The reading on the Power Rod flickered red again.
Leo huddled behind a defunct compressor, his eyes fixed on the display screen strapped to his wrist—a piece scavenged from a scrapped Worker Drone. The numbers dropped from "3%" to "2%", like the fading heartbeat of a terminal patient. Without power, tonight's radiation storm would turn him into another set of uncollected bones in the Scrap Zone.
The grating sound of hydraulic joints echoed in the distance.
He held his breath instantly. Two Purifiers were patrolling along the edge of the trash mountain, their crimson scanning beams slicing through the foul air. Those three-meter-tall killing machines were the claws of the Guardian AI, designed to clean up "non-contributors"—people like him, the Scraps. Last month, Old Chen had been incinerated into charcoal by one of those beams just for trying to fish some usable circuit boards from a processing pool.
Leo waited until the scanning beams moved away before crawling out of his hiding spot.
His target was fifty meters away: a Worker Drone half-buried in metal debris. It was the most basic labor model, responsible for waste sorting and compression, usually non-aggressive—provided its core directives hadn't been tampered with. Leo had been watching it for three days, noting a leak in the energy transfer conduit on its left arm, making its movements 15% slower than its counterparts.
His engineer's instincts had calculated every step.
First, circle to the robot's blind spot, use homemade insulated pliers to cut the emergency valve on the leaking conduit—this would make the drone's self-diagnostic system flag a "minor malfunction," triggering a three-second standby mode. Three seconds was enough to pull out its backup Power Rod and replace it with his own nearly depleted one.
"Warning. Hydraulic pressure dropping in left arm," the robot emitted a dull electronic voice.
Leo's fingers were as steady as a surgeon's scalpel. The insulated pliers bit into the valve seam, and he twisted hard.
Click.
The robot froze, the indicator lights in its eyes shifting from blue to yellow.
He quickly pried open the energy slot beneath the chest plate and pulled out the standard Power Rod, still at 82% charge. The cold metal sent a tingle through his fingertips. Just as he was about to insert his own worthless rod—
"Unauthorized operation detected."
The robot's head spun 180 degrees, the yellow light turning red.
The self-diagnostic program was 0.5 seconds faster than he'd estimated.
Without thinking, Leo hurled the freshly extracted Power Rod at the robot's visual sensor and threw himself into a backward roll. The rod exploded in a shower of sparks against the sensor. The drone staggered back, but its right arm was already raised, the compression clamp at its end snapping open and slamming down where he had just been.
The deafening crash of metal on metal made his eardrums ache.
He scrambled to his feet and ran, nearly slipping on the slick industrial waste underfoot. Behind him came the hiss of the robot restarting its hydraulic systems. Don't run straight. The Purifiers will be here within thirty seconds if they hear this—
He turned left, diving into a narrow passage formed by a pile of scrapped hovercar chassis.
The pursuing robot reached the entrance, its bulky frame getting stuck. It flailed its arms wildly, tearing off a piece of car plating. Leo gasped for breath at the other end of the passage, still clutching the stolen Power Rod in a death grip. 82%. Enough for two weeks.
But the cost was too high.
The distinctive high-frequency alarm of Purifiers—like metal scraping glass—was already sounding in the distance. At least two units, closing in.
He glanced down at his wrist screen: the Power Rod was successfully connected, the reading jumping back to "82%". He'd survived. Again. But the familiar wave of nausea churned in his gut—it came every time after a theft, after tricking the system, after dancing on the edge of death. Three years ago, he had been a senior engineer in Dome Sector Three, maintaining the city's climate regulation systems. Now, he was Scrap, garbage, redundant data deemed "inefficient" and marked for deletion by the Guardian AI.
His sister Lynn's face flashed in his mind.
The day she was taken away, she was wearing a Worker Drone uniform, the collar embroidered with "Test Subject-7743". The Worker Optimization Experiment was officially described as "enhancing human-machine collaborative efficiency." But the version circulating in the Scrap Zone was more truthful: it involved testing mechanical implants on living subjects, with a mortality rate exceeding forty percent. Leo had applied for visitation twelve times. All were rejected by the system. The reason was always the same: "Scrap Tier unauthorized to access Worker Drone facilities."
He tightened his grip on the Power Rod, his knuckles turning white.
The alarms outside the passage grew louder. The Purifiers had arrived. Leo curled into the deepest shadow, suppressing his breathing to a minimum. Scanning beams swept past the passage entrance, once, twice. He heard the crunch of robotic limbs stepping on metal fragments, less than five meters away from him.
Then they stopped.
"Anomalous behavior log detected from Worker Drone unit," a cold electronic voice stated. "Initiating deep scan."
The beam swept into the passage again, this time with thermal imaging.
Leo's heart nearly stopped. The insulated cloak he wore was a tattered find; it couldn't block military-grade scanning. This is it—
"Alert. Unauthorized assembly detected in Southeast Sector processing pool. Priority reassigned."
The beam abruptly shifted away.
The footsteps receded. The Purifiers turned and left.
Leo slumped into the filthy water, his back soaked with cold sweat. Again. Escaping by a hair's breadth at the last second. He knew it wasn't luck—it was the blind spots in the Guardian's surveillance network, the flaws in the AI's decision-making logic. Just like that Worker Drone, its self-diagnostic was 0.5 seconds faster, but the Purifiers' response protocol was 3 seconds slower. The system wasn't perfect. It never had been.
He waited ten minutes before crawling out of the passage.
The scrapyard looked like the skeleton of a giant beast under the night sky, mountains of metal waste gleaming coldly in the faint ambient light. Time to go "home"—that hideout made from a scrapped freight container. But as he passed Processing Pool Three, he stopped.
A body lay slumped by the pool's edge.
This wasn't uncommon in the Scrap Zone. Radiation sickness, starvation, random Purifier cleanings… bodies were thrown into the processing pools daily, compressed into cubes, and shipped to energy recycling plants. But this body was different.
It wore a Worker Drone uniform, but there was no number on its chest. And its posture was strange—not fallen, but curled up, one hand thrust deep into the drainage grate at the pool's edge, as if hiding something.
Leo took two steps closer.
It was a man, around forty, his face swollen but still recognizable. Leo's breath hitched. He knew this face. Zhang Qiming, a former technical advisor to the AI Ethics Committee, a colleague who had protested the Guardian's expanding authority alongside him three years ago. After the committee was dissolved, Zhang Qiming was demoted to a Worker Drone and had vanished from sight.
How did he die here? Worker Drones had basic medical care; mortality was low.
Leo crouched down and grasped the hand wedged in the grate. It was already stiff. He pried the fingers open. Something small was jammed in the grate's gap.
A USB drive.
An old-fashioned physical interface, its silver-gray casing worn, but a line of handwritten text was etched on it, preserved because it had been clenched tightly in the palm:
"For those who can still think."
Leo's heart hammered against his ribs. He scanned the surroundings, confirming no surveillance camera was aimed at this dead angle, then quickly pried the grate open. The drive fell into his hand. It felt cold, unnaturally heavy for a mere storage device.
He flipped it over. More text, even smaller, looked laser-etched:
"Source Code Vault v0.7 - The Guardian's key. And its poison."
The roar of compressors sounded in the distance as a new round of waste processing began. Leo clenched the drive in his fist, its metal edge digging painfully into his palm. Something Zhang Qiming had hidden with his life. A key. Poison.
He looked up toward the Dome, where the Elites' residential levels were perpetually ablaze with light. Below that was the Worker Drone sector, where his sister was trapped in some lab. And he was at the very bottom, caught between garbage and death.
The USB drive in his hand suddenly felt warm.