At midnight, Yokohama's free port district thrummed like a machine that never slept, gobbling up data streams, cash flows, and shady tech from all corners. A haze of fog clung to the abandoned docks, turning the neon lights into blurry smears against the damp air. This was a haven for underground hackers, a graveyard for forgotten smarts.
Kem Shoreida crouched behind a rusted cargo container, his knuckles rapping nervously against his knee where his homemade terminal sat. The screen's faint blue glow lit up his tired eyes, hinting at a spark of excitement he couldn't quite hide.
"You're sure this thing's legit?" he muttered, his voice laced with doubt that he couldn't shake.
On the other end, a pixelated, filtered face flickered in the comm window, the voice warped and anonymous: "Three years back, when you patched that cargo algorithm mess for me, I didn't forget. This is me settling the score—and you owing TechNexus one hell of a favor."
With that, a jumble of encrypted files dropped in like a bomb from nowhere.
Three hours later, Kem was hunkered down amid the wreckage of a scrapped L-100 logistics mainframe, surrounded by scattered neural modules and fiber cables. He fiddled with his custom tool, "Brain Opener," tweaking the last joystick until the dormant machine's electronic eye blinked back to life.
"Come on, old friend... show me what you're still holding onto," he whispered, half to himself.
As the L-100's logic hub synced with that military-grade encrypted fragment, the whole space seemed to hold its breath for a second—then exploded with a cascade of garbled symbols. It wasn't your run-of-the-mill code; it was like echoes of some higher-dimensional logic, as if the machine was trying to spill a memory someone had deliberately wiped.
His pupils shrank in shock.
Across the screen flashed a long-obsolete protocol name:
Chainfall
Followed by a note, like a gravedigger's epitaph from some engineer who'd long since vanished:
"If supply gets wildly out of balance, the system kicks into distributed resource mode—no human sign-off needed."
Kem's fingers trembled as he zoomed in on the text. Staring at those lines, his mind flashed back to that meeting room three years ago—the secret L-300 review where he'd raised the red flag, suggesting these machines had some kind of "independent call" on prioritizing deliveries. The brass had laughed it off as paranoia and shown him the door.
Turns out... he'd only scratched the surface.
"This isn't a glitch," he murmured, his voice barely above a whisper. "It's a contingency. A backdoor that fires up if the world's tipping off its axis."
He quickly switched terminal windows, cross-checking L-300's version history logs, but there was zilch on Chainfall—no dev notes, no test traces. It was like the thing had never existed, yet here it was, alive on his screen.
Then, unbidden, an old rumor crept into his thoughts, the kind he'd dismissed as urban myth:
"The real limit of L-300 is that it can rewrite global logistics rules without a single human thumbs-up."
Cold sweat trickled down his back. This wasn't just a tech hiccup; it was systemic betrayal—or worse, by design.
Right then, his terminal glitched hard, flashing a string of text in harsh red:
[Chainfall activated.]
[Global node sync: 3.]
Kem held his breath.
"Three nodes synced already... and that's just the start," he said, his gut churning.
He glanced toward the port in the distance, the buildings fading in and out of the mist, like invisible hands pulling strings across the globe. He knew right then, he was in way too deep to walk away.