Taichi and Bolt practically slid and sprinted the entire way down the narrow, damp sheet-metal staircase from the second floor.
Every time they stepped onto a rusted metal tread, the entire suspended staircase let out a piercing metallic groan. The sound shook the expansion bolts fixed in the wall’s concrete, making them rattle ominously as sheets of old rust and gray cement dust sifted down like rain.
When both men’s feet slammed onto the thick anti-static insulating rubber mat in the darkroom on the first floor, a current of air laced with high-concentration ozone, overheated high-voltage cables, cooling silicone oil, and the faint acetic tang of old magnetic tape came rushing at them in a suffocating wave.
The tungsten incandescent bulb fixed to its metal gooseneck in the darkroom swung violently, flinging the two men’s shadows across the lead-plated walls in wild, spasmodic black streaks.
At the exact center of the workbench, the supply reel of the old walnut four-track, dual-cassette tape recorder was spinning backward at a wildly impossible speed!
The black tape scraped rapidly across the demagnetizing head and playback head, producing shrill screams like a metal saw being dragged across bone. Around the pitch-black military-grade flash-memory casing, three hair-thin pure-gold leads glowed with a ghostly blue corona like a deep-sea electric eel discharging. Tiny arcs danced through the air, ionizing it and filling the room with a harsh, acrid smell.
“Click!”
The rewind stopped with perfect precision in an instant. The supply reel’s mechanical pawl clamped shut, producing a crisp, heavy metallic impact.
On the tape machine’s panel, the two orange-yellow needle meters that had been violently shaking at the far left suddenly locked with near-dead stillness at the exact center, 0 dB, without moving an inch.
Then a cold, mechanical synthesized prompt sounded from the speakers, devoid of any human emotion or vocal inflection:
『Nonstandard physical analog audio read request detected.』
『Bottom-layer hardware leads have established a current loop… Initiating Level-One neural resonance key verification protocol…』
『Please input 【Chen Shouren · Individual Emotional Resonance Key】 within 180 seconds.』
『Maximum errors allowed: 1. Upon verification failure or timeout, the built-in piezoelectric quartz crystal will immediately release a high-energy microcurrent, detonating the 0.8-milliliter physical thermite self-destruct unit.』
“Emotional resonance key?!”
Bolt’s eyes flew wide, every fold of flesh in his face tensing at once. His heavy mechanical left hand hovered over the signal generator’s master switch. His thick fingers made faint metallic joint-friction sounds from the extreme tension, while beads of sweat rolled down his forehead and through his bushy beard.
“What the fuck kind of password is that?! It’s not a 64-bit random hash or a dynamic asymmetric public-key cipher! Where the hell am I supposed to find this old bastard’s emotional frequency?! Who the fuck knows whether he was happy or scared right before he died?!”
“Calm down, you crude mechanic.”
Deep inside Taichi’s brain, ECHO rapidly brought up an enormous three-dimensional audio topology map woven from tens of thousands of dynamic spectral curves.
“Modern digital passwords are as defenseless as a transparent sheet of paper before the quantum supercomputer arrays in the Zenith District. A megacorp AI net can call upon thousands of nodes and brute-force them in a single microsecond.”
ECHO’s voice reverberated through Taichi’s neural center with the precision and chill of a dissecting scalpel:
“Old Chen was once AETHER’s top neural architect. He understood better than anyone in this city the hegemony and unreliability of algorithms. That’s why he built a physical mechanical lock into this black box based on ‘Analog Neural Resonance’—”
“Only when the input analog audio’s fundamental frequency, harmonic structure, and the specific microvoltage fluctuations of the cerebral cortex perfectly match the emotional memory that was deepest, most obsessive, and most relaxing to him in life will the miniature magnetoresistive safety bolt retract on the purely physical layer.”
“Countdown: 142 seconds.”
Taichi stared hard at the flash memory emitting its ghostly blue glow, his brain racing beyond its limits.
The industrial chip mounted at the back of his neck was growing faintly hot. Along the edge of his retina, the frozen dark-red noise reading 【00:00:01】 pulsed faintly in time with his heartbeat.
Old Chen had run an old-appliance repair shop for three full years in the filthy, garbage-choked streets of District 13, where acid rain was everywhere.
He was stingy, terrified of death, and always looking for a petty bargain. He could spend half an hour haggling with the grocery-store owner over a hot bowl of ramen just to save two credits. He would deliberately charge an extra fifty cents for solder when repairing an electric fan. Whenever he saw the street patrol cops, he was always the first to duck behind the roll-up door and tremble.
But over countless acid-rain evenings during those past three years, Taichi had sat countless times on the threshold of that beat-up shop and watched the miserable old man reveal a completely different side of himself—
Old Chen never used a modern high-frequency light-wave stove. He insisted on setting a rusted old iron pot fueled by low-grade diesel outside the shop to cook the cheapest synthetic-meat soup. Every evening when he closed up, he would sit in the creaky old wicker chair by the entrance and play slow, static-filled old-school jazz on a rusted antique radio. And whenever he drank the cheapest synthetic rye beer, he always poured it into a double-walled steel cup packed with rough-cut ice, narrowing his eyes as he listened to the fine, dense hiss of the bubbles bursting against the metal walls.
“The happiest and most unguarded moments of Old Chen’s life… weren’t when he was the chief neural architect in the Zenith District.”
Taichi suddenly spoke in a low voice. In the dead-silent darkroom, every word sounded exceptionally clear and firm:
“He once told me over a cheap black beer… that every day in the Zenith District, staring at those cold, immaculate algorithmic codes, watching people in white suits slice human lives apart like data, he felt as if the air he breathed was wrapped in a shroud. Only after escaping to this muddy wasteland of District 13, listening every day to acid rain hammering the sheet-metal roof, drinking cheap beer fizzing with carbonation, and listening to saxophone from the 1980s… did he feel that he wasn’t a calculating machine, but a living, flesh-and-blood human being!”
“Countdown: 88 seconds!” ECHO reminded him. “Taichi, your logical deduction matches the human limbic system’s emotional model perfectly! But we need a precise physical-frequency input! We don’t have the neural potentials of Old Chen’s living brain, so how are we supposed to simulate that complex resonant waveform in eighty seconds?!”
“Bolt! Drag over the multitrack analog signal generator you use to repair radios and the old mixing console!” Taichi suddenly turned and shouted.
“Got it!”
The old mechanic’s blood boiled completely at that moment. He yanked over an old audio signal synthesizer with a panel covered in Bakelite knobs and a chassis packed with germanium transistors. In an instant, he brutally jammed three gold-plated 6.35-millimeter TS audio cables into the tape recorder’s auxiliary input.
“Taichi! You call out the frequencies and waveforms. I’ll turn the knobs!” Bolt gripped the controls with both hands, staring hard at the oscilloscope’s green fluorescent screen.
“Track one: base noise—set it to a 432 Hz natural pure-tone sine wave! That was the standard fundamental pitch of the old-jazz saxophone playing on Old Chen’s radio!”
“432 Hz locked!” Bolt violently twisted the first black Bakelite knob. A smooth, stable green sine wave immediately appeared on the oscilloscope, rising and falling slowly like rippling water.
“Track two: high-frequency random micro-pulses—add broadband white noise between 12,000 and 16,000 Hz. Lower the amplitude to simulate the faint hiss of carbonated bubbles bursting against the stainless-steel cup!”
Bolt clenched his teeth. The metal fingertips of his mechanical left hand fine-tuned the second potentiometer with micrometer precision. “High-frequency bubble noise injected! Harmonic distortion held below 1.2%!”
“Track three… the most crucial, most central track…”
Taichi drew a deep breath, his chest heaving violently. Slowly, he extended his right hand and grasped the third pure-gold lead Old Chen had left behind.
Under Bolt’s horrified stare, Taichi took the exposed metal pin at the end of the lead and, without hesitation, drove it straight through the rubber cooling pad over the industrial flash chip mounted at the back of his neck, pressing it firmly against the silicon electrode at the chip’s core!
“Taichi! Are you fucking insane?!” Bolt nearly jumped out of his skin. “That chip has an S-class Glitch ghost sealed inside it! If you connect it directly to the audio circuit, its high-entropy code will flow straight into your brain’s neural center!”
“Before Old Chen died… he left this ghost, codename Corpse-0942, to me!”
Taichi’s eyes were webbed with crimson veins, his gaze utterly resolute.
“This ghost was forcibly collapsed and condensed from the neural current in Old Chen’s final moment! It still contains the last of his attachment to, regret for, and soul-frequency connection with this world!”
“ECHO! Overload the cervical auxiliary channel by five percent! Route the residual fundamental frequency of Old Chen’s neural activity before death… through the pure-gold lead and into the mixing console!”
“Neural overclock authorization confirmed. Neural-center overheating risk factor: 67.4%.” ECHO’s voice paused for a rare microsecond inside Taichi’s mind, then said in a low voice, “Taichi… don’t die at this step.”
“Shhhhhh—!”
A blinding golden arc flashed across the back of Taichi’s neck!
An indescribable tide of grief, desolation, warmth, and boundless longing for the ordinary warmth of human life surged backward out of the mounted chip like a violent emotional tsunami!
Taichi’s temporal lobe screamed with pain. Countless carousel-like flashes swept across his vision—the battered repair shop, steaming noodle soup in a rainy night, Old Chen’s kindly yet exhausted smile… This immense, pure emotional energy raced along the pure-gold lead like a surging golden current and slammed into the mixing signal generator!
“Countdown: 15 seconds!”
“All three tracks unified! Full-spectrum physical resonance—input!” Taichi let out a hoarse, desperate roar.
Bolt brought his palm down hard on the mixing console’s master output fader!
“Buzzzzzzz—!”
The air in the entire darkroom seemed to solidify completely in that instant.
From the speakers, the slow, melodious 432 Hz rumble of the saxophone, the crisp hiss of carbonated bubbles bursting, and the fundamental frequency of the last trace of warmth Old Chen’s soul felt for the human world merged into an intensely strange, intensely lonely, yet intensely gentle analog symphony that thundered through the cramped lead-plated darkroom!
The orange-yellow needles on the tape recorder began jumping wildly. The two needles overlapped perfectly on the 0 dB line!
One second, two seconds, three seconds…
The cold, glaring blue corona around the flash-memory casing gradually transformed after absorbing the audio frequency, becoming a warm, pale-gold glow like the first ray of dawn.
“Click.”
From inside the flash memory came an exceptionally crisp physical unlocking sound, like the gears of a heavy vault engaging and releasing.
『Emotional Resonance Key match: 99.98%.』
『Physical security bolt disengaged.』
『Welcome back… Chief Chen Shouren.』
“Whoosh—!”
A powerful miniature stream of low-temperature cooling air burst from the flash memory’s vents, condensing into a cloud of white frost mist.
Then a tiny holographic projection crystal lens at the top of the flash memory suddenly lit up!
Countless pale-blue fiber-optic rays as fine as strands of rain burst from the lens, rapidly weaving, rotating, and reassembling in midair above the darkroom into a three-dimensional web of light.
In barely three seconds, a lifelike three-dimensional holographic image two meters tall was projected with perfect clarity before Taichi and Bolt—
It showed a high-end laboratory filled with a futuristic atmosphere, its walls made entirely of pure-white polymer alloy and enormous transparent floor-to-ceiling windows. Through the windows, the eternally clear blue sky over the Zenith District and the dazzling floating cities suspended among the clouds were visible.
At the center of the laboratory, Old Chen, dressed in a crisp white research uniform, stood with his back to the camera before a massive cylindrical cryogenic hibernation chamber.
Inside the chamber floated a young test subject with a deathly pale face, its entire body threaded with neural fiber-optic lines.
The Old Chen in the holographic image slowly turned around.
His face was far younger than it had been in District 13, but his eyes were filled with enough despair and madness to suffocate anyone who looked into them.
He reached his trembling right hand toward the camera and pressed it against the sensor on the holographic recording device.
“Taichi… when you see this recording, it means I’ve placed this spark… into your hands with my own.”
Old Chen’s voice rang out in the darkroom. Every word sounded like a heavy bomb about to detonate over the entire city.