Qin Feng: Q's Chessboard

The nightmare you had last night may have been code implanted by someone else.

Nexus particles on Initial Island in the Pacific tore away the last veil concealing memory: it wasn’t inviolable privacy, but a neural resonance pattern that could be altered. As the reformist “Privileged” aimed the Antarctic “Eye of Power” at the entire globe, claiming they would erase everyone’s painful memories, the conservative “Guardians” used feng shui compasses to measure the cracks in the memory field and code to block neural intrusions.

Qin Feng stared at the file on his father’s imprisonment, but a blood-red laboratory he had never seen appeared on his retina. As a “memory symbiote,” he could remember everything, including the dark shadow inside him called the “Faceless One,” a monster born from altered memories. Tang Ren’s dragon-finding compass suddenly spun wildly, pointing to the cherry trees of Tokyo, the depths of London’s foggy alleys, and the base of a transmission tower beneath Antarctic ice. Hidden there were the missing “resistant individuals” list and a truth capable of overturning the world.

The triangular eye of Organization Q gleamed in the dark. They said, “What you remember is what you are,” while secretly rewriting crimes from a century ago as “redemption.”

Now the countdown to the “Global Purification Program” has begun. Should he swallow the “Code Zero” drug and become a puppet in a false world without pain? Or clutch his bloodstained memories and smash his way out of the maze?

Qin Feng touched his temple. The Nexus particles there were resonating, as though someone were knocking on his skull: “Remember this: you are not the person you remember yourself to be.”