…I woke up to the rasp of circulating vents and a medicinal tang that clung to the tongue like old fear. White ruled the chamber—yet not a forgiving white, but an immaculate void etched with obsidian seams and capillaries of gold. It felt less like a room than the polished skull of something divine, hollowed for a single occupant.
Pain blossomed behind my right eye. Upload commencing, whispered a voice neither male nor female—an AI's murmur slipping across synapses. Images bled into my mind: trade blockades unraveling, the Trumpian Wars grinding culture into code, a millennial emperor named Wei wrenching the world's axis eastward. They were not memories, but curated legends the chip spoon‑fed with a healer's patience and a torturer's precision.
I rose, feet meeting a floor that glowed faintly with pale circuitry, and crossed to a circular window the size of a tavern's shield. Dawn unfurled beyond in ribbons of rose and molten brass.
Aurora Prime greeted me: towers as white as a griffin's bones speared heavenward, their ridges traced in gilded runes. Bridges of spun glass stitched between them, delicate as frost on witch‑grass. Obsidian spires loomed among the alabaster giants like watchful ravens. Terraced gardens burst with emerald and vermilion, yet every bloom obeyed a perfect geometric cadence—beauty shackled by algebra.
Thrusters—aerial carriages shaped like elongated pearls—ghosted through invisible tubes, leaving heliotrope streaks of ion fire. Below, streets curved in recursive spirals, each lamp post a node of amber witch‑light, each holo‑banner a whispered incantation of market prices and imperial edicts.
American voice, flat as snapped bone: "TR‑15 batch stable. Eugene pattern online. Memory‑scrub logarithm at ninety‑eight percent integrity."
Chinese voice, mellow, amused: "Ninety‑eight? Leave the tears of doubt. They season the data."
American: "If he revolts?"
Chinese: "Revolt is proof of authenticity. Observe, don't interfere."
They stood on a balcony beyond the glass—one in charcoal suit, the other robed in pearl. Their words pierced the air like crossbow quarrels, yet the city swallowed the echoes before they could wound me further.
If they call me a pattern, I must break the mold. The thought flared hot. I pressed a palm to the glass. It pulsed with biometric light—scanning, learning, judging.
The AI resumed its drip‑feed, but I pushed back, conjuring a hunter's stubborn will.
I: "Show me truth, not theatre."
AI (after a silence laden with static): "Brace for unsupervised recall."
Visions struck: a cryo‑pod's icy cradle; Wei's ink‑black signature across a consent decree I never signed; technicians wiring the TR‑15 lattice into my cortex, murmuring of control variables and ethical loopholes.
I staggered, bile rising. The glass flickered to opacity, shielding the city from my vertigo. When it cleared, I understood two certainties:
Aurora Prime was less a metropolis than a proving ground—the sovereign laboratory of the Wei Era.
Eugene—I—was designed to be both sword and scabbard. Tool and test.
A PromiseTruth in this world carried a price steeper than dragon‑fire. To pay it, I would need allies, relics of forbidden memory, and perhaps the very AI that sought to master me. For in a realm where the past could be bartered like grain, the rarest commodity was an unedited soul.
I turned from the window, dawn burning at my back. Somewhere within these alabaster colossi lay the key to the chip's final protocol—and to the man I once was before the world rewrote itself in gold and ghost‑code.
And if Aurora Prime wished to test me, then I would answer in kind.