Chapter 8: Backdoor

  “Impossible.”

  The word came out with the bitter taste of an accounting error.

  I brought my face closer to the box, ignoring the smell of formaldehyde and the biological revulsion. I used the tip of my silver pen to point at the rectangular slot filled with dried blood.

  “Do you have any idea what this is, Echo?” My voice was a whisper, muffled by the egg-carton soundproofing of the bar. “This isn’t just ‘proprietary hardware.’ This is a USB-C standard.”

  She blinked, confused.

  “USB?”

  “Universal Serial Bus.” I looked at her, feeling the weight of history. “This is technology died in 2026 or 2027. It’s the kind of port we used to charge phones and transfer photos of cats before the Great Privatization. Before the Mycelium. Before we turned biology into a bank.”

  Echo pulled the box toward her violently, nearly knocking over my pen. She widened her eyes, staring at the metallic slit.

  “I... I didn’t see that,” she stammered. “In the incinerator, there was smoke, the alarm was ringing... I only saw the Node.”

  “No one has seen this in new hardware for thirty years,” I retorted. “If this arrived on your belt today, coming from Sector 4... it means someone is manufacturing new bodies with museum parts.”

  I ran a hand over my face, feeling the cold sweat. The temporal paradox was offensive. It was like finding a steam engine inside a nuclear reactor.

  “How?” I asked the empty air. “The Mycelium would reject this architecture. There is no way to maintain a body with this without the immune system attacking the metal.”

  It was then that Echo’s expression changed. The initial shock gave way to the technical coldness of the "Auditor." She stopped looking at the piece as a historical mystery and started looking at it as an anatomical puzzle.

  “You’re thinking like a historian, Valerian.” She grabbed a rough napkin from the table. “Stop looking at the year of the part. Look at where it is installed.”

  She held the dead girl's head and turned it with professional delicacy, exposing the area behind the left ear.

  “Look at me,” she ordered, turning her face so I could see her left temple, where the industrial polymer ring of the Temporal Seal was embedded in the skin. “What is this?”

  “An Auditor’s Seal. Wired access. Ugly. For those who work in the trash.”

  “Exactly. Visible. Industrial.” She returned her attention to the head in the box. “Now, touch behind your ear. On the mastoid bone.”

  I instinctively brought my hand behind my ear. The skin was smooth. My Mastoid Node was invisible, wireless, designed not to ruin the aesthetic.

  “The Mastoid Node is the luxury port,” she continued, scrubbing the coagulated blood behind the dead girl's ear with force. “Sensation streaming, Narcissus skin, transactions. All by induction. No holes.”

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  She finished cleaning. The pale skin appeared, torn around the metallic slit I had identified.

  “This girl had a luxury Mastoid Node. The skin should be smooth. But look... the USB port didn’t grow here. It was hidden here.”

  Echo pointed to the edges of the incision.

  “It is buried beneath the wireless transmitter. Whoever did this used the Luxury Node as camouflage. The Mycelium tracks the wireless signal and says ‘All Clear.’ But underneath...”

  “Underneath runs a physical cable,” I completed, the horror of the engineering settling in. “Offline. Undetectable.”

  “It’s a mule,” she diagnosed. “Someone is using elite bodies as human flash drives from 2026 to traffic data physically, without passing through the banking cloud. Or worse...”

  Before she could finish the sentence, my heart rate spiked.

  [Cortisol Spike: 190 BPM.]

  There was a physical contraband network operating right under our noses, using forgotten technology as an escape tunnel.

  The panic rose. And the barrier broke.

  Suddenly, my vision failed. It didn’t go dark. It became dirty.

  The Analog Bar, which my thirty-thousand-credit implants rendered with “Chic Noir” lighting, lost its filter.

  The “vintage patina” of the walls vanished. I saw the real grease stains running down the acoustic insulation. I saw that the floor wasn’t rustic polished cement, but cracked concrete covered in cigarette butts and wet sawdust mixed with spit. I saw that the velvet of the booth where I sat wasn’t blood-red; it was brown with grime and mold.

  “Disgusting...” I gagged, recoiling and pulling my hands off the sticky table.

  “Valerian?” Echo’s voice sounded strange, as if echoing from two distinct places. Coming from me, and from her.

  I looked at her. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the air, turning her head as if watching fireworks.

  “Echo? What are you seeing?”

  I was blind. Or rather, I was seeing too much.

  The moment Valerian panicked, the miserable bar disappeared.

  The world was flooded by a violent Saturation. Colors exploded. The red of the booth vibrated like neon. But the most bizarre thing wasn’t the colors. It was what was missing.

  I looked at the wall where, seconds before, there was an obscene spray-painted graffiti reading “L?E?V?I?A?T?HA?N E?A?T?S? ?I?T?S? ?C?H?I?L?D?R?E?N?.”

  Now, there was only a lead-gray wall, smooth, perfectly textured. The graffiti had been digitally erased in real-time.

  I looked at the floor. The trash, the butts, the dirt... everything had been replaced by a texture of “generic clean floor.” The world had been ironed out.

  “My God...” I whispered, reaching out to touch the wall I knew was dirty, but my eyes saw as immaculate. “You don’t see the dirt.”

  I turned to Valerian. In my normal field of view, he was sweating, his tie crooked, his skin pale and oily. And in a lapse, like a lightning flash, I saw myself, turning my head, frightened by something invisible.

  Our visions were interlacing, much like what had happened before.

  Through his feed, his skin was smoothed, as if retouched frame by frame. The deep circles under his eyes had been corrected. His suit looked like it had just come out of the store, without a single wrinkle, shining with perfect HDR contrast. Few of the world's imperfections seemed real. The virus was confused, or rather, it was confusing us well.

  “You live in this?” I asked, feeling a mix of nausea and enchantment. It was a lobotomized world. Beautiful, but fake. “It’s a Reality Ad-Block. Your implant censors the ugliness. You don’t see the graffiti. You don’t see the trash.”

  “And I am seeing your reality,” he replied, his voice trembling, wiping his hand on his suit as if it were covered in invisible germs that only he could see now. “It is filthy. It is depressing. How do you live like this without going insane?”

  “We don’t pay the Premium subscription to ignore the world, Valerian.”

  He closed the black box with a dry snap. The sound acted like a cut, breaking the stress spike. The visions unlocked. My world returned to being gray, dirty, and graffiti-covered; his, I imagine, returned to the artificial paradise.

  “Let’s go,” he said, standing up quickly, picking up the box as if it were radioactive. “If I stay one more minute seeing what you see, I’m going to vomit on my suit.”

  “Which, by the way, has a mustard stain on the lapel,” I warned, pointing. “Your filter must have erased that too.”

  He looked at the stain, which for him must have just “appeared” out of nowhere, and cursed softly.

  “Take the box. Let's get out of here.”

  Valerian’s Filter: He literally cannot see the decay of his own empire. The system protects his cortisol levels by erasing graffiti, trash, and stains. He pays to be blind. The Mule: We now know how the data is moving. Offline. Ancient tech (USB) hidden inside modern bodies? But who is sending it? And what exactly is stored in that dead girl's "offline drive"?

  Next Chapter: We exit the bar and head to [//CENSORED//]. But to get Echo past security, Valerian will have to declare a very specific—and dangerous—type of partnership.

  Are you Team Reality (Dirt) or Team Filter (Gold)? Let me know in the comments!

  Premium Ignorance Subscription: Valerian pays 30k credits to delete the ugliness of the world from his eyes. If you had the same amount in dollars, would you buy the "Beauty Filter"?