I don’t wake up?”
“Then you’ll become a vegetable with perfectly functional physiology but no soul. Bolt can sell you to black-market organ dealers and make a little extra cash.” ECHO answered without the slightest sympathy. “Ten-second countdown. Your call.”
“Fuck… do it!” Taichi shut his eyes—but didn’t close them all the way, keeping a narrow slit fixed on the surgical light—and roared his answer from the depths of his throat.
“Hold him down!” Bolt bellowed. His thick knee slammed onto Taichi’s convulsing chest, pinning him hard against the operating table.
Then Bolt took the incredibly heavy black-and-white CRT cone, wrapped in bare copper coils, together with the lead plate, and clamped it over Taichi’s head like an executioner’s iron helmet from the Middle Ages!
“BZZZZZT—!”
The high-voltage deflection coil touched the garage’s ground wire, erupting instantly in a shrill electromagnetic buzz. Taichi felt his scalp go violently numb. Every strand of hair sprang straight up under the powerful static charge. At the edges of his vision, the surgical light twisted and warped, transforming into strips of ghostly green analog interference.
“Soldering iron’s here!”
The miniature soldering iron in Bolt’s hand flared with a searing blue glow. Scalding solder was applied with near-brutal force, welding the heavy industrial flash chip directly onto the auxiliary port at the back of Taichi’s neck!
“Taichi! Empty your mind! Now!” ECHO shrieked.
Agonizing heat surged through the back of Taichi’s neck again. But in that instant, relying on the bottom-level survival instinct he had developed over five years of dismantling neural waste at Abandoned Port 13, he forcibly severed his brain’s desire to control every muscle in his body.
In the slang of low-level data cleaners, this was called “playing dead.”
When you encountered an incomprehensible data anomaly in a dark heap of discarded servers, you didn’t try to resist it with a firewall. You didn’t try to analyze it. You zeroed out your brain-computer interface output entirely, disguising yourself as a damaged, worthless “NIL Block.”
Taichi’s pupils suddenly dilated.
He forcibly suppressed his heartbeat to fewer than thirty beats per minute. The bioelectric signals in his cerebral cortex plunged into a faint ripple that was almost flat.
In the world of his subjective consciousness, everything around him sank into limitless silence.
The pair of crimson broken legs that had been floating above his brainstem suddenly fell into a brief state of logical confusion after losing the neural current signal of Taichi’s active resistance. It could no longer sense the host’s presence. All it could sense was the enormous, completely undefended blank industrial flash chip Bolt had crudely welded to the back of Taichi’s neck.
Instinctive erosion drove the high-entropy code onward.
“WHOOOOSH—!”
A brutally cold current surged through the solder and copper wires, pouring frenziedly into the external discarded flash chip!
“Bzzzzzzzz—!”
Beside the operating table, the surface of the industrial chip, originally black-gray from end to end, began visibly blooming with scarlet glimmers like blood seeping through! Under the extreme pressure of high-frequency data writing, its heavy metal casing quickly heated and reddened. Thin wisps of acrid white rosin smoke even began to rise from it!
“Disconnect it!” Bolt caught the whine of metal fatigue instantly. With a sharp click, the hydraulic cutters in his hand snipped through the grounding wire connected to the chip with perfect precision!
“WHOOOOSH—!”
Taichi tore free as if he had suddenly escaped from the abyss of drowning. His chest heaved violently as he gulped down air thick with the smell of motor oil. He flung the heavy lead-and-CRT helmet onto the floor, where it shattered into pieces.
The spasms in his limbs stopped.
The terrifying, suffocating sensation of an invisible monster controlling his body finally vanished completely.
“Did… did it work?” Taichi collapsed on the table and shakily touched the back of his neck.
“It can only be considered a temporary seal.” ECHO’s voice had returned to its calm state, though a faint trace of static from its overclocking still lingered in its tone. “The physical limit of that industrial chip is seventy-two hours of data erosion. After seventy-two hours, the silicon transistors inside it will be burned through completely by the high-entropy code. At that point, it will flow back into your brain.”
Wearing thick insulated gloves, Bolt carefully picked up the flash chip, glowing red-hot.
The clear industrial serial number stamped on the chip’s surface had been blurred by the heat. But at the very center, the burn marks spontaneously branded by the red Glitch code had somehow assembled themselves into an extremely strange line of miniature text:
【Project Elysium: Corpse-0942 (Elysium test subject: Corpse No. 0942)】
“Elysium test subject… No. 0942…” Bolt stared at the line of text, the muscles in his face twitching hard twice. “The vengeful ghost Old Chen left behind before he died wasn’t some urban legend that formed naturally… It was test subject No. 942 in some megacorp’s human experimentation project!”
Taichi sat on the operating table, the cold sweat on his back having completely soaked through his flimsy protective suit.
He looked at the 【00:00:01】 still stubbornly blinking at the edge of his retinal HUD and drew in a deep breath of metallic-smelling air.
“Old Chen… you old bastard, what the hell did you see in the Zenith District…” Taichi murmured to himself.
At that moment, the black military-grade flash memory Bolt had set on the metal table sensed the powerful electromagnetic disturbance around it subsiding. A faint blue self-test indicator suddenly lit up inside a seam in its casing.
An almost inaudible mechanical click quietly sounded in the dead-silent garage.
Old Chen’s memory packet was about to undergo its first decryption check.