In the parallel time and space of 1987, Xinhai City is a giant city eternally shrouded in icy rain and blurry neon lights. The technology tree here is skewed: artificial intelligence is still in its infancy, but memory retrieval and neural network technology have quietly matured. Ling Xiao, a former CIA agent whose future has been ruined, is now an "information detective" living in a dark corner of the city, specializing in gray commissions of data and memory. Late one night, a mysterious woman named Nightingale found him. She is a "memory painter" who can draw the memories in other people's minds into visual images. Her mentor, top neuroscientist Gu Yuanzhou, disappeared mysteriously, leaving only a fragmented and chaotic data echo. Ling Xiao accepted this seemingly ordinary disappearance case, but stepped step by step into a huge whirlpool woven by the giant technology company "Eternal Life Technology", out-of-control "digital ghosts" and tampered collective memories. In this abyss built of lies and neon lights, he is not only pursuing a missing person, but also the truth about human nature eroded by technology, and a past that almost swallowed him up.
