When Wei Xu came back to himself, the exosuit was dead and the world was quiet.
"What happened?" he croaked.
He hauled himself free and realized he'd landed at the bottom of a pit. The light above was a thin slice; sand from his suit sifted down like slow rain. For a moment, relief and disbelief tangled in his chest.
Relief at both the fact he evaded capture and the fact that he is still alive. In disbelief at the fact that he made it that far without being killed.
An incineration pit, of all things. Wei Xu observed as he let out a humorless little laugh. Lucky on my 18th birthday, he thought — ridiculous and almost obscene. He pushed himself to his feet and looked around: concrete ribs, scorched metal, maintenance catwalks. This wasn't a cave. This was a military installation buried under a manufactured forest in the middle of the Globi Desert.
"If they were trying to hide this, they did a pretty terrible job," he muttered.
It felt wrong. ECA installations were supposed to be impossible to stumble across; they were the sort of places even the gods would have trouble locating without tearing the ground apart. Yet here he was, three meters from a hundred-year-old incinerator and somehow not burnt to ashes.
To Wei Xu, it felt like the spirit of the ECA was mocking him — mocking him for believing that he could use them as a sword to fight his enemies. Luring him into a deeper set of traps before snapping everything shut.
Pain cut through him like a white knife. He fell back to his knees. Adrenaline had masked it at first, but now the truth slid in: his leg was fractured and several ribs had cracked. He tasted blood in his mouth.
"Fuck, that hurts."
He forced himself to stay still and run a damage scan with the wrist PDA — then cursed silently. The screen was a spiderweb of cracks; the unit was fried. No telemetry, no maps, no way to call it in.
"Let's do this then," he breathed, and pulled a syringe of painkillers from his and regeneration fluid from his first-aid pouch. The burn of the needle was sharp and immediate; the drugs smoothed the edges of agony into a dull, manageable ache.
He thumbed on the light clipped to his chest rig. The "cave" entrance clanged shut as the facility's airlock sealed. He watched as a wall of reinforced tungsten shot up like nothing, making it seem it was made out of light tofu instead of dense metal alloys, and blocked out the outside light. Wei Xu only caught a glimpse of the serene blue lake before it was also closed off to the outside world.
"Heh, the mercenaries outside must be having so much fun right now."
Wei Xu remarked sarcastically.
Wei Xu knew the terrors of the defensive measures the ECA practiced; the mercenaries — if alive at all — were probably faring far worse than he was.
Wei Xu had seen what happens: people who tried to steal from ECA sites paid for it in full. The automated sentries and maintenance swarms were indifferent, deadly, and ruthlessly efficient. So long as whatever the ECA deemed critical infrastructure remained untouched, their systems left you alone. Cities had grown around that rule. Trade hubs reopened. Schools reopened and saw their first wave of students. Humanity crawled back to something like half of its old number. The fragile peace people had hoped for in the warring era had finally arrived.
Closer to the inner forbidden zone, the rules frayed; the people living there weren't as lucky. Technocrats who'd hoarded ECA gear turned into petty rulers. The Patriots and the Ash Baron fought for scraps and blind spots; everyone else learned to survive by bargaining or brute force.
The only reason the Ash Baron hadn't expanded into the outer zone was the threat of nuclear retaliation. Wei Xu found it bitterly funny that even after watching those weapons destroy Earth, humans still needed them. Still, it was something that held the Baron back.
He looked up at the lip of the pit. The siren's light flickered like mockery. "How do I get out of this situation?"
A hiss of displaced air and the scent of jet fuel made him twist his head around. To Wei Xu's pleasant surprise, there was an enormous hole in the pit wall he hadn't noticed: the exosuit's power cell had punched clean through the incinerator's housing. Charred edges framed the void.
"…What a huge hole," he said, a twitch at the corner of his mouth. The Patriot fuel cell had been powerful enough to blast an escape route — and to blow the incinerator's igniter to pieces. No wonder the incinerator never triggered.
Wei Xu shuddered thinking about what would have happened if that SCRPG was just a little bit more accurate.
He limped toward the jagged opening. Inside he could see the engine's oxygen intakes and fuel-injection nozzles; maintenance ducts fanned out like the throat of a great animal. He crouched, then began to crawl through the narrow service channels, the air blowing cool against his face for the first time since the desert.
A sudden gust slammed into him as an automated routine attempted to purge the duct — the igniter was destroyed, but the pumps still cycled. Wei Xu spat sand from his mouth and grinned despite himself being in such a miserable condition.
"That feels great."
Wei Xu eventually stopped basking in the cold air and continued his advance.
He crawled until the ducts opened into a maintenance bay: humid, metallic, and eerily ordinary. A bank of HVAC units thrummed, and vents pushed conditioned air across his bruised face.
There was only one exit from the room: a heavy door with a biometric panel. Wei Xu hesitated, then worked the lock like it was nothing. The panel blinked turquoise and, improbably, relented.
The corridor beyond was clinical and white, the kind of bright minimalism that made the human eye ache after a while. Doors lined the walls like ribs, sealed and smooth. No badges, no obvious access points — ECA bionics and face recognition, he guessed. He tried a few doors experimentally; they stayed stubbornly shut.
After a while, he gave up on the small rooms and made for the larger door at the corridor's end. It opened almost obligingly, as if it expected him.
The lab beyond smelled faintly of antiseptic and ozone. Lights hummed awake as he entered; machines booted in sequence as if awaiting a researcher's arrival. A centrifuge spun up with a polite whirr. Panels blinked soft blue like watchful eyes. For a moment, the place felt like a memory.
Wei Xu's throat tightened. The room was the sort his mother had kept when she still worked in research — compact, efficient, full of instruments that hummed with purpose. He drifted to a reflective pane of glass and saw his face: black hair, brown eyes, the gentle features his mother used to tease him about. He was about 180 cm tall, not especially large, but solid enough. His mother used to joke that he looked like someone who could make a woman fall in love by simply looking at her with his gentle eyes; she had always exasperated him with those comments.
After all, that is why she — Xu Yan — fell in love with Wei Xu's father, Wei Lin.
"Why would the lab door open for me?" he whispered.
He was of Chinese descent but wasn't a true Chinese national.
"Even if I was a true Chinese national, I doubt I would have clearance to access these doors."
A glass partition cleared and, beyond it, a single pedestal came into focus. On the pedestal rested a drone — white, elegant, two slender antennae resting on its small crown, radish-like tri-pronged claws. It looked, at first glance, like a research unit rather than a combat model: delicate manipulators, a soft chassis.
"It doesn't look combat-related," Wei Xu thought aloud. He imagined the value of such a unit: databases, codebases, research kernels. ECA research drones housed knowledge worth more than armies. If I could bring this back… maybe I could find the cure for my mother.
Wei Xu grew hopeful. Maybe he didn't need to make the dangerous trip into the inner city zones after all. But reality poured cold water on him. Even if he took it, how would he power or maintain it? Even if it could be powered, can he protect himself from the greedy gazes of the overlords of the outer zones? Wei Xu wasn't confident that he could keep it a secret forever.
He hesitated with his hand on the glass. Then the drone lit up. A burst of white light flashed across the lab; the brightness punched through his eyelids.
"Shit — my eyes!" he hissed, shielding his face from the glare.
Before he could reach for a weapon — his side pistol felt like a child's toy — something thin and almost invisible pierced the skin at the base of his neck. Pain flared, cold and electric.
Initiating neural link.
Registering biometric ID.
Success — biometric ID registered.
A gentle, honeyed voice filled the room.
"AGI — Federated A.I. for Reclamation & Yield — at your service," it intoned.
When Wei Xu blinked, his vision cleared. The white drone was gone. In its place stood a girl near his height — one hundred sixty-five centimeters, poised, impossibly smooth-skinned, hair falling like a dark waterfall to her knees. Her face could have been carved from porcelain: cherry lips, a small, delicate, straight nose, jade-like skin that caught light like milk. But it was her eyes that gripped him — deep and strange, like wells with moving reflections; for a moment he felt he had never seen anything like them. Not quite human in their clarity, they held a depth that made his chest tighten.
She bowed once, with a precise, gentle grace unbefitting an AI.
"Fairy is pleased to meet her master," she said, her voice soft and oddly intimate.
Wei Xu's hand hovered uselessly at his side. The lab hummed on, indifferent. Outside, the forest breathed; somewhere, the desert wind kept its old score. Inside the facility, the world had folded into a new, impossible smallness: a young adult male, a female AI, and a designation on a tongue that carried the weight of whole lost empires.
He should have felt fear for what the ECA had achieved. Instead he felt an absurd, aching mixture of wonder and dread.
{End}