Deal

Chapter 4: Battery Blood

Boston Docklands, 2:17 AM

As molten, star-shaped holes appeared in the rusted shipping container under the beam of Jason’s EMP gun, Summer finally saw the bloody characters hidden beneath the Tesla logo – a distress signal from the Shanghai Tesla Women Workers' Union, etched onto the battery cathode. The ghosts of Pinyin names seemed curled within every lithium-ion vacancy.

"Your father's watch," Summer jacked the modified mechanical timepiece into a Tesla Model S charging port. "The memory alloy held the death roster from the 2018 Gigafactory."

A holographic projection bloomed in the dense fog: Jason's father collapsing on the Pudong production line, the AI monitoring system calculating productivity loss even after his heart stopped. The digital signature field on the death certificate pulsed with the NeuroLink CEO's name.

MIT Media Lab, 10:29 AM

Emily's robotic prosthetic limb crushed Summer's quantum bracelet. Inside the robotics team showroom, the BCI prototype was actively converting the neural pain signals of Chinese laborers into raw computing power.

"You're rebuilding the Silk Road," Emily pulled up NeuroLink's equity structure diagram, "only this time, the cargo is agony itself."

Jason's drone swarm smashed through the bulletproof glass, AR graffiti shifting into burning union flags. On a t****k livestream, Lily's chemo room had transformed into a blockchain mining farm; each breath she took generated hash values for the black market syndicate.

"Welcome to the age of the human mine," Emily's irises shimmered with the cold blue of data streams.

New York Bitcoin Mining Facility, 3:41 PM

Amidst the roar of six thousand ASIC miners, Summer rewrote the pain-computation protocol using ternary code. Jason wired the Tesla battery packs to a cryogenic embryo bank; the temperature of Siberian permafrost surged upwards through quantum entanglement.

"They're mining Bitcoin with the nerve pain of Shanghai factory workers!" Summer channeled the bio-current feed onto the dark web. "Every millisecond of agony equals 0.0003 Bitcoin."

The V-mask hacker’s phantom flickered above the mining pool. Jason activated the EMP weapon. At Bitcoin block height 813,265, the Tesla coils triggered a chain reaction. As miners exploded, three lines of bloody code materialized in the firestorm:

Shanghai Worker ID: GX-2207

Accumulated Pain Value: 9,387,451 Units

Equivalent Hashrate: 3.2 Petaflops/sec

Brooklyn Bridge, 11:59 PM

Summer hurled the blood-stained graphene battery into the East River. Manhattan's neon lights twisted in the black ripples, forming the Chinese character "*" (Gōng - Work/Labor). Jason's father's AI-generated last words looped in the waves, a haunting mix of Shanghainese dialect and Python code.

"I deleted the MIT recommendation," Summer handed the wreckage of the mechanical watch back to Jason. "The robotics team rewrote my application essays using blockchain."

As sirens echoed from the harbor, Jason's modified drone swarm formed a massive union symbol above the Statue of Liberty. The moment the dark web livestream viewers topped ten million, Lily's life support system suddenly began generating relief funds using the very pain-compute algorithm.

"Time for a new battlefield." Jason engaged the Tesla's Autopilot. The navigation system displayed its new destination: Shanghai Pudong Gigafactory.