Chapter 1

On the thirty-seventh day after my boyfriend vanished, I received the last of his "data legacy": an utterly ordinary mechanical watch, and a system text: [User S-0413. Life Value composite score below 70. Resource Optimization Program activated. All social ties automatically dissolved.]

Resource optimization was a cold term. Put plainly, it meant data deletion. In this age of total digitization, every life was turned into a score from birth, and that score decided a person's job, partner, place in society, even whether they lived or died. Anything below 70 was social death.

Everyone said my boyfriend was a useless slacker and that getting deleted served him right. Only I knew he had once been top-tier talent with a 98.5 score. To find out the truth, I disguised my own score as a dangerous 68.9 and entered the Life Optimization Center as a "Pending Optimization Resource."

The stench of disinfectant hit my nose, sharp and cold as a scalpel. I stood in the lobby of the Life Optimization Center. To people like us, places like this were graveyards. The micro-sensor at my wrist ran hot as the fake data block under my skin did its job, broadcasting one disgusting number to every scanner around me: 68.9.

"Ms. Lane?" The voice was gentle, yet utterly without warmth. I looked up and met a pair of eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses. Dr. Lewis, the man in charge here, wore a lab coat so white it hurt to look at, and the badge on his chest gleamed with the silver mark of S-Class status.

I deliberately hunched my shoulders and twisted my hands together like a nervous wreck. My nails dug into my palms, the sharp pain keeping me alert while leaving my fingertips pale and trembling. "Y-yes," I said, lowering my head and pitching my voice into something meek and defeated.

"No need to be nervous." Dr. Lewis stepped closer, smelling faintly of expensive dark coffee. He swept his long, surgeon-like fingers over my sensor, and every hair on my body stood on end. Then my gaze caught on his cuff, and my breathing stopped.

A strip of brown leather peeked out at his wrist. On the edge of the watch face was a tiny, irregular scratch exactly like the one on Ryan Shaw's watch—the mark he'd gotten by accident in the lab, the one I'd traced countless times. Why did it look so alike? My stomach cramped, but I bit down on my tongue until blood filled my mouth, forcing back the urge to lunge at him and demand answers.

"Your data profile is... unfortunate," he said, with the pity a superior might show defective goods. "But this place is a utopia, a last chance for low scorers. We'll reassess your potential and help you recover those missing thirty points." He turned and motioned for me to follow. The mechanical watch flashed beneath his cuff, like a silent taunt.

"Ms. Lane, welcome to the land of rebirth." He pushed open a heavy metal door leading underground and glanced back with a faint, pitying smile. "Here, your value will be redefined... or ended for good."

Sublevel 3 was stuffy and foul, thick with the burnt smell of overheated electronics. My post was called data scrubbing. It sounded technical, but really I just sat at a cramped workstation, stared at chaotic surveillance clips and text records, and manually tagged whatever was deemed "meaningless."

"Don't stare too hard. The more you look, the more you feel like trash." The girl beside me was Maya. Her eyes were sunken, and her skin had the bluish pallor of someone who never saw daylight.

I clicked the mouse like a machine until my wrist ached. Every move here turned into points, and my real-time Life Value pulsed in the corner of the screen. No matter how fast I worked or how diligent I acted, it stayed trapped between 68.8 and 68.9, as if an invisible wall was holding it there.

"Maya, has anyone ever really graduated from this place and gone back out?" I leaned closer and lowered my voice, keeping my left hand in the camera's blind spot.

Maya's fingers stiffened. She kept staring at the screen, her voice barely above a whisper. "Work hard and your score will go up... that's what the people here say. Once our numbers recover, we can be normal again." There was a nearly self-destructive stubbornness in her tone. I glanced around. Hundreds of low scorers worked under the dim blue light like penned livestock, burning through their eyes and minds.

Late that night, after Maya's heavy snoring filled the dorm, I quietly got up. Using the bathroom as an excuse, I slipped into the utility room at the end of the hall. From the lining of my sleeve, I dug out a decoder no bigger than a fingernail—my last trump card as an S-Class Data Analyst. I plugged it into the Center's backup network port, my fingers flying over the virtual keyboard as sweat dripped into my burning eyes.

The firewall had more holes than I expected, not from weakness but from arrogant neglect. Just as the flood of data threatened to drown me, a string of red code flashed by. It was the log for the backend auto-removal program, and one technical term kept showing up throughout the last thirty days of records: value burnout.

This wasn't any kind of score-boosting program. It was a one-way trip. Burnout meant a person's value had been wrung dry, and what was left got discarded.