Log 10
Hidden Variable
Beneath the city, there is another world.
There is no light there—only flickering screens and the damp sound of breathing.
We moved all the way from the harbor district to the abandoned western subway line, our footsteps echoing between steel walls.
The tracks had long been sealed off, the station signs faded, and the only thing still glowing was the blue light reflected from underground water.
“Is he really here?” Min Min asked.
“Yes. He said he was in the west district.”
“There are so many levels underground. Are you sure?”
I smiled faintly. “He’ll leave a clue.”
Sure enough, on the brick wall at the third fork, there were four numbers: 5021.
That was the number Chee Yan used to write all the time back in police academy. It meant the last exit.
I looked up. The light flickered.
The hidden door in the corner was half open, and from inside came the faint sound of welding.
I pushed the door open.
Inside, the room was dim. Several monitors glowed with lines of code.
Chee Yan sat among a pile of electronic wreckage, his eyes bloodshot.
When he saw me, he froze for a second, then broke into a grin. “You really came back.”
“You’re still alive?” I asked.
He bared his teeth. “Lucky. The roof collapsed in front of me.”
“Wai Hing said you were dead.”
“Wai Hing?” He blinked, then gave a bitter smile. “That old bastard really does know how to act.”
I stepped forward and slapped his shoulder. “You saw the city fog, right?”
“I did.” His expression turned serious. “The whole network is breathing, like it has a heart. After the Commissioner died, MORPHEUS started learning on its own.”
“Who’s controlling it now?”
“Lau Zi Him.” He pointed at the screen, and a face flashed across it—cold, expressionless.
“I pulled this out of the residual data from the main server. On basement level three of the medical school, there’s a master control terminal called Project MORPHEUS Beta.”
I was silent for a few seconds. “He’s rewriting the dream.”
“To be more precise,” Chee Yan said, “he wants to make the dream the norm.”
He pulled aside a curtain beside him. Behind it was a group of people hammering at keyboards, talking over one another.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Friends,” Chee Yan said. “My old circle from the Intelligence Technology Division—Ghostwriters.”
There were men and women among them, all ordinary in appearance, but with sharp eyes.
“This is Iris, RF engineer, radio hacker. That bearded one is RootKnot, specializes in system kernels. This is Nori, expert in anomaly detection. And there’s also—P.”
He pointed to the quiet figure in the corner.
P was small and thin, wearing headphones. Without looking up, he said only one sentence:
“Don’t let MORPHEUS hear you.”
“It can hear us?” Man Man asked.
“It’s always listening,” P’s voice echoed like air in the room. “MORPHEUS Beta isn’t just a system. It’s part of the city. Every word you say can be reconstructed by it.”
I looked at Chee Ren. “We need your help. I need to create a fake version of me.”
He stared for a few seconds, then laughed. “A fake you?”
“Yes. Let MORPHEUS think I’m still online, when I’m actually offline.”
“A ghost node,” Iris cut in. “Theoretically possible. But you’ll need source-level brainwave data.”
I handed over the USB drive. “It’s in here.”
RootKnot took it and plugged it into the server. “This is the real thing. The template for the city’s alpha source.”
On the screen, tens of thousands of waveforms erupted like an electronic storm of electrocardiograms.
Nori said quietly, “This is Loke sir’s brainwave frequency.”
P stared at it in silence for a moment, then spoke. “It can be copied. But to fool the master control, it needs an equivalent soul.”
“What does that mean?” Man Man frowned.
P answered, “MORPHEUS Beta verifies thought signature. If the fake node doesn’t carry an equivalent thinking pattern, it will self-destruct.”
“Then use my thinking pattern,” I said.
“Not enough. You need a reflection.”
The room fell silent.
Chee Yan tapped the table. “Then I’ll do it.”
I shook my head. “No. It’s too dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” He laughed. “Brother, I’ve been in danger for a long time already. The fire, the dream, and her.”
He looked toward Mun Tseng at the side.
Mun Tseng stepped out of the shadows. She was wearing an old shirt, her expression calm.
“Don’t look so surprised,” she said. “I got out with him.”
Man Man smiled. “I knew you wouldn’t die.”
“Not dead yet, so I still have work to do.” Mun Tseng shrugged. “Chee Yan said he needed me to help you.”
I looked at the two of them, and something rose in my chest that I couldn’t quite name—something like being taken back to the day MCS was first formed.
Five people. Five lives.
Now the team from the dream had gathered again in reality.
“This is the plan.” Chee Yan stood in front of the whiteboard and drew a large ring. “The MORPHEUS Beta master control is in the medical school, but the city has nine synchronization nodes. As long as we plant Ghost L.T.K. into one of the nodes, the master control will think Captain Lok’s consciousness is still running inside the network. That way, you can disconnect safely.”
Iris added, “We need to seize bandwidth. The city RF system refreshes by district every three minutes. I can insert the fake signal in the refresh window.”
Jiawu said, “I can forge the verification signature and temporarily make the master control trust the fake source.”
Nori said, “But MORPHEUS Beta has self-correction. It’ll detect the anomaly in thirty minutes.”
P said, “So you only have thirty minutes.”
I looked at them. “Is thirty minutes enough?”
Chee Yan grinned. “We cracked the central network in fifteen once.”
“But this time we’re cracking a dream.”
He shrugged. “Then we’ll just have to dream faster.”
Before we began, Man Man stood behind me and adjusted the brainwave leads.
“You sure you want to do this yourself?” she asked.
“It’s my dream. I have to pull my own plug.”
She paused for a second, then said softly, “Then promise me—don’t wake up alone again.”
I smiled faintly. “You’re holding on to me.”
She didn’t answer, only pressed lightly against my wrist. The pressure was just right, steady as a promise.
Chee Yan shouted from the main console, “Starting countdown. Three, two, one!”
Iris “Channel locked!”
RootKnot: “Master key forged successfully!”
Nori: “Interference signal active!”
P spoke softly: “Ghost L.T.K. loading.”
On the screen, lines of waveform overlapped, resonated, fused.
I felt as though my mind had been split in two—one half in reality, the other pulled into light.
The light had no color, yet it had warmth.
I saw another me standing inside it, expressionless.
That was the ghost—the fake me.
“Source established successfully,” P’s voice came through.
“Heartbeat?” Zhiren asked.
“Normal. City frequency synchronized.”
I let out a breath.
But in the next second, alarms went off.
“Master control anomaly detected!” Nori shouted. “Beta system is counterattacking!”
“How is that possible?” Jiawu cursed. “It’s reverse-tracing!”
On the screen, a red flood of data surged into the fake node.
P’s face changed. “It’s trying to feed back!”
Chee Yan immediately struck the keyboard. “I’ll block it!”
His fingers flew, streams of code like a firefight.
Man Man rushed forward. “I can cut the power!”
I shook my head. “No! If you cut the power, the ghost will be destroyed!”
“Chee Yan!” I shouted.
He didn’t look back. He said coldly, “Don’t worry about me. You’re the primary source. You’re the only one who has to survive.”
“Don’t talk nonsense—”
“I owe this city a dream.”
Red light flashed. He hit the transmission key.
In an instant, all the lights in the underground room went out.
A few seconds later, the monitors came back on.
“System stable,” P said quietly. “Counterattack stopped. Fake node operating normally.”
I rushed forward. “Chee Yan!”
He leaned back in his chair, breathing hard.
“I’m not dead,” he said with a grin. “The dream just bit me once.”
“You lunatic,” Man Man cursed.
“If you’re not crazy, how do you write dreams?” He winked.
The system stabilized again. Doukou projected the control view onto the wall.
The synchronization wave across the city was dropping.
The white fog had begun to thin, and the lights were flickering out of sync.
“It worked,” RootKnot said.
“For now,” P added. “Beta will relearn. You need to move quickly.”
“Next step?” Man Man asked.
I stared at the flashing map and tapped the central red point—the medical school.
“That’s the root.
Lau Zi Him is there.
We’re going to make him watch the dream wake up.”
Chee Yan leaned back in his chair, his tone calm. “Then I’ll stay here with them and hold the backend. Someone has to maintain the fake node and buy you time.”
I looked at him. “Thirty minutes?”
“Twenty-five.” He smiled. “I want to keep five minutes for myself—just to see what this city really looks like.”
I held out my hand.
He held out his too, and our palms struck together.
“This time,” I said, “we’re not just solving a case. We’re saving a city.”
He grinned. “Then don’t waste the dream I just wrote.”
By the time we stepped out from underground, the sky was already bright.
The white fog was still there, but cracks had formed in it, and light was beginning to seep through.
Man Man tightened her coat and looked in that direction.
“The medical school.”
I nodded.
“That’s the heart of the dream.”
Wind poured down between the skyscrapers, carrying a familiar scent—
not jasmine,
not blood,
but dust.
Dry, real, the kind that makes you cough.
I looked up at the white tower in the fog.
And there was only one sentence in my mind:
No matter how deep the dream, someone must dare to wake it.