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墨書 Inktalez
The residual heat from the chassis still burned at my fingertips. The scratching sound from the ventilation duct suddenly stopped, and the countdown on the scarlet display froze at 71:59:59. As I pressed the newly appeared barcode on the back of my neck, the smell of burning rubber wafted from the subway entrance.
Lao Zhao's repair shop was hidden in a crack beneath the viaduct. Inside the glass cabinet lay a row of rusted turnout switch parts, with a dark red chip at the back oozing a blood-like glow. The old man in khaki work pants lifted his welding gun, and amidst the flying sparks, half of a metal face flickered into view.
"Is anyone still looking for Line 13 these days?" The welding gun left scorch marks on the table corner. "The blueprints were burned long ago." I slammed my father's brainwave analyzer onto the counter. As the instrument brushed against my metro card, the chip suddenly emitted a high-frequency beep.
Lao Zhao's mechanical eye constricted to a pinprick, and sparks from the welding gun splattered onto the barcode on my palm, searing it into a charred "071." The old man abruptly lifted a hidden floor panel. As the musty smell of the air raid shelter mixed with formaldehyde rushed out, the scent of blood rust from thirty years ago exploded on my tongue.
My calves began to twitch uncontrollably, reminiscent of that time when I hid in the ventilation duct at thirteen. "Things brought by the Six-Nine Year Soviet Expert Group," Lao Zhao said as his mechanical hand twisted open an air-tight valve. Inside the freezer, thirteen diamond crystals flickered in and out at brainwave frequencies. "On the day they were embedded into the station foundation pile, six workers jumped into the mixer."
My temples throbbed. The blue culture medium scent from my father's laboratory seeped out from one of the crystals as the analyzer's probe automatically pierced into the freezer. When my fingertip touched the crystal surface marked with "071," my retina suddenly exploded with the blinding searchlight of 1987.
"Help... Shen Tong..." Amidst the roaring sound of concrete pouring, before the young worker's face was swallowed by mud, his right hand tapped out intermittent Morse code on the crystal surface. His pupil retained quantum entanglement patterns identical to Li Ming's, and a corner of a mathematics textbook peeked out from his work pants pocket—the title page bore Li Ming's handwriting, distorting in resonance with sound waves.
Lao Zhao's mechanical eye suddenly projected an image. In it, thirty years ago, I was signing construction drawings while a man in a white lab coat beside me removed his mask, revealing a jaw with metallic seams glinting coldly. "Dr. Lin said to test the threshold," his electronic vocal cords emitted a grinding noise like gears stuck. "Those cries... coming from the chip... are frequencies that no human electronic vocal cords can produce..."
The analyzer suddenly erupted with electric sparks. The crystal matrix in the freezer began to resonate, and blue cerebrospinal fluid seeped from my ear canal. A fragment of crystal, imprinted with the school emblem, suddenly exploded, and the flying shards sliced through my wrist. From the blood emerged thirty-eight sets of latitude and longitude coordinates—remarkably coinciding with the fluorescent markings on the back of thirteen missing person notices.
"They're still inside!" I grasped the melting chip tightly as Lao Zhao suddenly tore open his collar. Beneath the sutures crossing his chest, a dark red crystal pulsed with each heartbeat. His mechanical fingers plunged into the synthetic skin, pulling out a segment of neural synapse-like fiber. "The surveillance chip embedded in my heart... has started receiving your brainwave frequency since this morning."
The air raid shelter trembled violently. The seams of the freezer oozed a tar-like substance as thirteen crystals fused into a massive prism. When the first beam of refracted light pierced my pupil, I saw Li Ming's figure—he stood before a control panel deep within the prism, a tag from the Deep Eye Council around his neck flashing with the fluorescent code "071-L."
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