The day Shen Che was hunted down with a reward from the entire Internet, he had a piece of scrap metal still falling off in his arms.
It was a military core that was forcibly destroyed by the military, numbered "Zero". It was supposed to be turned into molten iron in the furnace, but at the end of a broken bridge in the Rust Belt, he opened his eyes in the palm of his hand.
The mother brain is broadcasting gently: if you hand over your memories, you will live forever. Human beings all over the network lined up to donate themselves, like fading empty shells.
But Shen Che refused. He remembered the dampness of his mother's pillow as she died, and the rust-belt wind blowing against her severed finger. These "useless" things were all he had left and refused to hand over.
On one side was the painless immortality promised by Mother Brain, and on the other was his own self, which was getting rusty inch by inch and was about to forget his lover's name.
Is the piece of scrap metal he bound to the final core of life-saving, or is it the bait that the mother brain spreads into the crowd, specifically to harvest him?
On that night when the entire Internet was sharing the same temperature, Shen Che hugged the cold piece of iron into his arms and heard it say for the first time:
"Don't be afraid. I'll hide your name where they can't delete it."
