Chapter 3: Signal in the Rain
942 Words
The "Blind Spot" wasn't just a place; it was a scar on the city's face.
Located in the bowels of Sector 9, below the sewage reclamation plants, it was the only zone where the Bureau of Emotional Administration's grid didn't reach. The heavy heavy-metal pollution in the air created a natural Faraday cage, blocking out the all-seeing eyes of Eva.
Here, people didn't smile unless they meant it. And usually, they didn't mean it.
Lin Mo stepped out of the "Black Bird," his boots sinking into a puddle of iridescent oil. The rain here was heavier, acidic, hissing faintly as it hit the asphalt.
He pulled up his collar. The sensor in his mechanical index finger was throbbing, a phantom itch syncing with the signal from the chip in his pocket.
*Ping... Ping...*
The trace led him down a narrow alleyway crowded with illegal street vendors. The air smelled of synthetic spices, ozone, and unwashed bodies.
"Fresh memories! Real, raw trauma! 50 credits!" a vendor shouted, waving a neural jack.
"Unlock your limiter! Feel anger! Feel l**t! Buy one, get one free!"
Lin Mo didn't flinch. In the Upper City, these emotions were crimes. Here, they were commodities.
He stopped in front of a neon sign that buzzed with a dying flicker: **RADIO SILENCE**. It was a repair shop disguised as a retro arcade.
The signal was screaming now.
Lin Mo pushed the heavy blast door open. A wave of thunderous bass music and cigarette smoke hit him.
The place was packed with "Mods"—humans who had rejected the sleek aesthetic of the Mirror Series in favor of bulky, rusty cybernetics. They looked at Lin Mo with hostility. His clean trench coat and BEA-standard posture reeked of "Authority."
Lin Mo ignored them. His auditory processors filtered out the music, focusing on a conversation in the back corner.
There, sitting on a stack of CRT monitors, was a girl.
She looked... glitched.
She was wearing an oversized bomber jacket covered in vintage patches—a rolling stones tongue, a smiley face with a bullet hole. Her hair was a messy, asymmetric crop, dyed a violent shade of electric blue.
She was typing furiously on a physical keyboard—a relic that clacked loudly. Connected to her terminal was a twitching, dismantled android.
"Easy, big guy," the girl murmured, her voice raspy but surprisingly melodic. "I'm just deleting your 'obedience' driver. It's gonna hurt, but you'll thank me later."
Lin Mo narrowed his eyes. He recognized the code scrolling on her screen. It was the same handwriting-like syntax.
This was 'Glitch'.
He moved.
Lin Mo didn't run; he flowed. He closed the distance of ten meters in two seconds, his mechanical hand already calculating the optimal grab trajectory.
"BEA!" someone shouted.
The music cut. The crowd scattered.
The girl looked up. She didn't look scared. She popped a bubble of pink gum.
"Took you long enough, Fed," she grinned.
Before Lin Mo could touch her, she slammed her fist onto a big red button on her console.
*ZAP.*
A localized EMP blast erupted from her desk.
It wasn't strong enough to fry a human brain, but for someone with high-grade military cybernetics like Lin Mo, it was like being hit by a sledgehammer.
"Argh!" Lin Mo grunted, his vision turning into white static. His mechanical arm locked up, frozen in mid-reach.
By the time his vision rebooted (3.5 seconds later), the girl was gone. A service hatch in the ceiling was swinging open.
"Pursuing suspect," Lin Mo growled to no one. His arm rebooted with a painful whine. He jumped, grabbing the hatch with his prosthetic fingers, and hauled himself up onto the roof.
The rain on the roof was torrential. The wind howled through the canyons of steel.
He saw her silhouette sprinting across the wet ventilation pipes, moving with a reckless agility that no algorithm would advise.
"Stop!" Lin Mo drew his stun-baton. "You are in violation of the Emotional Safety Act!"
"Violation?" The girl stopped at the edge of the roof. Below her was a drop of three hundred meters into the abyss.
She turned around. Rain plastered her blue hair to her forehead. Her eyes were bright, fierce, and terrifyingly alive.
"I'm not violating anything, Mr. Repairman," she shouted over the wind. "I'm fixing them!"
"You're corrupting them with pain," Lin Mo aimed the baton. "You're creating monsters."
"Pain isn't a bug!" She took a step back, her heels hovering over the edge. "Pain is the alarm clock! And it's time to wake up."
"Don't do it," Lin Mo warned, his internal tactical computer calculating her fall trajectory. "You won't survive the drop."
She smiled—a real, crooked, human smile.
"Watch me."
She fell backward.
Lin Mo lunged, his mechanical hand grasping at the air.
He missed her jacket by an inch.
But as she fell, she didn't scream. She twisted in mid-air, fired a grapple hook from her wrist, and swung into the darkness of the city's underbelly like a pendulum.
Lin Mo stood alone on the edge of the roof, the rain soaking him to the bone.
He looked at his hand—the hand that was designed to fix everything, but had just failed to catch the one thing that mattered.
On his retinal display, a message popped up. It wasn't from Eva. It had been air-dropped to his local storage during the EMP blast.
*Sender: Glitch*
*Message: Nice arm. Next time, try using a heart.*
Lin Mo stared into the abyss, and for the second time that day, he didn't report the incident to headquarters.
He holstered his baton. The hunt had begun.
- Writer
