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Chapter 1
Huojin Tan’s watch beeps at midnight. He is trying to study a blueprint of a client’s apartment. This is a redundant model of apartment in a section of town where tenants can’t afford to buy the upgrades that come out every Christmas, so Tan crosses out the irrelevant modules with is pen. The lights along the path strobe as his subway car passes them. Huojin doesn’t usually take the tube, but his hoverbike broke down.
The strobing lights bother him, so he takes out a flashlight from his vest. Huojin doesn’t want to make any mistakes. Twenty minutes ago, Tan intercepted a call from a man who is having trouble with the AC in his apartment. Tan knows he is the only one who can fix it. The people who were on the other side of the line are the incompetent Xiǎng Fú Department Store staff. Tan worked for Xiǎng Fú Appliance Support for five years. He remembers many moments where his colleagues froze up apartment rooms after a refrigerator is claimed to be fixed. From what he knows, his former colleagues are now managers. This type of stuff happens when ice statues which used to be people can’t submit a complaint. If he doesn’t get to his unwilling client’s apartment before Xiǎng Fú does, this man won’t have a place to sleep. It’s busy times like these which people need to sleep. If someone can’t dream during the night, they’ll dream during the day. They will daydream. Huojin wants people to dream. He doesn’t see anything wrong with daydreaming, but most of the people in this country associate it with distraction, and chide and punish daydreamers accordingly. Not only will this poor man not be able to dream, he will be stuck in the cold, suffering slowly outdoors, or freezing to death indoors.
Hmm, cold. It is quite cold in this car. Not that he wants to be bothered by the robot mockeries of women whom attend passengers. He takes out a coat from his bag and puts it on. A wrench falls out from his bag. When he picks the cold wrench from the floor, Huojin looks up, and a fembot appears. He looks to the cold wrench in his hand, and contemplates assault on the machine. He studies the female form, and feels a thread of sympathy. He can’t find it in himself to harm something which resembles a woman.”但它只机器” he thinks to himself. Wait! If it’s a machine, than he can handle this in a breeze. He asks it a question.
“你懂你是谁吗”
“我… 我…” Her LCD eyes flicker between whiteness and rendered images of different eye colors as she reflects on this question. Eventually, her eyes shine completely blue, and she falls over with a loud thud. Her soft membrane doesn’t noticeably quiet the thud.
For a while, Huojin contemplates opening her up and reprogramming the machine as an assistant. It is at that moment he remembers Shu, the plain frontier girl who showed up at his storage-garage office one day with a desperate plea for apprenticeship. He argues with himself on whether to keep Shu or field a robot as his assistant. On one hand, Huojin wouldn’t have to deal with her potential ambitions towards him. Backwoods girls like Shu usually marry older men like himself. On the other hand, he couldn’t teach a robot some of the intricacies of his work, and he couldn’t indoctrinate a robot about his ideology. Once he says “梦“, the machine would probably crash.
An alarm calls out in his vest. It was 12:23:30. Did his contemplations take this much time? In half a minute, a service door leading up a ladder to a street near his unwilling and unwitting client’s apartment would pass by. Huojin gets up off the floor looks at a locked metal box above where he was sitting. He stands on the seat, opens the box by striking it with the cold wrench in his hand, and takes a wire stripper from another pocket in his vest. After he strips the black silicon which concealed clear fiber-optic cable, he severs the cable with a green light traveling through the thousands of small mirrors with a knife.
The train decreases speed. There are no brakes, so the train takes about seventeen seconds to stop. When it finally does, Huojin opens the train door with a crowbar. Directly in front of him is the service door. He smirks under his black balaclava mask. He opens the service door, and sets out to save another man’s dreams.