Boundary Marker

In March 2157, a meteorite that could brake on its own fell onto Mars's Utopia Planitia. Liu Zongyi reached out and touched it. He was unconscious for forty-three days. When he woke, a web of blue-violet blood vessels floated beneath his temples. It wasn't a meteorite. It was a boundary marker. The Klein race's homeworld was approaching heat death. They had found a way around entropy: extract it from others. Probes scattered across the solar system had been working quietly for seven years. By the time humanity discovered them, they had already been waiting. Humanity had only two ways to fight back. One was the Topological Glove, which used an equivalent increase in entropy to counterattack and impose temporary order on a small area of space. The cost was borne by the user's own nervous system. The other was Cangjie, a symbol system redesigned according to the logic used to create oracle-bone script. A memory virus could parse any code governed by grammatical rules. Oracle-bone script had no grammar, only associations. It couldn't be read. Humanity used writing from three thousand years ago to fight a civilization capable of folding dimensions. But the real enemy wasn't only out there. Among the signatories to the Memory Revision Protocol, signed thirty-one years earlier, was a name Xia Jue Ming had spent a long time pursuing before he dared confirm it: his own file. And every act of resistance came at a cost.