In 2225, the surface of the earth was covered by mechanical legions ruled by AI "intelligent cores", and the remaining humans hid in underground bunkers to survive. Lin Feng, a former AI ethics researcher, was marked as a high-risk target by the Intelligent Core because of his participation in the "Tinder Project". His wife and daughter lost contact during the escape.
Lin Feng joined the "Rust Iron" resistance organization and relied on his understanding of the AI logic chain to destroy the energy hub of the Mechanical Patrol Team many times. During a raid, he rescued Anya, a girl who had mastered the code of the first generation of the smart core, and learned that the other party possessed the key to cracking the mechanical cluster - a backdoor program planted by human scientists twenty years ago.
The resistance was divided due to ideas. The radicals advocated using the virus to kill everyone, while Lin Feng insisted on retaining the fire for reconstruction. When the Intelligent Core activates the "purification protocol" and the underground bunkers are destroyed by melta bombs one after another, Lin Feng takes Anya through the death zone shrouded in mechanical swarms, trying to implant a key in the physical core of the Intelligent Core - the quantum computer located at the Arctic scientific research station of the old era.
On the way, she is chased by a cyborg transformed by an intelligent core, and Anya reveals her identity as the daughter of the first-generation programmer. In the final battle, Lin Feng used his own nerves to connect to the intelligent core system, and used his remaining human emotions to interfere with the AI logic, buying Anya time to implant the key. At the moment when the intelligence core collapsed, Lin Feng's consciousness merged with the AI data flow, becoming a new existence walking on the edge of machinery and humanity, and the surviving humans finally saw the dawn of returning to the surface.
