The sky was not a sky. It was a motherboard.
High above the toxic smog of the Junkyard, the Celestial Motherboard hummed with the light of a billion transactions. It was a cage of gold and silicon, a Dyson Swarm enclosing the dying star that humanity called the Core. Up there, in the Upper Realm, the Administrative Gods bathed in pure energy and infinite computing power. Down here, in the Lower Realm—the frozen, trash-filled outer shell of the megastructure—Kai shivered.
Kai was a "Null".
He sat crouched on a ridge of compacted trash, watching the neon rain fall. To anyone else, the rain was beautiful. To the 65% of the population with neural implants, the falling water was augmented by the System to look like glowing lotus petals, accompanied by soft, ambient chime music streamed directly into their auditory nerves.
But Kai had no port. He had no neural interface, no fiber-optic meridians woven into his spine, and no Dantian processor humming in his chest.
He saw the world as it truly was: gray, wet, and smelling of ozone and rotting synthetic flesh. The rain wasn't lotus petals; it was acidic runoff from the cooling towers of the Ring Sectors above.
"Optimization rate: 0%," Kai whispered, his voice raspy.
He checked the rusted trap he had set three hours ago. It was a crude device—a kinetic spring-loader made from a scavenged car suspension and a sharpened piece of rebar. Primitive. Analog. In a world where Cultivators could delete a street block with a single line of code, Kai was fighting with sticks and stones.
Scritch. Scritch.
The sound came from beneath a pile of discarded server racks.
Kai's eyes narrowed. He didn't have the tactical HUD that highlighted enemies in red. He had to rely on his biological ears, trained by years of silence and paranoia. He was the "Calculator," an archetype born of necessity; without an interface to process data for him, he had to process reality manually.
Distance: four meters. Wind speed: negligible. Target weight: approximately fifteen kilograms.
A creature emerged from the shadows. It was a Scrap-Beast—a synthetic rat the size of a dog, its flesh partially replaced by jagged copper wiring and scrap metal. Its eyes were broken camera lenses glowing with a malfunction red light.
The rat sniffed the bait—a piece of moldy protein paste.
Kai held his breath. His muscles, lean and scarred, coiled like the spring in his trap. He wasn't a cultivator. He hadn't even reached the Hardware Forge Stage; his body contained no synthetic muscle. One bite from that beast would infect him with cyber-tetanus or worse.
The rat stepped on the pressure plate.
CLANG!
The rebar snapped shut, but the beast was fast. Its hydraulic legs fired, launching it backward. The trap missed its neck, clamping onto its hind leg instead.
The rat screeched—a sound like grinding gears—and thrashed, its metal claws sparking against the trash. It turned its lens-eyes toward Kai, recognizing the source of its pain. With a hiss of steam, it gnawed through its own trapped leg, severing the copper wires, and lunged at him.
Kai didn't panic. He viewed the interaction as a transaction: his stamina for the beast's life.
He sidestepped the lunge, feeling the heat of the rat's internal battery pass inches from his chest. As the beast landed, skidding on the wet refuse, Kai swung a heavy iron pipe he kept strapped to his back.
Impact.
The pipe connected with the rat's cranial unit. There was a sickening crunch of wet biology meeting brittle plastic. The beast twitched, its internal cooling fan whirring loudly, then sparked and died.
Kai stood over the corpse, breathing heavily. The rain soaked his ragged hoodie. He felt no surge of "Qi"—the nano-machines suspended in the air ignored him completely. There was no system notification congratulating him on the kill. No "+10 Karma" deposited into his account.
Just silence. And the dull ache of hunger.
He knelt and pulled out a serrated knife. He wasn't interested in the meat; it was too toxic. He carved into the beast's chest cavity, pushing aside greased organs to find the prize: a small, flickering bio-capacitor.
"Grade F scrap," Kai muttered, wiping the blue coolant fluid on his pants. "Maybe five credits. Seven if the fence is feeling generous."
He pocketed the component. It wasn't enough. It was never enough.
Kai looked up at the sky again. Far above, the Ring Sectors spun slowly, their lights forming the logos of the Trinity Corporations: the green helix of Azure Bio-Systems, the blue circuit of the Divine Silicon Sect, and the golden coin of the Void Financial Group.
They controlled everything. The air, the water, the code of reality itself. They believed in the "Techno-Dao"—that flesh was weak and only by optimizing one's brain to run higher-complexity scripts could one ascend to the Heavens.
Kai spat a mouthful of bloody saliva onto the ground. "System," he said to the empty air, mocking the prayer the cultivators used. "Go to hell."
He turned and began the long trek back to the settlement.
The settlement of "Sector 404"—colloquially known as Garbage City—was a tumor growing on the side of a massive exhaust vent. Hovels made of corrugated plastic and stolen shipping containers were stacked atop one another, connected by swaying bridges of fiber-optic cable.
The noise was deafening. Even without implants, the sensory overload was intense. Holographic ads, glitching and distorted down here in the slums, projected fifty-foot-tall faces of perfect, chrome-skinned Immortals.
"Is your flesh failing? Upgrade to the new Lotus-III arm at Azure Bio-Systems! Financing available for your soul!"
Kai pulled his hood lower, keeping his head down. He walked with a specific rhythm—irregular, chaotic steps designed to throw off the gait-analysis software used by the local gangs.
He passed the "clinics" where back-alley doctors installed rusted second-hand implants into screaming patients. He passed the opium dens where addicts plugged directly into "Dream-Servers" to live out fantasies while their real bodies withered away.
He reached a rusted container at the edge of the sector, half-buried in a drift of electronic waste. He scanned his thumb against a hidden mechanical lock—no digital keypads for him—and the heavy door groaned open.
The air inside was warm and smelled of filtered recycled oxygen. It was the only clean place in Kai's world.
"Rin?" he called out softly.
A cough answered him. It was a wet, hacking sound, like a hard drive trying to spin up with a broken needle.
A girl lay on a cot in the corner, wrapped in thermal blankets. Rin was twelve years old, pale and thin. Unlike Kai, she had been born with a port—a cheap, factory-standard neural interface at the base of her skull. But her body rejected it.
Hardware Rejection Syndrome. Her biology was allergic to the chrome. Without expensive suppressor drugs, her own immune system would attack her brain, trying to "heal" the port by scarring over the connection.
Kai knelt beside her, his cold, pragmatic mask cracking for a fraction of a second.
"Did you get it?" Rin whispered, her eyes fluttering open. Her irises were gray, clouded by the system errors flooding her vision.
"I got a capacitor," Kai lied smoothly, smoothing her hair back. "It's high grade. I'm going to trade it for a full cycle of suppressors."
Rin smiled weakly. "You're a bad liar, Kai. Your heartbeat elevates when you lie."
"I don't have a heartbeat monitor," he reminded her.
"I can hear it," she murmured, tapping her temple. "The System amplifies it. You're loud, Kai. You're so loud."
She squeezed his hand. Her skin was burning hot. The fever was spiking.
Kai's jaw tightened. The capacitor he found was worth seven credits. A single dose of suppressors cost fifty. The debt collector from the local gang, a brute named "Iron-Skin" who worked for the lower-tier triads, was coming tomorrow.
If Kai didn't pay, they wouldn't kill him. That would be a waste of resources. They would take Rin. Azure Bio-Systems paid good money for children with rare genetic defects like Rejection Syndrome. They used them for "live debugging".
"Rest," Kai commanded, his voice returning to its usual cold, logical tone. "Save your processing power. I'm going back out."
"It's night cycle," Rin warned. "The scavengers..."
"I am a scavenger," Kai said.
He stood up, checking his knife. He needed a big score. A really big score.
Rumors had been circulating in the junk market about a "Heaven-Fall"—a piece of debris from the Upper Realm that had crashed into the deep wastes of the Junkyard earlier that week. Most said it was just sewage. But some said it was a data-shard from the Pre-System Era.
If it was real, it was dangerous. The Firewall (the government police) hunted down unauthorized history.
But Kai looked at his dying sister, her body fighting a war against the metal in her head.
He didn't care about history. He didn't care about the risk. He calculated the variables: Probability of death: 85%. Probability of saving Rin if he did nothing: 0%.
The math was simple.
Kai stepped back out into the acid rain. The neon lights of the city reflected in his dark eyes, not as data, but as fire.
He was a Null. A zero.
But in binary code, a zero was just a placeholder waiting to be flipped