Chương 45: Chapter 46: The Tariff Throttle

The mechanical hiss of the reconditioned capsule's depressurisation seal released with a sharp, cold plume of white steam. Ethan sat up, his physical shoulder muscles instantly locking with an unvarnished, aching fatigue. His skin felt clammy and raw as the synthetic mesh of his haptic undersuit—stiff and caked with dried conductive sweat from his continuous forty-eight-hour industrial grind—peeled away from his chest with a sticky, tearing sound.

He didn't open his eyes immediately; his lungs automatically flattened, his throat constricting as his respiratory system adjusted to the flat, chemically recycled tang of the apartment's internal air filter. The dark, cramped reality of Room 12-04 closed back in. He slid his legs out of the capsule, his bare feet meeting the cold, uncarpeted synthetic linoleum floor. He didn't look over at the corner where his grandmother's automated medical pod pulsed with its rhythmic, low-frequency green status indicators.

He stepped straight toward the concrete wall face, his fingers tapping the cold plastic casing of the terminal interface. The micro-accounting node illuminated his face in a cold, blue glow. He didn't check a global bank balance; he tracked raw localized survival variables. [Chinatown Smart-Grid Node — Block 52] Current Credit: S$6, 843. 90 Status: Normal (Unthrottled) Time Remaining: 180 Days, 0 Hours, 0 Minutes.

A dull, heavy thrum-thud shook the concrete floor slabs beneath his heels, vibrating straight through his ankle bones. It wasn't the distant maritime engines of the automated Tuas port. It was the rhythmic, low-frequency cycling of the Central Business District's Sub-Canopy Air-Extraction Shafts, located less than four hundred metres away near the old Raffles Place corridor.

Outside his reinforced acrylic window pane, the Sumatran Shroud sat heavy over the roofs of Block 52, a thick, bronze-tinted smouldering sulphur fog that completely blotted out the midday sun. Above the 150-metre mark, the corporate elite inside the Marina Bay sky-domes had just cycled their high-altitude climate systems. Minutes later, the massive ground-level exhaust pumps violently dumped tons of super-heated, sulfurous dross straight down onto the lower-deck carbon-mesh ceilings of Chinatown.

The pressure wave rattled the loose aluminium frame of Ethan's window. Click. On the node display, the financial fractions began to slowly, relentlessly tick downward as the automated Peak Haze Surcharge factored the forty-five percent air-filtration cost penalty into his daily baseline.

The flat's central intake fan loudly groaned, its internal metal bearings rattling violently against the concrete wall as the old carbon membranes struggled to scrub the heavy port-dross sulphur molecules bleeding through the door seams. Ethan watched the counter drop. He didn't curse. His face remained entirely flat, his jaw clenching as his inner data-processor calculated the physical inflation curve. Back during his childhood in 2035, a mere eight dollars could keep a flat's filtration grid wide open for days.

By 2042, with the Sumatran peatlands entering a permanent, self-sustaining burn cycle and the technocratic statutory boards leasing the entire municipal grid to private Canopy infrastructure consortiums, simply breathing the air was a running economic tax. The state didn't take bribes under the table; its uncorrupted, terrifyingly efficient algorithms simply monitored the ledger. If a resident's smart-grid node hit zero, the valves mechanically choked down to a hypoxic, minimum survival state within a single frame.

Ethan watched the digits bleed, his mind tracking the exact programmatic echo between his two lives. The corporate utility syndicates running the Chinatown grid called this the Oxygen Tariff—a mandatory, automated payment required just to draw breath inside a lower-deck depression. But his analytical mind recognised it for what it truly was: the real-world mutation of the ancient Ilku tax he had just defeated in the Levant slums.

Sopher Yakin-Ilu had used cuneiform clay tablets to demand human labor or silver tribute under the threat of imperial force; the Canopy hiearchy used digital smart-meters to squeeze Programmable Resource Units under the threat of systemic suffocation. He was fighting the exact same corporate dragon on both sides of the screen. Ethan reached out, grabbing a stiff wire brush from the utility shelf beneath the terminal.

He knelt by the floor intake vent, where a thick, greasy layer of yellow sulphur dross had already caked across the metal mesh. He dragged the wire bristles across the metal with short, aggressive strokes, scraping the yellow crust onto a sheet of scrap plastic. The harsh, scraping sound filled the tiny four-metre room. The rich family boys think the Levant server is just a playground to waste their parents' capital, Ethan thought, his knuckles turning white against the wooden handle of the brush.

Bochim is probably screaming at his logistics managers right now, bleeding real-world dollars to repair his broken bronze swords because his forge fires ran out of flux. But Ethan hadn't treated Bereshit Online like a game. He had spent forty continuous hours in the mud to extract thirty-five silver shekels from their corporate reserves because he knew that out here, on the concrete floor of the sumps, the traditional ladder was dead.

The old meritocracy of elite Metropolitan University degrees and diplomas had been completely hollowed out by their cognitive automation models, leaving nothing but an unmitigated, spiralling inflation designed to slowly suffocate anyone who couldn't buy a subscription to the upper deck. He cleared the final corner of the vent mesh, watching the node's active indicators stabilise into a clean, unthrottled green airflow parameter.

He had officially purchased a six-month survival shield for Room 12-04 for an input cost of absolute zero out-of-pocket dollars. He stood up, tapping the interface to finalize his grandmother's medical pod allocation. The zero-overhead factory floor in the digital dark was his only real-world leverage, and he was going to turn their entire corporate matrix into raw silt before the next server shift cleared.