Malfunctioning Utopia

Chapter 17: The System

Sun Jack held the chip in his hand and voiced his request to King Kong.

He had spent all of last night pondering and ultimately decided that directly implanting the chip into his brain was too risky.

Song 6’s earlier remarks only deepened his concerns—if even a backup heart pump could fail, how could he trust a chip installed in his brain not to malfunction? It was a gamble he couldn’t afford to take.

"Besides," he thought, "I’m in unfamiliar territory here. What if these two are working together to scam me? At least with an external device, I can just take it off if something goes wrong."

His explanation caught King Kong off guard. “Why’s that, my friend? Is your current system chip malfunctioning?”

Sun Jack seized the opportunity and nodded. “Yeah, it’s stuck in there, malfunctioning. My buddy over there, well, that’s how he ended up replacing his entire body with metal parts.”

As he spoke, Sun Jack gave Tapai a hearty pat on the shoulder. Tapai played along perfectly, letting out an exaggerated sigh. "╯△╰"

“Is that so? Let me take a look,” King Kong offered, extending a set of tools from his split-open palm.

Sun Jack leaned back immediately, dodging the invasive gesture. No way was he letting the monk check—it would blow his cover.

Thinking quickly, Sun Jack feigned alarm. “Don’t touch it! That thing’s dangerous. It can transfer consciousness. I barely managed to disable it after a huge struggle. If you accidentally restart it, it might turn me into someone else!”

“Huh? That doesn’t sound like what I heard yesterday,” Song 6 said, tilting his head thoughtfully.

“Take a guess,” Sun Jack replied with a deadpan expression.

His barrage of half-truths and bluffs finally convinced King Kong to drop the idea. “Hmm... if that’s the case, I’ll find you an external device. I’m pretty sure I had something like that in stock.” He began rummaging through his shelves.

It didn’t take long before King Kong pulled out a circular metal device resembling a pair of eyeglass frames. He installed the chip into the device and handed it to Sun Jack.

Taking a deep breath, Sun Jack placed the odd contraption on his head.

With a hiss, a bright yellow light flashed in front of his eyes. To his surprise, it was a pair of glasses—not with glass or resin lenses but a projected virtual display.

The arced projection created a slight wide-angle distortion at the edges of his field of vision, noticeably extending his peripheral view.

The yellow display flickered briefly. When Song 6 spoke again, subtitles appeared along the bottom edge. “How is it? How does it feel?”

“How do I control it?” Sun Jack asked, running his fingers along the temple arms of the device, finding no buttons.

“Just think about it. It scans your scalp for brainwave signals to interpret your commands. Since it’s external, it can only sense and process signals but can’t manipulate them. So features like the dopamine circulator and pain editor won’t work. But monitoring disruptors and temporary ICE are fully functional.” 𝙧ÃＮO͍𐌱ΕṦ

“Turn off subtitles.” As Sun Jack thought the command, the subtitles vanished instantly.

“Show information.” Instantly, names appeared above Song 6 and King Kong’s heads, and in a particularly cheeky touch, a link to Song 6’s livestream popped up below his name.

Lifting his cybernetic arm, Sun Jack saw the ammo count displayed at the bottom left corner of his vision: Bullets: 124 | Grenades: 0.

“So this is what it’s like to be connected,” Sun Jack murmured, marveling at the world through the augmented lens.

With another thought, the shelves of prosthetics around the shop lit up, each item displaying its type, price, and features in a detailed overlay.

With this device, Sun Jack felt like his brain had gained the processing power of a supercomputer—and this was just an external system. He couldn’t imagine how overpowered an internal neural system would be.

“No wonder everyone’s so eager to install systems. These things are insanely convenient.”

“However,” King Kong warned, “since your chip is external, you’ll need to protect it. If someone steals your device, your money and everything else linked to it will be gone.”

To this, Sun Jack shrugged nonchalantly, tapping the device on his head. “What’s the difference? If it’s implanted, wouldn’t they just bash my head in and dig the chip out anyway?”

From the look of Song 6’s mental state, it was clear that people in this world wouldn’t hesitate to go that far without any moral qualms.

“Haha, bro! Well said. If there weren’t any shady goods, where would all this stuff come from?” Song 6 chuckled as he scratched his back with a broken prosthetic limb.

King Kong looked aghast. “Hey! My inventory comes from legitimate sources. Don’t slander me!”

“Legit, huh? Then why the sneaky sales? Afraid of the cops?”

“Selling this way is just... a tax dodge,” King Kong muttered defensively.

Sun Jack’s eyes narrowed as he glanced at the other chips on the table. “So these chips... they were dug out of people’s heads?”

Oddly, he wasn’t shocked. Perhaps the city had numbed him to surprises. He simply accepted it as another fact of life here.

After King Kong gave his combat prosthetics a thorough tune-up, the group returned to the funeral shop upstairs.

Sun Jack looked around at the shop, his new glasses lighting up with a cascade of information. Everything seemed alive and vibrant in a way he hadn’t experienced before.

As he silently activated the auto-translate feature, every unfamiliar language on the neon ads seamlessly switched to Chinese, and the garbled voices in the background transformed into understandable speech.

“@Account setup,” he thought. Streams of binary data flowed before him, and a balance of 0.0000@ appeared in the bottom-left corner of his vision.

As Sun Jack tested the device’s other functions, a notification window suddenly popped up in his view.

“Hey, bro! Add me as a friend! That way we can help each other out in the future!”

“Sure thing. Thanks for the assist. We’re bros now,” Sun Jack replied, agreeing to the request.

“A deal’s a deal. I knew you weren’t ordinary. Keep it up—Krv1loi isn’t someone just anyone can handle.” Song 6 grinned, pulling Sun Jack into a hearty embrace before heading to the car.

After Song 6 left, Sun Jack continued tinkering with the system. It was fascinating, almost like being in a video game.

But then, another notification popped up, this one with a black frame.

Seeing it, his heart skipped a beat.

“In a place like this, besides Song 6, who else would know me?”

His mind raced with possibilities. Could someone in this city have recognized him? Had he been under surveillance all along?