In 2065, the Mechanical Fleet arrived.
Within 72 hours, the global network went dark, and humanity plunged into the abyss. Survivors were implanted with “slave chips” and ranked from A to F according to their “usefulness.” Names were replaced with identification numbers, emotions were monitored in real time, and existence was reduced entirely to numbers.
Shen Yuan, once a doctoral student in physics, was now merely a C-grade laborer in the ruins of Beijing: C-114514.
After five years of numb toil, he fought off the death of his mind by reciting physics formulas. Then, as he witnessed a fellow worker’s execution, something in his chest began to vibrate violently
The “Lifeline” had awakened.
A woman calling herself Xian San told him that a group of Awakened were hiding in the dark underground, using the power of their life essence to fight the Mechanical Race’s rule of quantification. They called themselves the Source Structure Society.
In seven days, the reformatting protocol would begin. Three million seven hundred thousand survivors in Beijing would be “purged” all at once.
Shen Yuan had to choose within the 0.3-second delay in the surveillance system: stay and become a number, or leave and become “unquantifiable,” using the vibrating string in his chest to fight an entire mechanical civilization.
He did not know that this path would cost him every guide he had, make him the most wanted fugitive on the bounty list, “Humanity’s String,” and eventually bring him face-to-face with the Mechanical Race’s oldest question:
“You have proved that life cannot be fully quantified. But after evolution, are you still human?”
Some things would forever remain beyond their measurements.
A name. Anger. The frequency of the vibration in a person’s chest at the moment they decide to resist.
