novelraw Chapter 3: On the Road
Chapter 3: On the Road
The communication went smoothly. Mo Wen, having been "rescued" by him, now acted as a guide to lead him to the city where Kai was waiting. The two of them sat in the front seats of the gang’s off-road vehicle, while the originally six-seat rear row was now occupied by eleven corpses.
The corpses from both gangs were all loaded onto the vehicle, except for a few that were too difficult to move. The stench of death relentlessly drifted forward. Mo Wen, who was already accustomed to extreme environments, felt nothing unusual. However, Kai, who was driving, could not suppress his nausea and disgust. He looked as if he might vomit his stomach acid at any moment.
Mo Wen had no idea how to handle such a situation. He was used to frequent death himself, but this strange experience obviously offered no help to a normal person who would die after being killed. These corpses were all moved onto the vehicle by Kai himself in hopes of selling them for some money. Regardless of the fact that he had chosen them personally, even if the corpses were thrown off now, the stench would not dissipate easily.
Mo Wen could only watch the scenery outside the window change continuously, hoping that Kai could endure it and not vomit all over him.
The abandoned town quickly bored Mo Wen. The sandstorms outside the town failed to catch his attention, but the pits in the sand looked far from natural, no matter how he looked at them.
“What’s with those pits?”
Kai, suppressing the nausea of being stuck in a confined space with an enemy, casually answered, “Nuclear explosion. Didn’t you know?”
“During the company wars, this area was bombed. If it weren’t for the humanitarian support troops from the Corporation who set up anti-blast systems, you’d probably only see a dead wasteland here. But even so, the townspeople eventually evacuated, leaving behind a dilapidated town the company was too lazy to manage.”
“Many gangs in the city like to make deals in the town. The company knows about this but turns a blind eye for various reasons.”
The company wars were a completely unfamiliar concept to Mo Wen, but this seemed important.He tried to probe indirectly, “Oh, so that’s why it was left behind. Who fought whom here?”
Kai shrugged it off carelessly. “Who knows? Anyway, it’s over. Even if you knew which companies dropped nukes on your city, it wouldn’t mean much. You should ask the surviving veterans that question.”
“But I heard the winning companies treat their veterans pretty well, taking those cold-blooded ‘heroes’ into the inner ring.”
“Inner ring?” Mo Wen sensed another key point. He tried to express his doubts less obviously, allowing Kai to fill in the gaps himself.
Having been questioned twice about common knowledge, Kai wouldn’t normally think much of it. But facing someone who inexplicably appeared in unfamiliar territory, killed his gang leader, and yet showed an almost inhuman calmness afterward with physical endurance worthy of a commercial, there was no way he would think this normal.
This guy next to him couldn’t be some laboratory experiment escaped, could he?
But the company was far away, and this humanoid monster was right before his eyes.
Kai, assisted by his cybernetic implants, pretended not to notice anything abnormal and casually said, “Don’t you call it the inner ring over there?”
“The inner ring here refers to a city within a city mainly for company personnel. It’s better than the outside in every way. Not only is security good, but public services are better too. People in the inner ring can even have their offspring become new humans.”
“However, getting approved to enter is tricky. Gangs or people from wandering families hardly get in. Among those carrying guns, only a few company-recognized mercenaries can settle in the inner ring.”
“But if you can’t get in, you can wait for it to expand. The inner ring keeps expanding. Sometimes it doesn’t evict the natives but incorporates those affected by the expansion into the inner ring.”
New confusion arose: new humans… Mo Wen guessed it meant genetically modified people or something similar.
But that wasn’t the main point. The key was that outsiders were automatically relocated during the “expansion.”
From Mo Wen’s shallow understanding of the cyberpunk world and profit-driven capitalism, this was obviously abnormal.
If there weren’t severe hardships during life, compulsory fertility in middle age, postmortem body donations, inherited debts passed down to descendants, and contracts that circulated within the company like slaves, the inner ring’s outskirts would surely be some experimental zone where being caught meant becoming company sacrifices.
Mo Wen asked, “Have you contacted anyone who was caught in the inner ring’s expansion?”
Kai answered, “Yeah, I have a classmate who was lucky enough to be incorporated into the inner ring. We still keep in touch from time to time.”
Mo Wen didn’t quite believe him. “Are you sure it’s your old classmate and not some cheap AI-generated fake person?”
Kai was stunned and immediately understood the monster’s implication.
If it were anyone else, he might have laughed off the “company conspiracy theory.” But this wasn’t an ordinary person saying it.
He had chatted online and even video-called with his old classmate, but he had never been to the inner ring. AI large language models and synthetic video technology could create almost indistinguishable fake people given enough data. However, the Corporation’s newly enacted “Temporary New Law” defined this as illegal behavior.
Kai’s nausea, which he had just suppressed, surged again along with a spasm in his stomach.
Fake people… no…
After thinking carefully, Mo Wen felt this guess was unlikely. “If they really made fake people to talk to outsiders, it would be to make the inner ring look good. But the entry audit is so strict it doesn’t seem like they want to deceive people into coming in.”
“Wait, you can’t enter, but you chat online? You can connect to the inner ring’s network?”
Kai immediately caught on. “Yeah, we can connect. Not just the inner ring. Although the global network was cut for a few weeks due to the company wars, we can only use the intercity network for now, but the Corporation fixed it quickly.”
“The information on the network is complicated and contradictory, but if you cross-check it, some things are hard to fake…”
Mo Wen interrupted, “Don’t cross-check. Even what you see with your own eyes might be staged. On the network, if the algorithms are strong enough, all the information you receive can be processed into a closed logical loop. You only get to know what they want you to know.”
Kai was stunned.
He had never thought about such issues before, but after being suddenly confronted with this, an inexplicable fear began spreading in his heart.
The world suddenly became unfamiliar. Everything that seemed clear because of the network was suddenly just shadows.
Was his understanding of the world correct? Did his goals truly exist? What meaning did his current actions have?
Kai felt electric currents running back and forth through his brain, a tingling in the back of his head. Suddenly, he feared returning to the city, as if a terrifying truth awaited him ahead, yet his limbs disobeyed him. His body forced him back.
At that moment, Mo Wen’s voice pierced his eardrums, “Don’t zone out while driving!”
“We’re going to crash!”
Mo Wen grabbed the window frame with one hand and considered where to grab Kai with the other. Not knowing how to drive, he was already prepared to jump out and escape.
Kai didn’t immediately snap out of it, but the vehicle naturally turned to avoid the danger.
Then Kai loosened his grip on the steering wheel and smiled at Mo Wen, who might have accidentally killed a gang brother out of goodwill, “Don’t you know cars nowadays have automatic navigation? Its reaction is way better than most people.”
Fake person evidence +1. Not even knowing such basic common sense made Kai suspect this guy wasn’t even an experimental subject but some past human or a mimic creature.
Even wanderers knew how to drive!
Maybe while settling Mo Wen down, he should also teach him how to drive.
Mo Wen wasn’t happy. “If there’s automatic navigation, why are you keeping your hands on the steering wheel? Just playing around?”
Kai helplessly replied, “The signal outside is bad, so there’s some error. Even if the danger is small, you have to be a little cautious. Now that we’ve fully entered the intercity network, I can let go.”