My name is Lin Shen. I’m forty years old. I used to be the chief systems architect at Genesis Tech. Now I deliver orders in the Abyss.
It’s really just a more immersive, higher-risk version of food delivery. I deliver sweet dreams to insomniacs, sealed memories of pain, or encrypted data. The recipients are hidden within the layered consciousness network of the Abyssal Dreamscape.
The Dreamscape is a bizarre place, a graveyard of reason. Young couriers either lose themselves in it or struggle to survive, but I take it apart with an architect’s mindset. It’s a vast, ancient, bug-ridden hyperdimensional System. Its distorted scenes are inefficient data structures, its muttering is noise in the System logs, and its “magic” is just low-level APIs we haven’t fully figured out.
I do this for the money. The real-world “System” is overloaded: the mortgage, my daughter’s international school tuition, and my wife’s expectations for our life are pushing me close to “logging off.” This part-time job in the Dreamscape is my only option.
Entering the Dreamscape is like accessing a system without authorization. I could trigger its “firewall” or be devoured by a “virus,” but I know how to assess risks. To keep my family’s “local network” stable, I’m willing to take on anything.
I signed the contract and put on the connection device. Reality is heavy, the Abyss is uncanny, and all I want is to find a balance between the two systems: a middle-aged courier who uses code to make sense of madness and takes responsibility for protecting a glimmer of hope. My story begins with an order I can’t refuse.
