Seventy-five-year-old He Mingzhe awakens at the brink of death, only to be labeled personality sample “S-7” and plunged into layer upon layer of nested future matrices. The cities have no shadows, the sky is distorted, and countless sleeping personalities are stored away as resources. He escapes again and again, drawing ever closer to the so-called “reality,” only to find that every layer of the world is internally consistent while contradicting the others. His beloved wife, Lin Suhua, is both a memory and a variable. As reality is rewritten again and again, he begins to wonder: Is the System collapsing, or is it him?
