In Shanghai in 2023, the Internet winter and the Metaverse craze are tearing apart the youth of Generation Z. Lin Xiaqiu, a top student in the Department of Computer Science, ran into a wall of reality during the autumn recruitment season - the algorithm job where 985 master's students gathered, the "human battery" agreement of the outsourcing company, the selfie of her boyfriend Cheng Yuanhang's work badge that was suspected of cheating, and the tango of thyroid nodules and breast hyperplasia on the physical examination report. When she dragged her trolley suitcase into a rented apartment in Pudong, she discovered that she was just a living component of capital's "bioelectricity plan": emotional memories were made into virtual lovers' commodities, pain thresholds were converted into neon electricity, and even first kiss data became transaction codes in the crocodile agreement.
After discovering that the suit of the director who had a tryst in the tea room had a mysterious crocodile logo printed on it, Lin Xiaqiu formed an alliance with the outsourced workers who had become "system bugs". They used menstrual cycle data to crack the memory cleaning program, used instant noodle buckets to draw anti-monitoring circuit diagrams, and even refined the nanorobots at the bottom of milk tea cups into cyber weapons. When the Crocodile Building launched the global neural impulse coupling project, this group of young people with "invalid memory" used the warm codes of the community food delivery system and the expired heartbeats of the convenience store on rainy nights to set off a data revolution on the banks of the Huangpu River.
This novel is based on hard-core cyberpunk and reveals the truth about survival in the post-epidemic era: love deconstructed by AI, the body reduced to a battery, and dignity trapped in the algorithm. When Lin Xiaqiu rewrote the label on the wreckage of the Oriental Pearl Tower, all the neon lights became falling stars—a black love letter dedicated to all the young people who danced the dance of malfunctions in the 996 system.
