Deep inside the underground parking garage, the darkroom's air was as stifling as a lead coffin sealed shut for half a century.
This place had originally been a pressurized airlock chamber in an air-raid bunker. Bolt had nailed half-inch-thick discarded lead plates all over the walls. Their surfaces were pitted and dimpled, their oxidized gray a colorless corpse of a finish, while every seam had been firmly sealed with black asphalt and conductive rubber. Whenever high-pressure wastewater rushed through the main sewage pipe outside, dull, faint vibrations traveled through the room's concrete foundation, making several strings of old coaxial cables hanging from the ceiling sway slowly like dead snakes.
The only light on the heavy oak workbench, covered with dark-green antistatic insulating rubber, came from a single sixty-watt tungsten incandescent bulb mounted on a metal gooseneck tube.
The filament trembled faintly under the unstable voltage from the old generator, giving off a dim, warm halo. That golden light outlined countless dust particles drifting slowly through the air, stretching the shadows of Taichi and Bolt, seated on opposite sides of the table, into long, distorted shapes across the mottled lead-plated walls—like two rust-eaten ghosts struggling to survive beneath the rain curtain of an endless night.
At the exact center of the workbench, a military-grade flash drive, entirely clad in deep matte black, lay quietly on a square of white antistatic foam.
It was only half the size of a lighter, its casing milled from an exceptionally rare high-density heavy tungsten alloy. Slanting through the tungsten bulb's light, an impossibly fine laser-etched emblem along the casing's edge—a trio of nested concentric circles pierced through the center by three rays—radiated a cold, arrogant, suffocating pressure.
It was the exclusive security seal of the highest-security laboratory of AETHER Technologies, first among the three ruling megacorps of the Zenith District.
“Glug.”
Sitting in a wooden chair, Taichi couldn't help swallowing. His throat felt as dry as if he'd swallowed a handful of scorching coarse sand. The auxiliary-slot interface at the back of his neck, which Bolt had just shorted manually with an old soldering iron and fitted with a heavy industrial flash chip, still throbbed faintly. The coldness of the chemical anesthetic and the stabbing pain of the nerve burn pulled repeatedly at his flesh, reminding him of the danger he'd faced escaping from between death's fingers only moments ago.
Taichi hesitated. Instinctively, he extended his right index finger, wanting to touch the black box's metal edge.
“If you want all ten of your fingers melted into glowing cinders by 2,200-degree liquid thermite within one microsecond, by all means, move your hand another two centimeters forward.”
Deep inside his mind, ECHO's cold, elegant female synthetic voice, carrying utterly undisguised mockery, pierced precisely into Taichi's temporal lobe like a poisoned ice pick.
Taichi's outstretched finger froze in midair, less than an inch from the tungsten-alloy casing. He jerked his hand back as if shocked, then scrubbed his palm's cold sweat hard against his pant leg and gritted his teeth as he retorted mentally:
“ECHO, every time you warn me, could you maybe not use that tone that makes it sound like you're reading instructions for cremating a corpse?”
“Sorry, deadweight.” ECHO's voice didn't waver in the slightest. “According to my architectural logic library, for low-level carbon-based organisms lacking basic safety awareness and possessing a survival probability below 3.5 percent, excessively gentle language is merely a waste of CPU cycles. Also, shift your retinal focus three millimeters to the left and observe the drive's heat-dissipation vents.”
Taichi drew a deep breath and focused his eyes as instructed.
Across from him, Bolt had already put on a pair of impossibly heavy dual-polarized magnifying goggles. His thick mechanical left arm emitted a faint servo-motor buzz. With a click, the tip of his index finger transformed, popping out a laser-scanning probe fitted with a miniature optical lens.
An extremely thin ghost-green laser beam slowly traced the alloy seam of the flash drive. On the green-phosphor oscilloscope beside the workbench, a staggeringly complex, multilayered three-dimensional physical cross-section suddenly appeared on the CRT.
“Fuck…”
Bolt stared at the scan waveform on the oscilloscope. The beard around his lips shook violently a few times as he sucked in a breath that smelled of machine oil.
“These Zenith District bastards made the defense mechanism crazier than a military nuclear bomb's safety lock. The casing's internal layers contain a full 0.8 milliliters of microencapsulated high-purity liquid thermite. And between the first and second data pins, they've wedged a piezoelectric quartz crystal sensor.”
Bolt extended a rough finger and pointed at a tiny red protruding node on the oscilloscope.
“See this? The moment any conventional digital card reader is plugged in, or the fluctuation in the external contact voltage exceeds 0.05 millivolts, the quartz crystal releases a microcurrent and detonates the thermite. Within 0.001 seconds, every silicon storage wafer inside this tungsten-alloy casing will be flash-melted by the heat into a pool of glowing red metal.”
A chill crept up Taichi's back. He instinctively hunched his neck. “That's only the physical-layer defense, right? If it's a megacorp black box of the highest classification, doesn't it have a tracking program on the digital side?”
“Good question, deadweight. Your neurons have finally begun producing the faintest traces of intellectual activity.” ECHO summoned a densely packed decompiled logic tree inside Taichi's mind.
“Buried in the chip's low-level firmware is an AETHER ‘Quantum Heartbeat Broadcast Protocol.’ That means the instant you connect this drive to any cyberbrain, terminal, or brain-computer interface linked to the city's public network, its self-check code will send a Ping packet through the sky-net's low-level sniffing channel to the Zenith District's ‘Stability Control Hub’ within 0.0001 seconds. The packet will contain your geographic coordinates and your brain's neural signature code.”
ECHO's voice was cold as iron.
“At that point, the orbital kinetic-weapons platform hovering in the stratosphere three thousand meters overhead won't need to dispatch an enforcement unit. A thirty-centimeter-diameter tungsten-alloy kinetic rod will punch through the clouds within seven seconds at ten times the speed of sound, wiping this fifteen-meter layer of scrap metal above our heads—and every living thing within a five-hundred-meter radius—directly out of the physical world.”
A deathly silence settled over the room.
Only the faint hum of the incandescent filament and the occasional drip of water from deep inside the sewage pipe overhead disturbed it.
Taichi clutched his head with both hands, frantically tangling his hair, still caked with mud and oil. “This won't work, and that won't work! We can't plug it into a digital interface, and we can't touch any networked device… Old Chen shoved this death warrant that can blow a person to ash into my hands. Does he want me to avenge him, or does he just think I've lived too long?!”
“That's why you bottom-feeders who grew up in the fully networked age have lost all ability to understand the underlying physical world. Your brains contain nothing but algorithm-fed garbage data.”
ECHO's voice held an arrogance and icy contempt almost like a god looking down on mortals.
“What is the foundation of the algorithms ruling this city? The high-speed circulation of ‘binary digital packets.’ A megacorp's AI sky-net can audit and parse tens of billions of pieces of digital data every second. Any signal containing a packet Header, Checksum, and routing protocol is as impossible to hide from it as a torch in the night.”
“But the algorithm engineers in the Zenith District, who fancy themselves gods, left a massive blind spot in the underlying logic architecture—”
ECHO paused, then spoke each word distinctly:
“They cannot understand or monitor a ‘Pure Analog Signal’ with no packet format whatsoever, relying purely on the random arrangement of physical magnetic particles and mechanical vibrations in the air.”
Bolt, seated across from him, jerked his head up. A beastly glint suddenly erupted in his eyes, which had been bloodshot from sleeplessness and fear.
He tore off his goggles, slapped his thigh hard, and let out a sharp crack.
“Goddamn it! I get it! Tape! And an acoustic coupler!”
“Not bad for a crude wrench-jockey with a little old-school common sense left,” ECHO said. “When Old Chen designed this military-grade flash drive, he obviously left himself a way out in case the megacorps betrayed him. Look closely at the third and seventh heat-dissipation pins on the bottom of the drive—they aren't for cooling at all. They're two pure Analog Audio Jumper outputs.”
“If we use completely physically isolated equipment to convert the faint current signal from the pins directly into an audio magnetic signal, record it onto old-fashioned tape, and then restore it to sound waves through an acoustic filter, we'll be able to understand Old Chen's final message with a hundred percent physical network isolation and zero digital signature.”
Bolt shot to his feet, excitement making his breathing several shades heavier.
He turned and charged toward a metal wall at the very back of the darkroom. Embedded there was a heavy old-fashioned combination safe with a rotary dial. Amid a series of crisp metallic gear clicks, he yanked open the ten-centimeter-thick alloy door.
Bolt carefully reached inside with both hands and lifted out a massive walnut case as though he were carrying fragile explosives.
When he opened the case, it revealed an antique in remarkably good condition, its faceplate assembled from brushed aluminum alloy and solid wood: a late-1980s four-track dual-cassette tape recorder, or Cassette Deck.
Beside the recorder lay a high-fidelity Type IV Metal tape, its surface packaging intact beneath a vacuum-sealed film.
“This is my old man's prized possession. He stole it from the ruins of some bankrupt collector's private mansion in the Zenith District.” Bolt tore open the tape's plastic seal while rubbing his rough fingers over the recorder's physical buttons, their surfaces gleaming with metal. “I usually won't even use a rough cloth to wipe the dust off… Never thought I'd be using it today to summon that old bastard Old Chen from the grave in this lightless, stinking sewer.”
“Enough talk. Wire it up,” Taichi urged.
Taichi picked up two hair-thin specialized leads wrapped in pure gold plating. With the aid of a magnifying glass, he held his breath and carefully spot-welded the ends of the leads to the flash drive's third and seventh pins with an exceptionally steady hand.
Bolt then brutally but precisely jammed the other ends directly into the recorder's 3.5-millimeter audio input port.
“All lines connected.” Taichi wiped the cold sweat from his forehead.
“Cut all nonessential power in the darkroom,” ECHO ordered inside his mind. “Suppress environmental electromagnetic noise to the absolute minimum.”
Bolt extended his mechanical hand and yanked down the main breaker on the wall.
Click.
The dim tungsten incandescent bulb went out instantly.
The entire darkroom plunged into boundless darkness. In the extreme dark, human hearing and perception were magnified without limit. Taichi could clearly hear his heart pounding heavily inside his chest, as well as the endless patter of acid rain dripping deep within the sewage pipes outside.
The only glimmer came from the two rows of orange-yellow old-fashioned light-emitting diodes—the LED level meters—on the recorder's faceplate.
Bolt extended his oil-stained index finger and pressed the heavy combined [REC / Record] and [PLAY / Playback] key on the metal panel.
Click.
The rubber pinch roller clamped tightly onto the tape, and the miniature DC motor began to turn smoothly and evenly. As the tape slid slowly across the tape head, a classic, warm hiss of background noise immediately rose from the speakers.
Then—
“Bzzzzzz—hummmmmm!”
An extremely shrill screech, like countless metal needle tips furiously scraping across glass, erupted violently from the speakers without warning!
The sound was so high-pitched it made Taichi's heart spasm. The two needles on the level meters slammed instantly into the red +6dB overload limit on the far right!
Taichi clapped his hands over his ears and curled up in the wooden chair. It wasn't human speech. It was trillions upon trillions of low-level binary codes forcibly modulated into analog sound waves, producing a kind of “data scream” reminiscent of dial-up internet in the late twentieth century!
“Audio-spectrum demodulation protocol initiated.”
Deep inside Taichi's brain, ECHO used astronomical processing power to construct a fully virtual band-pass filter.
Within Taichi's consciousness, countless chaotic, ear-splitting audio waveforms were rapidly separated into layers, filtered, denoised, and aligned.
The shrill high-frequency screech gradually subsided.
From the speaker's original roar of electrical static, hurried breathing slowly emerged—low and heavy, accompanied by the faint sound of blood bubbles popping.
It was Old Chen's voice.
“Huff… huff… cough, cough…”
Old Chen's weak, hoarse breathing echoed through the deathly silent darkroom, accompanied by the crisp clatter of metal tools hitting the floor. The voice was impossibly real, so real it felt as though the greasy tank-top-wearing old man with his perpetually miserable face were standing in this dark room right now, whispering directly into their ears.
“Taichi… Bolt… if you're hearing the voice on this tape… that means AETHER's eradicator unit has ‘physically recovered’ me.”
Old Chen coughed violently several times on the recording. Then came a laugh filled with self-mockery and despair.
“Don't try to find my body… In front of those high-pressure vaporizers, my bones probably amounted to a small handful of blackened carbonized particles, dumped into an incinerator as trash along with my wreck of a shop… Listen carefully. You have to burn every word that follows into your brains. Do not write any of it into a device that can connect to a network.”
Old Chen paused for several seconds, seemingly trying to steady his racing heart.
“Three years ago, I was one of the chief architects at AETHER's Zenith Core Laboratory. Back then, the board secretly initiated an ultimate project called [Elysium-0 (Elysium Pure State)]. The megacorp claimed publicly that it was a great miracle capable of freeing human consciousness from bodily aging and disease and granting permanent immortality in the cloud.”
“But it was a lie! A complete, bloody lie built on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people!”
Old Chen's voice suddenly rose, filled with fury and terror, even taking on a hint of hysterical sobbing.
“The human brain is chaotic! Human neural current is saturated with fear, pain, greed, regret, and endless obsession! When the wealthy in the Zenith District uploaded their consciousness models to the supercomputer cloud, those negative emotions triggered terrifying ‘neural entropy increase’ in the quantum arrays, causing their digital consciousnesses to go completely insane and collapse within seconds!”
“To let the rich bastards' souls live forever in perfect purity, we so-called ‘geniuses’ were forced to develop an architecture called ‘reverse emotional distillation.’”
Old Chen gasped heavily as he spoke the horrifying truth:
“We forcibly stripped all the pain and fear from the rich people's consciousnesses. But high-entropy data can't be deleted directly by algorithms. It needs a physical carrier to absorb the heat and decay… So the megacorps turned the brain-computer interfaces of the three hundred thousand bottom-level civilians in the entire 13th District and the lower city into a ‘living sewer’ for dumping toxins!”
“Through the underground fiber-optic network, they secretly injected that violently unstable negative neural waste into poor people's brains! When those vagrants, cleaners, and black-market residents died sudden deaths under unbearable pain and injustice, the code that couldn't be digested collapsed inside their memory… That's Glitch! That's the cyber revenant!”
“This isn't a virus at all! It's three full years of ‘artificial data poisoning’!”
At that point in Old Chen's voice, a deafening blast suddenly thundered through the recording as a heavy blast door was violently breached with thermite explosives!
Next came the dense, perfectly synchronized sound of mechanical military boots crushing glass, followed by the shrill high-frequency whine of high-pressure vaporizers charging.
The final sound on the recording was a cold synthetic broadcast with a harsh metallic quality, clearly captured on tape through the communicator on Old Chen's body:
“Target asset: Chen Shouren. Asset number 0942. Core authorization frozen.”
“Determined to be a severe high-entropy contamination source. Executing on-site physical vaporization.”
“13th District low-entropy cleanup progress: 12.4%.”
“District-wide microwave-coverage formatting countdown: 47 hours, 59 minutes, 58 seconds.”
“Hissssss!”
A burst of harsh white noise exploded, followed immediately by the crisp click of the playback key springing up automatically.
The tape had reached its end.
The darkroom once again sank into a suffocating silence.
Only the row of orange-yellow indicator lights gradually going dark on the recorder's faceplate left a faint afterglow in the darkness.
Bolt sat rigidly in his chair. The color drained from his coarse, fleshy face in an instant. Even his thick, steady mechanical left arm trembled almost imperceptibly in the air.
Taichi stared blankly at the walnut recorder that had stopped turning. All he could hear was his own heartbeat pounding like thunder.
Forty-eight hours.
The three hundred thousand wretched lives of the entire 13th District were about to be reduced to ash beneath the megacorp's single-button formatting fire.