Core settings
- **World view**: In 204X, the global automation rate will reach 92%. AI is taking over every job from the farm to the laboratory. Human society is divided into the "algorithmic layer" (the elite who control resources) and the "waste layer" (the unemployed bottom class).
- **Core Contradiction**: The elite believes that the "useless population" is a negative asset to the earth. The government acquiesces and even implements "moderate reduction plans" (such as inferior food, inducing drugs, high-risk environments) in an attempt to reduce the population through natural elimination.
- **Fertility Collapse**: The bottom class is unwilling to have children out of despair, while the elite class uses gene editing to customize "perfect offspring" and strictly prohibits bottom class genetic contamination.
- **Protagonist**: Chen Mo, a former factory assembly line worker, now a "data scavenger" in the underground black market, suffering from pulmonary fibrosis caused by inferior nutritional cream.
