Chapter Two: Copper Sugar and the Dyson Principle

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The man temporarily calling himself Yorg propped up his head with both hands and gazed at the world below the mountain of garbage. Then he sighed again.

“I keep feeling that the world shouldn’t be like this.”

Yorg felt that either he or the world had to be insane.

To the east lay an enormous stretch of “farmland,” its broad expanse covered in silver-black. The plants were short trees, less than two meters tall, with silver-black leaves and pure blue sap. Each tree was fitted with a mechanical device, and specially assigned workers came every day to collect the sap through those mechanisms.

That sap was known as “copper sugar.”

They said the mayor’s greatest wish was to lay a network of pipelines, making copper-sugar collection fully automated and placing the town’s entire supply firmly in his hands. But they also said such a pipeline system was expensive. Laying the pipes themselves was not difficult; the real problem was preventing the townspeople from stealing from them. The maintenance costs were simply too high.

Copper sugar was the staple food of the people in this era.

Although Yorg himself consumed copper sugar—primarily through a broken tube opening in his upper palate—he still thought the whole thing was insane.

Once, he had saved a little copper sugar and performed an experiment, heating it with combustible material.

He discovered that it unquestionably contained copper. When heated under the proper conditions, it would even yield anhydrous copper sulfate.

It was strange.

Yet apart from him, no one seemed to think that living creatures should not ingest such vast quantities of copper.

The black plants were strange as well. Yorg sincerely believed that plants were supposed to be green. But Yuki and his mother, Yulia, had sworn up and down that green plants simply did not exist anywhere in the world.

Truly strange.

Everything was extremely, extremely, extremely unreasonable.

What was even stranger, however, was that a part of him felt this world made perfect sense. It was as though, after an immensely long process of change, the world he knew had gradually become this way. He might even have lived through that process himself.

Unfortunately, it seemed that all of those things had burned away. Only a few components remained in his electronic brain, perhaps not even a complete chip, while his biological brain might have been damaged in the impact—or, of course, it might simply have starved.

“What… happened to this world…?”

He whispered the words to himself.

“Hey!”

Yuki came running up the garbage mountain. “Yorg, why are you still standing around admiring the view? Come help me! We might be able to gather enough materials for your new body!”

“Oh.”

And so the man was carried away by Yuki, who ran down the mountain of scrap metal with him. The two of them tumbled all the way down until they reached a place they had never visited before.

By then, apart from his head, Yorg had acquired a skull—though it had been fashioned from a fuel cap and did not fit properly—and two arms. The arms seemed to have belonged to Yulia in the past, and perhaps even to Yuki’s grandmother before that. They were so old that they could only be sold for scrap-metal prices, which was why Yulia had kept them, insisting that they could serve as emergency replacements whenever someone’s arms broke.

Fortunately, although his spine had been severed, its “central nervous system had a high degree of metallic integration”—or so the village chief had said. Yuki had never understood what that meant either. In any case, that tiny remnant of spine could function as a “universal interface.”

Otherwise, he would not even have been able to use the two arms.

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The mayor rarely showed kindness, but on this occasion he helped attach the two arms to Yorg.

The man had no shoulders. Both arms were connected directly to his cervical spine. He walked across the ground on his hands, looking exactly like a domestic fowl.

Even the man himself was surprised to discover that he seemed to possess considerable engineering talent. He might genuinely be able to assemble a functional body from spare parts.

…………………………………………………………

A month later, Yorg finally installed a “shoulder” for himself. In reality, it was merely a section of bearing mounted beneath his neck, with both arms attached to the bearing.

Still, at least Yorg could now nod and shake his head.

That was a monumental improvement. Body language greatly increased the efficiency of communication.

Afterward, Yuki found Yorg a storage battery and hung it from a support frame. To the man, possessing a storage battery felt rather like possessing a “heart” from the Old Era. Once he had the battery, he could finally remain active a little longer.

At noon that day, the man sat beside a solar photovoltaic panel, connecting his storage battery to a shared charging port. He then opened the casing of his left arm and made delicate adjustments with an electromagnetic screwdriver.

After realizing that he had an enemy called Yorg, the man had become gripped by a peculiar sense of crisis. He did not know where it came from. It seemed that the entire world was somehow connected to that feeling.

He vaguely sensed that he had to possess a complete prosthetic body.

Yuki had found the screwdriver several years earlier. Tools from the era of the Ascension Wars were not particularly expensive, but they were exceptionally useful, so Yuki had kept it. The head of the electromagnetic screwdriver could be finely adjusted to match its target. Given detailed parameters, it could even double as a universal key.

Of course, in this age, finding a mechanical lock was itself a difficult task.

The man was replacing the old, worn components inside his arm with newer ones. Replacing several transmission parts could slightly increase the arm’s output. It was something he had been doing constantly. At present, these two arms were all he had. If they broke, he would be reduced once again to nothing but a head.

The pupils of his eyes repeatedly dilated and contracted as they adjusted their focus. A few days earlier, the man had been astonished to discover that his eyes seemed to be remarkable pieces of equipment. They were directly linked to his nerves, could zoom freely, and could clearly distinguish objects several kilometers away. He did not know their exact specifications, but whenever he set their visual capacity to a higher level, the cheap chip in his brain issued an overheating warning. Sometimes his vision even began to skip frames.

He now understood why anyone had invented such a thing as “metal eyelids.” These eyes were truly high-end equipment, worthy of a dedicated protective structure.

“All done…”

The man soon finished the repairs and prepared to reattach the arm.

“Beep, beep!”

A horn blared. A roiling cloud of dust came rushing toward him.

Startled, the man immediately closed the casing of his left arm, pressed it down with his head, and slapped his right hand over the ground as quickly as possible, covering the screws that held the casing in place.

Then the wind and sand howled past. For a moment, he nearly thought he had been caught in a sandstorm.

Plants seemed to be exceedingly rare in this age. At least in the town, Yorg had seen only the shrubs that produced copper sugar. Apart from those, he had not seen a single plant—not even a blade of grass.

Once the storm had passed, the man immediately checked the screws on the ground. If several had gone missing, he would be in genuine trouble.

A deep rumble sounded before him. A gigantic truck deliberately backed toward him. Its cab had been uncoupled from the cargo bed, and it drew close as a camera looked down from above.

“Well, well, Yorg! It’s you! Sorry about that! I really didn’t see you. After all, you’re so… Hahaha, you’re really tiny now! None of your screws went missing, did they?”

The voice was rough and coarse, like the nicotine- and alcohol-ravaged throat of an old man who had smoked and drunk for thirty years. Clearly, this fellow was more willing to spend money than Yulia and had paid for a proper voiceprint package.

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“Are you insane?” Yorg snapped, somewhat irritated. “If you like Yulia, go after Yulia. What are you trying to prove by causing trouble in front of me?”

Enoch was one of the town’s engineering machines. He had apparently been infected with the Silver Plague when he was around ten years old and had been forced to abandon his flesh and sell his spine in exchange for an engineering-machine body. He had worked as construction machinery in the recycling-town for more than a decade and earned a considerable income, but he had probably spent money too freely, because he had virtually no savings.

He had developed feelings for Yulia, the only female engineering machine in the village.

Yulia was not especially opposed to him. But the concept of family had long since vanished from her mind. “Family” was a sacred concept, a designation of human lineage and genes. Every person had a duty to mark their genes with a “family” and a “name,” ensuring that the lord could better preserve genetic diversity when establishing the human gene bank. Since both of them had nothing left but their brains, there was no need for them to establish a family at all.

If anything, Enoch’s habit of occasionally coming over to scrape and rub against her made Yulia resent him. They were both heavy machines, and a single mistake could damage either of them. Whenever Enoch shamelessly edged closer, Yulia was terrified. Even if Enoch’s driving skills were impeccable, the anti-rust paint scraped from Yulia’s body still cost money to replace.

And now Yorg was living in Yulia’s son’s home.

That made Enoch look upon him with particular displeasure.

Yorg, meanwhile, found the whole matter inexplicable. He truly did not understand how love could arise between engineering machines. Judging by Enoch’s behavior, he did not seem attracted to Yulia’s “interesting soul,” either.

Enoch’s tires nearly brushed Yorg’s face as his engine roared.

“Listen carefully, you bastard. I’m taking pity on you because you’re a useless wreck right now, and that’s the only reason I’m giving you a chance. You’ve been staying at Yulia’s son’s house for quite a few days now, haven’t you? And you’ve got prosthetic limbs already… You should get lost, shouldn’t you?”

The man almost thought the tires were about to crush his body.

At that moment, an uncontrollable thought rose in his mind.

—Fall forward with the motion, landing on the inner side of the tire…

—He won’t have time to turn…

—Seize the rotating axle…

—Use vibrational force to loosen the screws…

Countless mechanical diagrams…

Even more combinations of tactics…

Techniques…

A buzzing sound came from the man’s head. The ventilation fan that had just been installed had begun to operate. The cheap civilian chip could not support calculations of this magnitude. The man nearly began to tremble.

—What is happening to me? What is this…?

Enoch noticed that the man did not respond and that only his two arms were trembling faintly. He assumed the fellow had been scared witless. With contempt, he expelled a cloud of black exhaust from his tailpipe.

In the end, he did not dare actually run over Yorg. The second prohibition of the Dyson Principle was “do not kill humans.” Regardless of the reason, anyone who killed a human or damaged another person’s biological brain would lose every form of protection granted by civilization.

Enoch’s tires rocked twice.

“I’m warning you. You’d better move out of Yulia’s son’s house soon. You’ve got three months at most… No, two months! Understand? Before the next genetic tax is due! Otherwise, I have ten thousand ways to make your life impossible!”

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