3:40 a.m.
The underground garage’s main exhaust fan wheezed like an old tuberculosis patient. Its enormous rusted blades turned slowly amid the shriek of bearings starved of lubricant, drawing the air’s suffocating stench of blood, burnt insulation, and ozone bit by bit toward the pitch-black stormy sky aboveground.
The mess in the repair bay on the first floor had finally been cleaned up.
Black Rat’s mangled corpse had been wrapped and sealed tight inside two layers of heavy-duty industrial hazmat trash bags by Bolt, then temporarily shoved into the dry-ice waste cooling pool at the deepest end of the ventilation duct. As for that priceless military-grade cybernetic arm from Styx Heavy Industries, Bolt had taken it apart piece by piece with a heavy wrench. Its plasma capacitor, micro-nuclear battery, and neural sensors were soaking neatly in a metal drum filled with high-purity insulating silicone oil, undergoing deep physical decontamination from electromagnetic pollution.
Taichi dragged his utterly exhausted body up the creaking sheet-metal spiral staircase, swaying with every step, until he reached the cramped attic on the second floor.
It was a shelter of less than ten square meters, normally used by Bolt to pile up old magazines, expired synthetic canned food, and rusty spare parts.
The roof was patched together from several uneven sheets of corrugated metal. Acid rain hammered against them in a dense, chaotic rhythm.
Tap-tap-tap.
One corner of the ceiling was leaking. Yellow-brown droplets fell one after another into a chipped enamel basin in the corner, each making a monotonous, hollow metallic echo. In the silent depths of the night, the sound seemed especially vast and lonely.
At the center of the room, a makeshift electric stove converted from a discarded diesel drum cast a faint orange-red glow.
A dented aluminum pot sat above it. Cheap filtered water boiled and churned inside, belching out great clouds of white steam laced with the smell of mineral scale. Bolt stood shirtless before the pot, displaying a body of knotted muscles like old tree bark, crisscrossed with metal sutures and scars. With a metal spoon smeared in black grease, he shoved two packets of dehydrated synthetic vegetables wrapped in coarse gray paper, several slices of synthetic soybean protein meat glowing an eerie yellow, and three fried noodle cakes as hard as paving bricks into the boiling water.
When he tore open and poured in a small packet of concentrated chemical curry powder smuggled in from the black market, an intense, spicy aroma with the faint scorched smell of plastic immediately spread through the cold, damp attic.
Sizzle... sizzle...
Taichi was curled up inside a battered leather sofa whose springs had completely collapsed. Cradling a large chipped ceramic bowl in both hands, he ignored the scalding heat and shoveled mouthful after mouthful of noodles coated in curry broth into his mouth.
The spicy, burning-hot broth slid down his esophagus into his utterly empty stomach. The heat that erupted in that instant was like a tiny flame, finally driving away, little by little, the chill radiating from deep within his marrow and the weakness left behind by his neural spasms.
Taichi let out a long breath. His eyes, reddened by the spicy steam, finally regained a trace of life.
“Warning: The soybean protein meat you just swallowed contains industrial preservatives and artificial trans fatty acids exceeding civilian food-safety standards by 340%.”
From deep inside his mind, ECHO’s voice arrived right on schedule, still cold and precise in its utterly humanless tone.
“According to the current metabolic model, consuming this category of synthetic waste continuously for more than six months carries an 89.4% probability of malignant tumors in the lower digestive tract.”
Taichi lifted the last yellow-glowing slice of synthetic meat with his wooden chopsticks and waved it before his eyes. He rolled his eyes and retorted inwardly:
“In a dump like District 13, where you have to pay an air-purification tax just to breathe, living long enough to get cancer already makes you a freakin’ longevity champ. The megacorps’ microwave cannon is coming down in forty-seven hours to roast us all alive, and you’re lecturing me about carcinogenic preservatives?”
Having said that, Taichi barely chewed the slice before swallowing it hard. He even drank every last drop of the oily, spicy broth from the bottom of the bowl.
“Suit yourself, short-lived organism.” ECHO gave a cold snort, then, unusually, fell silent for a brief moment.
On the wooden chair across from him, Bolt ate noodles in huge mouthfuls, gripping the spoon with his greasy fleshy hand while his left hydraulic cybernetic arm clamped around a bottle of cheap synthetic liquor with no label. He threw his head back and gulped down a large mouthful.
Glug... Ahhh—!
The liquor went down his throat. Bolt exhaled a satisfied breath of spicy alcohol and stared somewhat glassily at the water-stained crack in the ceiling.
“That marking on the arm just now...” Taichi set down his empty bowl and wiped the grease from the corner of his mouth with a tissue, quietly breaking the silence. “STYX-EXP-0881. Bolt, were you with Styx Heavy Industries too?”
Bolt’s fingers tightened slightly around the bottle. The vents in his hydraulic prosthetic released a faint hiss of escaping pressure.
“That was eight years ago.”
Bolt tugged at the corner of his mouth, revealing a bitter, self-mocking smile. The knife scars on his face looked especially savage in the stove’s orange-red glow.
“Back then, I was the chief mechanical sergeant of Styx Heavy Industries’ 4th Armored Assault Brigade. Put nicely, we were an elite rapid-response unit. Put less nicely, we were a pack of stray dogs hired by the arms directors in suits up in the Zenith District to do their dirty work—putting down strikes at heavy-industry plants, secretly blowing up underground server hubs belonging to competitors, even cleaning out the low-level living test subjects who knew too much.”
“What happened after that?” Taichi asked.
“After that? During a secret purge codenamed ‘Black Tide,’ our commanding officer—Colonel Drake, now an executive director of Styx Heavy Industries—inserted a forced self-destruct code directly into the withdrawal order to cover up a leak of military-grade high-entropy neural toxin gas.”
Bolt raised his mechanical left arm and roughly tore open the thick rubber dust cover around his shoulder, exposing the crude metal framework inside. It had been violently severed, then manually welded back together with old-fashioned solder.
“An entire fully staffed assault company. One hundred and twenty brothers who’d lived and died alongside me. The military combat chips in their heads were remotely detonated within a single microsecond, blowing them into a pile of headless meat. I was repairing the vehicle chassis at the time. I reacted half a second faster, grabbed a bone saw, and sawed off my own left shoulder—skin, flesh, and bone—before tossing the combat sub-chip with the self-destruct program out of the armored vehicle and crawling out of the pile of corpses.”
Bolt’s voice was calm, so calm it sounded like he was telling someone else’s story. But Taichi could see the veins throbbing wildly across his forehead and neck.
“I went underground and spent eight whole years fixing busted microwaves in this lightless, stinking gutter. I figured I’d rot in District 13 like a piece of scrap metal for the rest of my life...” Bolt suddenly slammed the glass liquor bottle onto the table, splashing alcohol everywhere. “I never thought those bastards wouldn’t just stop—they’d get worse! They reached their hands toward Old Chen, and now they’re trying to wipe out all of District 13 along with him!”
Taichi fell silent.
He turned to look out the window at the neon-black night shrouded in acid rain. Beneath the distant clouds, a gigantic holographic advertisement projected virtual images of socialites and high-society women from the Zenith District elegantly sampling premium red wine. It glittered brilliantly, like a heavenly kingdom in the clouds where the gods lived. And beneath that heaven was this enormous, stinking cesspool, piled high with three hundred thousand ruined lives, all ready to be erased with a single click whenever someone decided they were trash.
“What about you, Taichi?” Bolt suddenly raised his head and looked at him. His drunken eyes held scrutiny and curiosity. “You’ve been a coward afraid of dying since you were a kid. You wear three layers of insulating gloves just to tear apart an old hard drive at the port. With your skills and your sensitivity to data, you could make a decent living as a hacker in the Steel Middle Tier. Why keep hiding in District 13 as some scavenging cleaner?”
Taichi gave a self-mocking smile and reached inside the collar of his thin undershirt, pulling out a small metal tube strung on an old insulated wire.
He twisted the tube open. Inside were no valuable chips or gold ornaments, only a small pinch of dried, yellowed grass leaves carrying a faint earthy scent.
“When I was five, my mom was burned alive in the server-room fire at Port 13. Before she died, she gave me this and told me it was a genuine plant specimen brought down from an ‘Outer Ring agricultural colony starship.’”
Taichi stared at the dried grass. For once, all his slyness and wariness had faded from his eyes, leaving only the purest longing.
“The biggest wish of my life is to save up one hundred thousand credits, buy a one-way ticket on a smuggled cargo ship from a black-market dealer, and escape this godforsaken city where clean rain never falls and there’s never a real sun. I want to go somewhere I can look up and see a real blue sky, somewhere the ground beneath my feet is dirt instead of cables. I want to open an offline general store and spend the second half of my life in the sunlight.”
“One hundred thousand credits...” Bolt gave a derisive laugh, but there was no mockery in his eyes, only deep sorrow. “In this city, a bottom-dweller’s life is worth just eight hundred credits on a megacorp insurance policy. You want to save a hundred thousand? You’d have to crawl out of a pile of corpses a hundred and twenty times.”
“But at least it’s something to hope for, right?” Taichi carefully tucked the metal tube back against his chest. “That’s better than dying pointlessly in a sewer like a rat.”
“What pathetic, childish romanticism from a carbon-based life-form.”
Deep inside Taichi’s brain, ECHO’s voice once again broke the silence in the room. But this time, there was less of its usual sharpness and the faintest trace of distance and desolation in its tone.
“Three years ago, when I was still flesh and blood, I also believed that with the processing power of my code, I could steal the fire of freedom from the Zenith District’s central brainnet like Prometheus and distribute it to every person in the lower city.”
Taichi’s heart stirred. “What happened after that?”
“After that? AETHER’s Stability Hub needed only 0.003 seconds of processing power to lock onto my physical coordinates. Three high-altitude orbital drones fired high-energy microwave pulses. One microsecond before my consciousness upload completed, they vaporized my body and all my laboratory partners into glowing protein char.”
ECHO said flatly, “I’m just a ghost code that happened to escape, sleeping in Old Chen’s backup server for three full years. There is no salvation in this city, Taichi. Rules are rules, and algorithms are gods. Either overthrow them completely, or be erased by them completely. There is no third path.”
The tiny attic fell silent once again.
A bottom-level scavenger who wanted nothing more than to save enough money to run; a crippled veteran mechanic carrying a blood feud; and a former top-tier hacker ghost who had lost her body and was left with nothing but an obsession with revenge.
Three wretched lives that should never have intersected were, at this moment, before this cheap bowl of instant noodles seething with chemical curry foam, twisted together by fate’s rough copper wire into a single rope.
“To the three of us and our cheap lives that haven’t been formatted yet.”
Bolt raised the half-full bottle of liquor and looked toward Taichi.
Taichi lifted his empty, chipped porcelain bowl and tapped it against the cold glass bottle, producing a crisp little chime.
“To tomorrow, while we’re not completely dead yet.”
Just then—
Click.
An exceptionally crisp metallic snap suddenly rang out from the direction of the darkroom on the first floor, without warning!
Immediately afterward, the old walnut tape recorder downstairs, connected to a military-grade flash-memory module, began emitting the shrill buzz of rapid rewinding even though no one was operating it.
From its speaker came an extremely regular low-frequency pulse, like the heartbeat of the deep sea:
Thump... thump... thump...
ECHO’s voice erupted like an alarm in Taichi’s mind:
“Taichi! Get down there! The first dynamic key matrix of Old Chen’s memory packet... has begun its self-check response!”