Chapter Four: A Thirty-Million Order—Paid First to My Enemy

They would cause failures near the end of acceptance testing, too late for routine inspection to catch. Four days remained. “Expose them?” Wanqing asked. “Not yet. They’ll blame contamination in transit.” Chenzhou divided the chips into four groups and used the A1 as a relay. His Level-Two limit was 1,024 nodes, so he shook hands with each group in turn. Every connection showed him the material’s memory of heat and current. By the fourth group, pain drilled through his skull. He fell to his knees and, for several seconds, could no longer remember his mother’s voice. Authority always had a price. It could not make a good chip from nothing. It could only deny lies a place to hide.