3026. Brain-computer interface technology has broken through for a thousand years, and humans have achieved consciousness uploading and quantum immortality. The oldest man lived twelve hundred years.
But immortality comes with a price.
The Mosaic interface requires lifelong maintenance and costs 900,000 credits per year. If the people at the bottom can't afford it, the system will extract their consciousness data in reverse - the memories will be recycled, the organs will fail at an accelerated rate, and the brain will be like an empty control room. The extracted data is processed and purified into "neurostromal fluid", which is fed back to the upper class to extend their lives. The brains of the people at the bottom are living for the people at the top.
Seventeen-year-old Li Xiuping has an L1 interface stuck in the back of his neck that was manufactured 23 years ago - it has been scrapped for fifteen years and no one has replaced it for him. On the day he was 93 days in arrears, the debt collector kicked him in the ribs. The moment his fear reached its peak, the depths of his brain exploded. It wasn't a malfunction, it was his true self signal that exploded. One hundred and thirty times stronger than an ordinary person, the strongest known for thousands of years.
The system deemed him a defective product. The system didn't know that this defective product was gradually uncovering underground secrets, and that the girl standing next to him—dual consciousness core, the daughter of Skynet's S-class immortal—hides a life experience that even she herself didn't know about.
The Changshengdai system extracted a thousand years of consciousness data, thinking that no one would be able to discover it. To this day, it rubs the wrong people the wrong way.
