The man temporarily using the name "Yawg" propped up his head with both hands, gazed at the world below the garbage mountain, and sighed again.
"I always feel like the world shouldn't be this way."
Yawg felt that either he or the world had to be insane.
To his east lay a vast stretch of "farmland," where silver-black covered the land. The plants were stunted trees less than two meters tall, with silver-black leaves and pure blue sap. Each tree had a mechanical device attached to it, and every day, designated workers used those devices to collect the sap.
That sap was "Copper Sugar."
It was said that the mayor's greatest wish was to lay down a network of pipelines, automate Copper Sugar collection, and firmly grasp all the town's Copper Sugar in his hands. But such pipelines were supposedly expensive—laying the pipes themselves was easy enough; the hard part was preventing the townspeople from stealing from them. The maintenance costs were simply too high.
Copper Sugar was the staple food of people in this era.
Although Yawg consumed Copper Sugar too—mainly through a broken hose port in his upper jaw—he still felt it was insane.
He had once saved a little Copper Sugar, then found some combustible material and heated it for an experiment.
He discovered that the Copper Sugar undoubtedly contained copper. Under certain heating conditions, it even precipitated anhydrous copper sulfate.
That was strange.
Yet aside from him, no one seemed to think that "living things shouldn't consume so much copper."
The black plants were strange too. Yawg sincerely believed plants ought to be green. But Youji and Yulia, mother and son, swore to him that green plants simply did not exist in this world.
It was truly strange.
Everything about it was profoundly, profoundly, profoundly unreasonable.
But stranger still, part of him felt that the present world was perfectly logical. It seemed that after a long process of change, the world he knew had become like this. He had even experienced that process himself.
Unfortunately, all of that seemed to have burned away. Only a few components remained of his electronic brain, perhaps not even a complete chip, while his Biological Brain might have been damaged in the crash—or perhaps it had simply been starved.
"What... happened to this world..."
he murmured.
"Hey!" Youji ran up the garbage mountain. "Yawg, why are you still sightseeing? Hurry up and help me! Maybe we can scrape together the materials for your new body!"
"Oh." The man was carried down the mountain of scrap metal by Youji. The two of them tumbled all the way to a place they had never visited before.
At this point, aside from his head, Yawg had acquired a skullcap [although it was modified from a fuel cap and didn't fit his head], as well as two arms [which Yulia had apparently used before, and even Youji's grandmother had used them; they were so old they could only be sold for scrap, so Yulia had kept them, insisting that "they could serve as emergency replacements if anyone's arms broke"].
Luckily, although his spine was broken, its "central nervous metalization was high" [according to the village chief; Youji did not understand what that meant either]. The small remaining section of spine could serve as a "universal interface." Otherwise, he would not even have been able to use those two arms.
The mayor had rarely shown kindness and helped Yawg attach the arms.
The man had no shoulders. His arms connected directly to his cervical vertebrae. He used both hands to walk across the ground, looking exactly like some kind of poultry.
Even the man himself was surprised that he seemed rather talented at engineering. It truly seemed possible for him to assemble a usable body from spare parts.
A month later, Yawg finally installed a pair of "shoulders" for himself. It was really just a section of bearing attached below his neck, with the two arms mounted onto the bearing.
But at least Yawg could now nod or shake his head.
That was an enormous improvement. Body language truly made communication much more efficient.
After that, Youji found Yawg a battery and hung it from a bracket. To the man, having a battery felt like having a "heart" from the old era. With it, he could finally move for longer periods.
That noon, the man sat beside the solar photovoltaic panels, connected the battery to a shared charging port, opened the casing of his left arm, and used an electromagnetic screwdriver to make minute adjustments.
After realizing he had an enemy named Yawg, the man had fallen into a vague sense of crisis. He did not know where that feeling came from. It seemed as though the entire world was connected to it.
He vaguely felt that he had to acquire a complete prosthetic body.
The screwdriver had also been found by Youji several years ago. Tools from the Sublimation War Era were not especially expensive, but they were extremely practical, so Youji had kept it. The electromagnetic screwdriver's tip could be fine-tuned according to the target. If given detailed parameters, it could even double as a master key.
Of course, in this age, finding a mechanical lock was difficult.
The man was replacing old, worn parts inside his arm with relatively newer ones. Replacing certain transmission components could marginally increase the arm's output. This was something he had been doing all along. At his current stage, these were his only two arms. If they broke, he would return to being nothing but a head.
His pupils constantly dilated and contracted as he adjusted his focus. Some days earlier, the man had been surprised to discover that his eyes seemed to be high-quality equipment. They were directly connected to his nerves and could zoom freely, allowing him to clearly see objects thousands of meters away. He did not know their exact specifications, but whenever he set their visual capability to a higher level, the cheap chip in his head issued overheating warnings. Sometimes, his vision even began dropping frames.
He now truly understood why things like Metal Eyelids existed. Those eyes really were premium goods, worth building a dedicated protective structure for.
"All right..." The man quickly finished the repairs and prepared to reattach his arm.
Beep beep! A horn blared. A cloud of dust rolled toward him. Startled, the man immediately shut the casing of his left arm, pinned it down with his head, then slapped his right hand to the ground as fast as he could, covering the screws that secured the casing.
Then the wind and sand howled past. He almost thought he had been caught in a sandstorm.
In this era, plants seemed to be rare. At least in town, Yawg had only seen the shrubs that produced Copper Sugar. Other than that, he had not seen a single plant—not even a blade of grass.
After the storm passed, the first thing the man did was check the screws on the ground. If even a few had gone missing, he would really be in trouble.
A thunderous rumble came from in front of him. An enormous truck deliberately backed toward him. Its cab detached from the cargo bed and approached the man, its camera looking down from above. "Yo, Yawg, it's you! Sorry about that! I really didn't see you. After all, you're... hahaha, really tiny right now! None of your screws went missing, right?"
The voice sounded coarse, like the throat of an old man who had spent thirty years poisoning it with nicotine and alcohol. Clearly, this guy was more willing to spend money than Yulia; he had bought himself a voiceprint package.
"Are you crazy?" Yawg was annoyed. "Enoch, if you like Yulia, go find Yulia. What are you trying to pull in front of me?"
Enoch was also a piece of engineering machinery in this village. He had apparently been infected with Silver Disease Bacteria at around the age of ten and had been forced to abandon his flesh, selling his spine in exchange for engineering machinery. He had worked as engineering machinery in Scrapheap Town for more than a decade and earned quite well, but probably because he spent money recklessly, he had no savings at all.
He had feelings for Yulia, the village's only female engineering machine.
Yulia was not especially repulsed by him. But the concept of family had long vanished from her mind. "Family" was sacred; it marked human bloodlines and genes. Everyone had the duty to use "family" and "surname" to identify their genes, ensuring that lords could better account for genetic diversity when establishing the Human Gene Bank. But the two of them only had brains left. There was simply no need to form a family.
Rather, Enoch's habit of occasionally rubbing and scraping against her disgusted Yulia. They were both heavy machinery, and one careless move could damage their own bodies. Whenever Enoch shamelessly edged close, Yulia was terrified. Even if Enoch was a skilled driver, repairing the anti-rust paint scraped off her body still cost money.
And now, Yawg was living in the home of Yulia's son. That made Enoch dislike him immensely.
Yawg found it baffling. He truly did not understand how engineering machines developed romantic feelings for one another—judging by Enoch, he did not seem drawn to Yulia's "interesting soul," either.
Enoch's tires nearly brushed Yawg's face, his engine roaring. "Bastard, listen carefully. I pity you because you're a piece of trash now, so I'm giving you a chance. You've already been staying at Yulia's son's place for so many days, haven't you? Now you even have prosthetic limbs... shouldn't you get the hell out?"
The man nearly thought the tire would crush his body. At that moment, a thought surged uncontrollably through his mind.
—Just fall forward with the momentum, into the inner side of the tire...
—He won't have time to turn...
—Grab the rotating axle...
—Use a vibration strike to loosen the screws...
So many 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 began working. A cheap civilian chip could not support calculations of this magnitude. The man almost began to tremble.
What is wrong with me? What is this...?
Enoch saw that the man did not respond, only that his two arms were trembling slightly. He assumed Yawg had been scared stupid and disdainfully expelled a puff of black exhaust from his pipe. In the end, he did not dare actually run Yawg over. The second prohibition of the Dyson Principles was "killing humans." No matter the reason, anyone who killed a human or destroyed another person's Biological Brain would lose all protection afforded by civilization.
Enoch's tires swayed twice. "I'm warning you, you'd better move out of Yulia's son's house soon. You have at most three months... no, two months! Understand? Before the next Gene Tax! Otherwise, I have ten thousand ways to make your life miserable!"