Before the System Deletes Me, I’ll Steal Her Heartbeat

I am a perfect agent cultivated by the System, designation Seven.

Erasing emotions was the final procedure, but Yu Xian became my forbidden data.

She was just a girl playing a ukulele in a flower shop on the corner, but the System judged that “her very existence is a threat.”

Sixty seconds on the countdown. The purge command begins.

I smash the terminal and use my neural interface to hack back into the core database.

“What are you doing?” The control room alarm shrieks.

“Hiding all the data about her,” I say, biting back the warning prompt, “inside the genome of a single bean.”

When everyone thinks I’ve been completely formatted...

I feel the bean in my pocket and smile.

This sprouting seed will one day cover the entire mechanical planet.