Chapter 2

The cellar vent emitted a dying whine, its rusty iron grating vibrating wildly in the wind, looking exactly like the icy server room from Plane P-99. I was squatting on the oily floor, replacing the servo-drive of a scrapped industrial mechanical arm. Oliver was complaining beside me about fuel prices, every word from his blathering mouthsounding cheap and noisy, yet I hadn't taken in a syllable.

My consciousness slipped into a trance again; the buried, hyper-fake, neon-drenched memories flooded back like a broken dam, dragging me back to that damn Thorne Tower.

It was my third year as the Ghost CTO. Vivian’s "Deep Web Architecture" was on the eve of an explosion but faced its greatest survival crisis. The competition had cast a massive net—a capital squeeze capable of evaporating any startup in an instant.

I sat in that narrow, dark cubicle filled with the roar of cooling fans; my eyes were bloodshot, and crusts of blood had formed at the corners from sleeplessness. To solve the "Recursive Logic Redundancy" that only a top-tier geek could smell, I hadn't closed my eyes for 72 hours. My fingers hammered at the virtual keyboard, every stroke accompanied by a violent, icy-pick-like neurological sting.

The pain felt like a punishment, reminding me: Under the contract law, I had no right to feel fatigue.

Finally, the precise code logic closed. The "Superconducting Patch," capable of increasing Thorne System’s operation efficiency by 400%, was complete. I stared at the dense logic sequences, like an intricate work of art, feeling no joy—only a numb, abyss-like emptiness. I knew too well what was next—it was my duty, the invisible shackle I had to wear.

"Vivian, I've adjusted the underlying driver. You should be able to see the load peak drop immediately," I murmured through the comms channel. My voice was hoarse, barely human, raspy with iron and rust.

Ten minutes later, the heavy explosion-proof door was shoved open. Vivian stepped in, clicking her stilettos. She was wrapped in an expensive champagne-colored silk robe, the air filled with the scent of high-end perfume—that decaying, intoxicating fragrance completely discordant with the ozone and machine-oil smell of this hidden server room. She didn't look at me, as if those server clusters didn't exist, walking straight to the terminal.

"Are you referring to this so-called 'Superconducting Patch'?" She furrowed her brow, pointing at the complex blocks of logic on the screen, her expression one of high-and-mighty criticism. "Kaine, haven't I emphasized this? Do not modify the system core without orders. You are just an auxiliary unit. Your task is to maintain infrastructure, not interfere with my architectural aesthetics."

I licked my cracked lips, a bitter taste of rust washing over me. I suppressed the dizziness and responded softly: "It’s not aesthetics. It’s the baseline of system security. If that hole is left until tomorrow, once the traffic surges..."

"Shut up." She turned, her eyes full of exhaustion, anger, and a sense of disgust reserved for low-level laborers—like looking at a mouse that had skittered into her office. "You’re always like this, crouching in a corner threatening me with boring logic. Ethan is right. Your mindset is too narrow. His proposal for the architecture yesterday—that was art, inspiration, marketplace trend. And you..."

She sneered, brushing her hair with a graceful arc that felt deeply ironic in the shadows. "You are just an auxiliary laborer shifting bricks in the dark. Don't try to project your dark psychopathy onto my empire."

After that, I watched as she sat behind that priceless desk and packaged every line of that code—every character soaked in my fatigue and computational power—into a compressed file.

She opened the terminal and sent a message to Ethan.

The text on the screen burned into my eyes. I had dimmed the brightness to avoid mis-tapping, but those green characters were still sharp as needles:

"Dear, this is the final optimization I integrated for you. Only under your logical guidance do they show their true vitality. This credit belongs to you; I have already named you Chief Architecture Officer in the board report. Tonight... I’ll wait for you at my apartment. I’ve prepared champagne; we will celebrate this great victory."

I stood in the shadows, watching her slender, fair fingers elegantly press the send button. At that instant, I felt like an alien stripped naked and dumped on a glacial wasteland; every breath of air in my lungs froze.

Ethan clearly couldn't read a line of that code. Ten minutes ago, he had replied to Vivian: "Amazing, this structure fits my vision for the future net." He didn't even realize the complex trigger mechanism hidden in those lines—without my hidden defensive patch, his server would have exploded from a current overload the moment it went live, plunging the entire building into a blackout.

I could have warned her, or set a trap for the fraud to fail in a public demo. I didn't. I just watched her use my life support as bargaining chips to exchange for the fraud’s fake tenderness. The shock of violating the contract surged, but I suppressed it to the core.

Afterward, Vivian walked out of the building with a triumphant, saintly smile. She walked lightly, as if she hadn't been in this filthy machine room, but had been patrolling her territory like a queen. She hadn't even thought to turn off my terminal—or perhaps, in her eyes, I was merely an execution program that only knew how to obey, unworthy of basic human dignity.

I sat alone in the chair, listening to the rain hitting the glass. My heartbeat became distinct in the silence—not because of sadness, for such emotions had been erased by the system long ago—but because of a pure, suffocating absurdity.

"Kaine? What are you looking at? Why isn't the scrap moving?"

In reality, Oliver’s rough voice pulled me from the abyss once more.

I snapped back to reality, realizing that in my distraction, the soldering iron had burned a hole through the metal plate, emitting a foul, charred stench. I tossed away the damn tool, the humiliation of being used as a consumable, air, or even an obstacle in that plane, burning like embers in my heart.

But I was no longer angry. I felt an unprecedented, cold clarity.

"Temperance is gone," I picked up the part, my voice calm enough to startle Oliver. "Many parts are like that. The more you care, the easier they break in your hands. Since this thing is totally wrecked, the way is not to repair, but to replace the entire module."

Oliver blinked, muttering: "You've changed, Kaine. You didn't treat equipment this way before. You used to... have this strange tolerance, like you were in love with a pile of iron."

Tolerance? No, that was the cost. In order to break that damn contract and survive this hellish game, I had spent ten long years tolerating her blind arrogance. And the current me believes in only one principle: If it’s not worth it, crush it—then discard it.