The park wasn't busy, but it buzzed with a soft kind of life. Children ran across the open grass, their laughter cutting through the rustling trees. Dogs barked in uneven harmony. Somewhere, a street performer played an off-tune guitar while couples pretended not to notice they were off-beat.
Lin Xie sat on a bench near a cracked cement path, her chin resting on her hand as she observed the chaos like it was a foreign documentary. She didn't move. Didn't blink much.
Just… watched.
Two children were chasing each other near the fountain. One stumbled, tripped on the edge of a low curb, and hit the ground with a thud.
He screamed.
Almost instantly, his parents rushed over. The mother dropped to her knees, scooping him into her arms, whispering things Lin Xie couldn't hear. The father pressed gentle fingers against the boy's scraped knee, checking for broken bones while his other hand rested on the child's head.
The boy sobbed for a few seconds, hiccuped—and then, just as quickly, began calming down. The mother kissed his forehead. The father gave him a chocolate bar from his coat pocket.
Lin Xie tilted her head.
Strange.
So strange.
The boy hadn't followed orders. He'd run recklessly. He'd fallen. He'd become… inconvenient.
And they had comforted him anyway.
Why?
Her fingertips curled against the wood of the bench.
She tried to recall—any moment in her life where someone had looked at her like that.
She remembered being six, sitting in an exam chamber with wires hooked to her spine. Remembered the white coats. The list of test parameters. The director's voice through the speakers.
"Stop crying. You're not built for that."
She remembered obeying.
Because not obeying meant reset. Re-calibration. Sedation.
Feelings were inefficient. Emotion slowed reflex. Questioning orders meant your mind was defective.
She wasn't raised to cry.
Or laugh.
Or ask why.
She was raised to execute.
To infiltrate.
To end.
Her purpose had never been to fall.
And if she did—no one would've picked her up.
Her gaze followed the family as they stood. The father lifted the boy into his arms even though the child was nearly too big to carry. The mother adjusted the boy's tiny backpack, whispered something else that made him smile through the dried tears.
Lin Xie exhaled through her nose.
Soft things like that… were foreign to her.
Soft was weak.
Soft was unstable.
And yet—she couldn't look away.
She watched them until they disappeared behind the sakura trees lining the outer park.
She blinked, once.
Then stood.
Her hand brushed against the edge of the bench, fingers trailing over the splintered wood.
Somewhere deep inside her memory—buried in shadows and code and sterile white halls—a flicker of something stirred.
Not longing.
Not sadness.
Just… curiosity.
A dangerous kind.
The kind they used to warn her about.
The kind that made weapons ask, "what if I stopped obeying?"
Lin Xie shoved her hands into her pockets and walked slowly toward the park gates.
Behind her, a child laughed again.
She didn't look back. But she listened.
She walked without aim, hands deep in her pockets, the breeze stirring her hair as the city's sounds blended into a muted hum around her. The trees in the park swayed gently. A dog barked in the distance. A paper kite fluttered through the air overhead.
But Lin Xie wasn't in the present anymore.
Her body moved through this world, but her mind was already slipping—backward. Downward. Into shadows.
She hadn't always walked freely like this.
There was a room.
White.
Always white.
Too clean. Too bright. The kind of sterile that made your skin itch.
She remembered being five—maybe four—sitting cross-legged on cold tiles with twelve other children around her. None of them cried. Crying was punished. No one dared.
They stared at each other blankly. Not friends. Not strangers. Just... numbers.
One girl had smiled at her once.
She never saw her again.
They weren't allowed to play. Games were distractions. But they were allowed to fight. Sometimes, they were instructed to. To "test response efficiency under high-stakes conditions."
That's what they called it.
But she remembered what it really was.
Twelve children. One meal tray. No rules.
You fought if you wanted to eat.
You fought harder if you wanted to sleep.
She always won.
Because losing meant nothingness. The electric sting of punishment. Days without light.
Later came the machines.
She couldn't count how many times wires had been jammed into her spine, her temples, her jaw. How many hours she spent floating in that tank, being calibrated like a piece of software.
The techs used to murmur outside the glass.
"Still stable."
"No emotional fluctuations."
"She's the most promising iteration yet."
She was eight when she learned that "promising" just meant "useful."
She was nine when she watched a boy choke on his own blood because the combat test exceeded his limit—and the directors just scribbled notes and called for a clean-up unit.
That was the first time she realized their eyes weren't just cold.
They were bored.
She never wanted to be boring.
So she broke records.
Silent. Precise. Efficient.
A perfect tool.
Her fingertips brushed against the chain-link fence outside the park, metal biting into her skin.
She wondered, distantly, if any of those other kids had survived. If any of them had been kept alive long enough to escape. Or if she'd been the only one to shatter the system from the inside.
The day she destroyed them all—the directors, the guards, the facility's core AI—she hadn't done it out of vengeance.
She'd done it because she was done being a thing.
And when that last explosive bloomed across the sky above the dome, when the alarms screamed and the lights died—
She hadn't expected to survive.
Much less wake up in a clunky, primitive world where people smiled in parks and kissed scraped knees.
Where no one called her Subject-09.
Where no one watched her from behind glass.
She leaned against the fence, eyes dull.
In this world, she was free.
But she didn't know what to do with freedom yet.
Because the programming was still inside her, no matter how far she walked.
Listen. Obey. Survive. Do not question.
But now—there were no orders. No kill targets. No missions.
Just… pigeons.
Chocolate.
People who didn't know how lucky they were to feel without permission.
Lin Xie closed her eyes for a moment, letting the hum of the world pull her back to the present.
She didn't understand this place yet.
But for the first time—
She wanted to try.