Chapter One: Two Characters at Midnight

On the day Gu Yan was laid off, rain fell over Linchuan without ever reaching the ground. At 11:47 p.m., he walked out of Chengtu Technologies carrying a cardboard box. It contained a keyboard, half a bag of pour-over coffee, and three cheap company trophies. Behind him, the access light changed from green to red. USER DOES NOT EXIST flashed across the screen, as if his last six years had been a caching error. Human Resources called it a business adjustment. Gu Yan knew better. Three days earlier, he had submitted a vulnerability report about CityScope, the municipal digital-twin project. An emergency account could bypass two-person authorization and write unsigned events into live city dispatch systems.