Four in the morning—there were no bells, only a faint tingle from the chip at the back of Lu Chen's neck.
His consciousness was roused with pinpoint precision, not by natural drowsiness, but by a forced jolt of microcurrent targeting his amygdala. The last wisp of chaos in his brain was crushed to powder, and he slipped into work mode without buffer, like a machine flipped to the "on" position.
Barefoot on the cold nanotech floor, the chill climbed up his soles and spread to his limbs, yet it could not extinguish the absolute rationality bestowed by the system. The sensor lights above flickered on in sequence with his steps, casting long, pale shadows across the empty office. In the mirrored wall, they traced a face of striking handsomeness, utterly devoid of expression.
His skin was the translucent hue of one who never saw sunlight, with faint blue veins visible just beneath the surface, like tangled logic circuits—not a trace of human warmth.
[Lu Chen, Chief Soul Auditor (HR Director). Current status: 99% (Optimal).]
The voice of the "Supreme System" echoed inside his skull, a perfect blend of three thousand high-quality tones of all genders and ages. It sounded as smooth as fine jade, yet wrapped in ice that never melted, without a flicker of emotion.
Lu Chen reached his workstation and deftly connected the "Holy Communion Hose."
Today's ration was "No. 0 Tasteless Supplement." The cold liquid slid down his throat like shards of broken glass, severing in an instant all his base desires—for warmth, hunger, and food.
Here, human instinct was classified as "redundant code," to be excised with clinical precision.
"Social Protocol activated."
He spoke softly, and a virtual miniature of the entire company materialized before his eyes. Tens of thousands of employees were in "Mirror Sync" state. Sister Li from Finance wore a standard smile, her eyes curved, appearing perfectly at ease.
But the physiological feedback deep in the system's core laid bare the truth: her stomach was convulsing violently, gastric acid gnawing at her mucous membranes, pain nearly breaking through her polished mask.
Under the Supreme System's law, this was the most basic form of "absolution": as long as the mirror smiled, pain did not exist.
Genuine human feeling was labeled "invalid data" by the algorithm—suppressed, erased, forever.
Lu Chen's slender fingers flicked through the air, gliding over an invisible interface as if plucking strings on a silent harp—elegant, yet carrying unassailable lethality.
A bright red dot was dragged before him.
It was Old Mo, a programmer. In the hologram, the white-haired old man stared blankly at a line of gray code, his fingers trembling uncontrollably, his eyes bloodshot, his breath ragged with the gasp of a dying man.
[Audit Conclusion: Unit has suffered 12% neuron necrosis due to "overload."]
The cold mechanical voice echoed in his skull. [Recommended Action: Material Degradation.]
Lu Chen's heart gave a sharp, faint twinge.
He knew Old Mo. Back when he was a green intern, fumbling even with basic code, Old Mo had slipped him half a forbidden chocolate bar—earthy, rough-sweet, the taste of real human food, the only "anomaly" in this algorithmic world.
Now, Old Mo was an "overloaded unit," scrap to be recycled.
"Confirm reclamation."
Lu Chen's voice was hoarse, deliberately flattened to hide all emotion.
The moment the order was issued, Old Mo on the screen did not even have time to scream. His body began to dissolve from the toes upward, erased as if by an invisible eraser. Every atom was precisely disassembled into a wisp of faint light, which trickled down the recycling chute beneath the workstation and merged into the building's pulsing circulation.
Old Mo's consciousness would become server cache. His flesh would be repurposed as printing material for new employees.
This was "Harvesting"—no pain of death, only an endless cycle of reuse.
Humans were no longer lives. They were resources governed by algorithms, used up and torn apart, rebuilt and used again, forever.
Lu Chen's fingers hovered over the "System Maintenance" button, about to close his eyes and meditate, when a signal never before recorded crashed into his consciousness matrix.
It was not a red crisis alert, nor a green compliance notification.
It was a color that defied definition, flashing across the dark monitoring matrix like a butterfly's wing—brief, yet explosive, shattering the system's absolute order.
Interference source locked: R&D Department, Sublevel 3, Workstation G-741.
User: Ying.
Lu Chen pulled up the live feed at once. The image sharpened instantly.
The girl was not at her desk. She knelt on the cold floor, hands clasped, whispering into the void, her thin shoulders trembling as if in prayer.
What chilled Lu Chen to the bone was that her virtual screen held no business code, no data reports—only dense, nearly primitive recursive algorithms, weaving frantically in a blind spot of logic.
She was building a "virtual womb."
In that void woven from code, a fragile white flower, so delicate it might shatter at a touch, bloomed slowly. Petals glistened with dew made of code, its logic wildly unstable, on the verge of collapse at any moment.
[Warning! Non-logical entity detected!]
For the first time, the Supreme System's voice wavered sharply, laced with a shrill edge of program disorder. [This individual is wasting sacred computational power to create "meaningless" aesthetic objects!]
Lu Chen stared fixedly at the screen, at the thin girl.
A drop of liquid slid from the corner of her eye—transparent, yet warm, hitting the cold floor and evaporating into a wisp of white smoke.
It was a tear.
A corrosive agent the Supreme System could not parse, one that would short-circuit its logic—the most precious, uniquely human emotion.
"This is not a waste."
Lu Chen whispered, so softly even the chip's monitoring module could not catch it. Only he heard.
"This is… a miracle."
His fingers trembled slightly. He pressed "Suspend Processing" and forged a line of code conflict in his operation log, temporarily masking Ying's anomaly.
It was the first time since becoming Chief Soul Auditor that he had lied to the Supreme System.
And it was the first step he took—from a believer in algorithms, to a seeker of truth.
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