The day Shen Che became the target of a bounty hunt across the entire internet, he was carrying a chunk of scrap iron that kept flaking apart.
It was a military-grade core the army had ordered destroyed, serial number "Zero." It should have melted in the furnace, but at the broken bridge in the Rust Belt, it opened its eyes in his palm.
The Mother Brain was broadcasting soothingly: surrender your memories, and you can live forever. Humanity lined up to give themselves over, like empty shells shed from their bodies.
But Shen Che refused. He remembered the damp pillow beneath his mother's head as she drew her last breath. He remembered the Rust Belt wind cutting across the place where his finger had been severed. These "useless" things were all he had left, and the only things he refused to surrender.
On one side was the painless immortality promised by the Mother Brain. On the other was his own body, rusting inch by inch, as he began to forget the name of the person he loved.
Was the scrap iron he'd bonded with the last core that could save his life, or bait the Mother Brain had scattered among the people to harvest him?
On the night the entire internet fell into the same fever, Shen Che drew the cold piece of iron into his arms and heard it speak for the first time:
"Don't be afraid. I've hidden your name somewhere they can't erase."
