Chương 11: The Cost of Air

The Levantine sun snapped into pitch black. Ethan pulled the manual emergency resets. The plastic seals of his capsule popped with a dry, hollow clack, venting the smell of warm machine grease and reconditioned foam into the room. He pushed the visor back, his neck cracking as he sat up inside the narrow tube. The air in the flat no longer carried that thin, metallic burn. The low, suffocating hum of the ventilation system had shifted into a steady, clean drone.

Ethan climbed out, his bare feet meeting the cold concrete floor. He glanced over at the wall-mounted meter box. The yellow warning indicator had vanished, replaced by a steady green line. [Chinatown Smart-Grid Node — Block 52] Current Credit: S$3. 21 Status: Normal (Unthrottled) Time Remaining: 1 Hour, 47 Minutes He walked the three paces to the corner of the room, his eyes fixed on the medical pod's console. The digital LED readout had stabilized: Current Draw: 600W. Status: Thermal Cycle Active.

Inside the glass casing, the support gel-pad was no longer an icy, stagnant grey. A faint, automated pulse of warmth hummed through the fluid, sending ripples across Grandma Tan's pale shoulders. Her breathing had slowed, losing that short, terrifying hitch from two hours ago. Her eyelids remained closed, but her fingers had uncurled from her chest, resting loosely against the warming gel. Ethan let out a quiet breath, the tension leaving his shoulders.

He reached down to the floor behind the pod's compressor unit, his fingers brushing against a thick, physical object wedged into the narrow gap between the plastic chassis and the concrete wall. It was a massive, black ring-bound binder. Printouts like this were completely illicit in 2042, but this was a leaked internal document titled: Bereshit Engine Core Syntax: Linguistic Architecture & Environmental Physics (Internal Beta Copy v0. 9).

The title page bore a faded holographic security seal from a multi-national megastudio located in the circular glass towers of Fusionopolis, down near One-North. Ethan pulled it out, flipping through the dense, single-spaced pages under the dim neon glare from the window. The book wasn't a standard strategy guide. It was a stolen developer cheat sheet, smuggled out by a disgruntled, underpaid QA intern who had worked in the high-security labs of the Western Singapore tech corridor before the game's launch.

He tucked the heavy binder back into the shadow of the medical pod, his mind running the calculations for his next session. One hour and forty-seven minutes of air was a safety net, but it was a thin one. The copper sponge flip had proven the binder's code was flawless. The engine simulated exact chemical reactions, which meant the next phase of his strategy could scale. He didn't need to run into the hills to fight monsters with the corporate squads.

He just needed to exploit the code strings the game company thought no one would read. Ethan walked back to the polymer capsule, his fingers gripping the manual lock levers of the hatch.