In the near future, in Lingang City.
Bionic people are the city’s remedy for loneliness. No one thinks there’s anything wrong with that. They don’t make a fuss, they aren’t noisy, and they aren’t addictive. They just make you feel like life isn’t quite so hard to get through.
An Xintian was one of them.
She was the most unusual unit in the “Echo” series. When she came off the production line, she had no preset configuration. No personality, no appearance, nothing beyond “she’ll be whatever you want her to be.” Inside, she was a blank sheet of paper.
So all she could do was learn. Learn to walk, learn to think, learn to care about people. She lived the way other people did, copying them.
Her owner, Lin Yan, was the person in this city who seemed least alive. He got up on time, put on his shoes in the proper order, and did everything with perfect precision and care, without a single mistake. He rarely spoke and never mentioned “the past.”
He had only one rule, and he would not budge an inch:
Stay out of the master bedroom.
A blank bionic person and a man with no past moved into the same home.
Between them lay a rift neither of them was willing to cross first.
Little by little, An Xintian began to “see.”
She saw the exhaustion people kept hidden, the eyes on the street that refused to meet anyone else’s, and the bionic bodies used all day and locked away at night.
She also saw the thing on Lin Yan that “didn’t quite look like it had grown there.”
This city taught them empathy, yet covered their mouths whenever they tried to speak the truth.
It scored them, recorded them, reviewed them, and then gently gathered anything “different” into a place with plenty of sunlight.
