Chapter 10: The Biometric Gate and the Duplicate Face
📖 Previous Chapter / 上一章： Blood Override and the Bronze Corps
📖 Previous Chapter / 上一章： Blood Override and the Bronze Corps
Old Chen was trembling like a leaf in the wind, his withered hand gripping my arm so tightly his nails nearly dug into my flesh. "Yun, Yun Feng! The sound of those scrap-metal freaks behind us is getting denser! That's not a pursuit party—that's a bulldozer rolling right over us!"
"Shut up, don't rush me." I gritted my teeth, veins bulging on my forehead as cold sweat mixed with blood streamed down the corners of my eyes. That thing in my chest was beating like crazy, every pulsation feeling like a red-hot steel needle stabbing into my bone marrow. The synchronization rate was skyrocketing, and my head was filled with chaotic garbled code and shrill electric screeches.
In the darkness beyond the bulkhead, heavy hydraulic thuds accompanied by harsh metallic scraping approached step by step like the beat of a death drum. The crimson emergency lights twisted the air into grotesque shapes, dozens of ghostly green electronic eyes flickering in and out of the thick fog.
There was no time to weigh the options.
I took a deep breath, and with a reckless, do-or-die grit, raised my right hand and pressed it directly into the geometry-matched socket of Hell's Eye.
Click—!
At that exact instant, the sounds of the world seemed to be hit with a physical mute button.
There were no electrical sparks from a circuit overload, nor the pain of tearing flesh. The moment they touched the skin of my chest, hundreds of hair-thin nano-tentacles inside the socket plunged in fiercely like sharks smelling blood. A foreign sensation intertwining icy coldness and searing heat shot straight up my spine to the top of my skull; every muscle in my body locked up instantly, my eyes blown wide open as the entire world in my field of vision abruptly turned into a grid of crimson data streams.
Rumble!
The overwhelmingly heavy security blast door emitted a deafening roar, and the half-meter-thick alloy armor began to retract and disintegrate inward layer by layer. Behind the door lay no expected escape tunnel, but a colossal annular hall suspended in a void. Right in the center of the hall hung an "inverted flesh-ball" entangled by countless optical fibers and discarded servers—the regional hub of the entire underground grid.
However, before we could even take half a step forward, a sudden and bizarre change occurred.
"Something's wrong..." Lu Yan's previously hurried breathing choked off abruptly, and the pulse crowbar in her hand dropped to the deck with a clang. She stared at her own hands in disbelief as a bizarre layer of electronic snow-screen effect began to spread across the surface of her fair skin. "This isn't an ordinary biometric gate... It's a trap. Boss Zhao never intended to let us leave alive; he left a rear-guard purge protocol at the bottom layer..."
Old Chen shrieked, his legs going soft as he collapsed straight to his knees, pointing frantically at the shadows around the perimeter of the hall. "Yun, Yun Feng... Look behind those pillars! What the hell are those?!"
I whipped my head up to look. At the edge of the dim red lighting, dozens of figures clad in heavy hazmat suits slowly paced out from the shadows. Instead of conventional weapons, they carried exaggeratedly styled neural-stripping matrix guns crackling with ghostly blue electric arcs. Most chilling of all, the figure at the lead slowly removed his hazmat mask—and that face was identical, down to the last detail, to the Old Chen who had died in the safehouse!
"Trust you're doing well, you little hybrid," that "Old Chen" flashed a grin, revealing a row of ghostly white false teeth, his voice raspy like a low-grade synthesized audio track. "Did you really think stuffing a broken core in your chest makes you a savior?"
The red light in my chest flashed violently, and a cold mechanical system prompt detonated directly deep inside my mind:
[WARNING: Core synchronization rate has breached 2.0%]
[High-dimensional dimensional-reduction strike routine connection detected]
[Host memory data chain is being forcibly formatted... Countdown: 10, 9...]
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Disclaimer: This is an original cyberpunk fiction created by the author. The cover image was generated using AI tools strictly based on the author's original story prompts.
It seems that even in times of need, there’s little respect for the elderly… How old is Old Chen?
In a way it feels as if Pinhead (Hell raiser) is also present ...
It’s also interesting that there does indeed seem to be a copy of everyone, something people are already arguing about in the present day, although I haven’t come across it yet, but who knows, maybe someone else has.
So now we’re surrounded by enemies while dragging a spy and Old Chennaround…
Or at least being attacked by an army; the nail gun is useless, everyone who’s dead turns out to be copied and has been brought alive to ..., and YunFeng (how are we going to spell that? Up to now it’s usually been written as one word, but in this part it’s separated – is this a first and last name? Is Feng Fung?
The ending isn’t just a good reason to carry on reading, but it’s also alarming. It is interesting, though, that he at least gets that warning, even if there isn’t much time to think. Instinct is needed. Perhaps someone else should take over that book for a while?