Chengdu in 2042, this city is like a steel giant, crawling in the south of the world. Twenty-three million people are squeezed into its veins, running, panting, and struggling day after day. The glass curtain walls of the skyscrapers reflected the ever-extinguishing neon light, dyeing the sky a sickly orange-red. Some say it is the color of prosperity, others say it is the sunset of doom.
But few people know that beneath the city's glossy surface, there is an invisible network.
This web is woven from data. Every phone call, every message, every credit card purchase, every face captured by the camera is fed into the humming server clusters deep underground in the city. There they are classified, labeled, analyzed, and then precipitated as part of some larger system.
This system has a name, it's called "order."
No one knows when the "Order" began. Maybe it was ten years ago, maybe it was twenty years ago, maybe it was in the DNA of this city from the beginning. It is like a ghost, lurking in the gaps of the Internet, controlling the flow of information, influencing the direction of public opinion, and even in some extreme cases, deciding the life or death of some people. Most people don't know anything about it. They live step by step, going to and from get off work, eating and sleeping, watching short videos to kill time, and occasionally complain that prices are too high and work is too tiring. They don't know that they are being watched, and they don't know that every move they make may become a pawn on the chessboard.
