The heavy warehouse door groaned shut behind Michael, its metallic clang echoing in the vast, silent industrial yard, the sound swallowed by the night. It was only then, standing alone under the immense, ink-black dome of the sky, that he looked up. A sprawling tapestry of stars, cold and sharp and utterly indifferent, glittered down upon him, their light a faint, ancient dusting against the profound darkness. The air, unlike the dry, charged dust of the Wasteland, was cool and carried the damp, greasy smell of the city. He fished the sleek, unnervingly light rectangle of his phone from his pocket. The screen blazed to life, a shocking square of artificial blue in the natural gloom. 1:27 AM. The numbers stared back, accusatory and inconvenient.
A profound and sudden rootlessness washed over him. He was back, yet he was nowhere. This time—this ungodly hour—presented a problem he hadn't truly faced before. His usual ritual, as ingrained as the safety checks on his rifle, was shot. A visit to Brother Dong's establishment to offload the weight of gold coins pressing against his thigh was out of the question. Dragging the man from his bed now would be more than impolite; it would be a trespass, an unforgivable breach of the unwritten code between businessman and… supplier. And his own rented room, with its stale air and silent reminders of a life on hold? He'd only been awake for a handful of hours. Sleep was a distant continent.
But Michael was nothing if not adaptable. A slow, wry grin spread across his face. There was a place for men like him at this hour, a sanctuary for the unmoored. A temple of distraction. A den of glorious, unapologetic vice. He needed, he decided, to get a fix. A different kind of fix.
He flagged down a sputtering motorcycle taxi, its rider a faceless silhouette in the night, and soon found himself deposited before a flickering beacon of neon despair. The sign sizzled and buzzed like a trapped insect: Velocity Internet Cafe. The 'V' flickered arrhythmically, as it had for as long as he could remember—a persistent, winking failure the owner couldn't be bothered to fix. It was perfect.
With a sense of purpose that felt both familiar and alien, he pushed through the smudged glass doors. The air inside hit him like a physical blow—a thick, warm soup of stale cigarette smoke, the synthetic tang of cheap air freshener, and the underlying, musky scent of unwashed bodies and concentrated ennui. The clack-clack-clackof mechanical keyboards provided a frantic, percussive soundtrack to the low murmur of voices and the occasional burst of tinny gunfire from a dozen sets of headphones.
He strode to the laminated counter, its surface sticky with ancient spills. Thwack.He slapped down his ID card and a crumpled fifty-yuan note with a flourish that felt more confident than he was. The girl behind the counter, her face illuminated by the glow of her own phone, didn't look up. She wore a tiny, spaghetti-strap top that seemed defiantly impractical.
"Twenty on the card," he announced, his voice a little too loud for the space. "A pack of Double Happiness, a Red Bull, and a cup noodle—load it up, extra egg, extra sausage. Keep the change. Buy yourself something… sweet." He aimed for a tone of casual generosity, the kind he imagined a regular, a man of means, might affect.
The girl finally glanced up, her eyes scanning him with a single, dismissive sweep that took in his dusty jeans and general air of displacement. Her expression was one of profound, practiced boredom.
"Fifty-two," she said flatly. "You're short."
His bravado deflated like a punctured tire. Muttering, he downgraded the Red Bull to a bottle of water. Armed with his diminished haul, he retreated into the gloom, finding a scarred carrel in a corner. The pleather chair groaned a protest as he sank into it. The warm, chemically-cheesy scent of the instant noodles rose to meet him, and for a moment, it was almost comforting. This was a lower form of life, but it was a life he understood.
He logged into an old gaming account, the familiar login screen a ghost from his past. He queued for a battle royale, the game that had once consumed his nights. The map loaded, his character dropped onto a digital island. He landed, scrambled for a weapon, his heart giving a perfunctory thud as he spotted an enemy. He fired. The crackle of gunfire from his headphones was tinny, a pathetic imitation. There was no kick against his shoulder, no acrid smell of cordite, no primal surge of adrenaline. It was… empty. A child's game of lights and sounds. After the visceral, life-or-death stakes of the Wasteland, after feeling the real weight of a weapon and the true cost of a fight, this was a pantomime. A silly, bloodless dance. The boy who had once lost whole weekends in this digital world was gone, his place taken by a man who had seen real blood seep into real dust. He exited the match, the hollow victory message meaning less than nothing.
With a sigh that came from deep within his soul, he closed the game and opened a browser. If he couldn't waste time, he would use it. His fingers hovered over the keys before typing: Michigan.
The screen filled with information, and he fell down a rabbit hole of geography and geology. He learned of the Great Lakes, vast inland seas that moderated the climate, making southeastern Michigan, the location of his fledgling Sweetwater Gulch, far more temperate than it had any right to be. Pre-Collapse data spoke of average highs of 14°C and lows of 6°C. A paradise compared to the scorching, radioactive hellscapes nearer the equator or the frozen wastes to the north. A slow dawning of realization spread through him: the portal hadn't dumped him in a random hellhole; it had placed him in one of the more habitable corners of a dead continent. The luck of it was staggering .
Then he searched for mineral resources, and his pulse quickened. Coal. Iron ore. Oil. Natural gas. The very bedrock of industry, all there, sleeping beneath the poisoned soil of the Wasteland, particularly around the Detroit area. Of course. They had built the Motor City there for a reason . Visions of smokestacks and steel mills, powered by coal-fired generators, flickered in his mind. They could skip the finicky diesel generators. They could melt down the skeletons of the old world in primitive blast furnaces. They could build.
The excitement was a heady rush, a potent drug. This wasn't just a wasteland; it was a treasure chest, buried under ignorance and fear. He felt a giddy sense of possibility, a ruler surveying a map of a future kingdom.
Then, almost as an afterthought, he searched: cost of coal-fired power plant.
The numbers that flashed onto the screen were a physical blow. Sixty to seventy million yuan for a small, 10-megawatt plant. Billions for a proper one. The grand vision, so vivid a moment ago, shattered into a million glittering, unaffordable pieces. The euphoria evaporated, leaving a cold, hard lump of reality in his gut. He stared at the digits, the glowing screen mocking his ambition. The half-eaten cup of noodles sat before him, its broth now cold and greasy, utterly unappetizing.
"Right," he muttered to the empty carrel, the word tasting of ash. "Diesel generators and solar panels… they're tried and true. Reliable."
The brief, intoxicating dream of industrial empire was over. The "den of iniquity" had served its purpose, reminding him of his place not through its vices, but through the crushing reality of economics. He stood up, leaving the computer humming, the browser window open to a future he couldn't afford. He didn't bother to log out.
As he turned his back on the glowing screen, a news aggregator widget on the browser, unnoticed, pinged softly and refreshed. A new headline slid to the top of a trending list. The top story concerned a renowned international director launching a global search for a theme song for his upcoming post-apocalyptic epic, offering a king's ransom for the winning composition . The second was an update on the continued, fruitless search for a rogue mechanical weapon, with a substantial reward for information . The third story, with no bounty attached, reported a Chinese teenage girl winning the International Physics Olympiad, hailed as a once-in-a-century talent . A photograph showed a young, vibrant face, her eyes alight with an intelligence that was, to anyone who had seen her, uncannily reminiscent of a certain amnesiac woman in another world who called Michael 'Ba-Ba'. But Michael was already pushing through the doors, back into the city's indifferent embrace, the face of a genius disappearing into the digital ether, unseen and unknown.