In a steel city drenched in neon, the sparks from his welding gun are the only light Gouji can control. He’s an assembly-line worker at the very bottom of the Tianqiong Group. It’s only when he witnesses a black-market deal that he understands: every gold-plated screw he assembles contains a slice of a human brain.
When a mechanical dog’s electronic eyes lock onto the implant at the back of his neck, and thirty clones in a cultivation pod open their eyes, each with the same burn scar on the right eye as his, Gouji tastes the truth in a shattered escape tunnel: the memories he thinks are his are nothing but replaceable, shoddy parts on Tianqiong Group’s assembly line. The pigeon he raised at seven, his dead father, even the instant noodles he ate last night: every frame bears the HD307 anti-counterfeit stamp.
Aqi, fleeing for her life alongside him, has a barcode wrapped around her neck, and her mechanical eye hides an experimental subject number that predates his own. The woman who can hack the gravity system carries a gun engraved with the worker ID Gouji himself once filed by hand. They pass through sewers fouled by rotting pharmaceuticals, each step awakening more “lives” that have been tampered with. The blind spot in the firing line of the clones overlaps perfectly with the blind spot in the rain-soaked alley’s surveillance cameras where they first met three months earlier. The coordinates marked on their escape route are the very shipping order number he forged when smuggling screws.
