Chapter One: At Midnight, the Chips Spoke

“Can you bypass it?” “Insufficient authority.” “What about my authority?” The chip paused. A million small voices overlapped at the edge of his mind, as if a sleeping city had opened its eyes. “Candidate Lu Chenzhou. Level-One authority, Listening, under verification.” “Condition: with incomplete information, choose what to preserve.” Forty-one seconds remained. Chenzhou tore open the power cabinet. Manual startup risked a surge that could destroy the whole controller. Voices poured data into him—voltage, flow, temperature, valve position. The noise abruptly assembled into a transparent model. He could feel every coolant pipe as though it were a nerve.