Copper Sugar and the Dyson Principles

The man temporarily using the name "Yawg" propped up his head with both hands, gazing at the world below the mountain of trash, and sighed again.

"I always feel like the world shouldn't be like this."

"Yawg" felt that either he or this world had to be insane.

To his east lay a vast stretch of "farmland," where silver-black covered huge swathes of ground. It was a kind of short tree, less than two meters tall, with silver-black leaves and pure blue sap. Every tree had a mechanical device attached to it, and designated workers went out every day to collect the sap through those devices.

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 seize all the town's Copper Sugar for himself. But those pipelines were supposedly expensive—laying the pipes alone was not difficult; the hard part was preventing the townspeople from stealing it. The maintenance costs were simply too high.

Copper Sugar was the staple food of the people of this era.

Although "Yawg" consumed Copper Sugar too—mainly through a broken hose opening on his upper jaw—he still found it insane.

He had once saved a tiny amount of Copper Sugar, then found some combustible material and heated it for an experiment.

He discovered that 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 organisms shouldn't consume so much copper."

The black plants were strange too. "Yawg" sincerely felt that plants ought to be green. But Youji and Yulia, mother and son, had sworn to him that green plants simply did not exist in this world.

It was truly strange.

Everything about this was profoundly, profoundly, profoundly unreasonable.

But stranger still, part of him felt that the current world was logical. It seemed that after a long period of change, the world he knew had become like this. He had even experienced that process himself.

Unfortunately, those things seemed to have been burned away. Only a few components remained of his electronic brain, perhaps not even enough to form 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 trash 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 range of scrap metal by Youji. The two rolled all the way to a place they had not visited before.

At this point, aside from his head, "Yawg" had acquired a skullcap [though it had been modified from a fuel cap and did not fit his head], as well as two arms [which seemed to have once belonged to Yulia, and even Youji's grandmother had used them before; they were so old that they could only be sold for scrap, so Yulia had kept them, saying they could serve as emergency replacements whenever an arm broke].

Fortunately, although his spine had been severed, its "central nervous system metalization was very high" [according to the village chief, though Youji had not understood what that meant either]. That tiny remnant of spine could serve as a "universal interface." Otherwise, he would not even have been able to use those two arms.

The mayor had shown rare kindness and helped "Yawg" connect the two arms.

The man had no shoulders. His arms were attached directly to his cervical vertebrae. He used both hands to walk across the ground, looking exactly like a bird.

Even the man himself was surprised that he seemed to possess considerable talent for engineering. It really seemed possible that he could piece together a usable body out of spare parts.

A month later, "Yawg" finally installed a pair of "shoulders" for himself. Though really, he had merely attached a section of bearing beneath his neck and mounted the two arms onto it.

But at least "Yawg" could nod and shake his head now.

That was an enormous improvement. Body language truly made communication far more efficient.

After that, Youji found a battery for "Yawg" and hung it on 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.

At noon that day, the man stayed beside the solar photovoltaic panels, connecting his battery to the shared charging port. Then he opened the casing on his left arm and used an electromagnetic screwdriver to make fine 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 needed a complete prosthetic body.

Youji had found this screwdriver several years ago. Tools from the Sublimation War Era were not especially expensive, but they were extremely practical, so Youji had kept it. The head of an electromagnetic screwdriver could be finely adjusted according to its target. If detailed parameters were entered, it could even double as a universal key.

Of course, in this era, finding a mechanical lock was difficult.

The man was replacing old, worn parts inside his arm with newer ones. Replacing some transmission components could slightly increase the arm's output. This was something he had been doing all along. At his current stage, these two arms were all he had. If they broke, he would return to being nothing but a head.

His pupils constantly expanded and contracted, adjusting focus. A few days earlier, the man had been surprised to discover that his eyes seemed to be quite valuable. They were directly linked to his nerves and could zoom freely, allowing him to clearly see objects several kilometers away at maximum range. He did not know their exact specifications, but whenever he set their visual capabilities to a higher level, the cheap chip in his head issued overheating warnings. Sometimes, his vision even began dropping frames.

Now he truly understood why things like Metal Eyelids existed. These eyes really were high-end goods, worth building specialized protection for.

"All right..." The man quickly finished his repairs and prepared to reattach his arm.

Beep beep! A horn blared. A cloud of dust came rolling toward him. The man was startled and immediately closed the casing of his left arm, pinned it down with his head, then slapped his right hand against 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.

Plants seemed to be scarce in this era. 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 a few had gone missing now, he would truly be in trouble.

A thunderous rumble came from before him. A huge 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 now! None of your screws went missing, right?"

The voice sounded rough, like the throat of an old man who had smoked and drunk himself hoarse for thirty years under the poison of nicotine and alcohol. Clearly, this guy was more willing than Yulia to spend money on himself and had bought a voiceprint package.

"Are you insane?" "Yawg" was irritated. "Enoch, if you like Yulia, go find Yulia. What's the point of making trouble for me?"

Enoch was another piece of engineering machinery in the village. He seemed to have been infected by the Silver Disease Bacteria in his teens 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 he probably had no savings at all because he spent money so freely.

He had feelings for Yulia, the village's only female engineering machine.

Yulia was not especially disgusted by him. But the concept of a Household had long vanished from her mind. The concept of "Household" was sacred; it marked humanity's bloodlines and genes. Every person was obligated to use "Household" and "name" to label their genes, ensuring that lords could better account for genetic diversity when establishing human gene banks. But the two of them had nothing but brains left. There was no need for them to form a Household.

Rather, Enoch's habit of constantly rubbing and bumping against her made Yulia quite uncomfortable. They were both heavy machinery, and a careless collision could damage them. Every time Enoch shamelessly edged close, Yulia was terrified. Even if Enoch was skilled behind the wheel, the anti-rust paint scraped off Yulia still cost money to replace.

And now, "Yawg" was living in the home of Yulia's son. That made Enoch dislike him intensely.

"Yawg," meanwhile, found it baffling. He truly did not understand how engineering machinery 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 as his engine roared. "Bastard, listen carefully. I pity you because you're trash now, so I gave you a chance. You've been staying at Yulia's son's home for so many days already, haven't you? Now you even have prosthetic limbs... shouldn't you get the hell out?"

The man almost thought the tires would crush his body. At that moment, a thought uncontrollably emerged in his mind.

—Go with the momentum and fall forward, into the inside of the tire...

—He won't have time to turn...

—Grab the rotating axle...

—Use vibration to loosen the screws...

Countless mechanical diagrams...

Even more tactical combinations...

Moves...

The man's head began to hum. The ventilation fan he had just installed started working. A cheap civilian chip could not support calculations of this magnitude. The man nearly began to tremble.

—What is happening to me? What is this...?

Enoch noticed that the man did not respond, that only his two arms were trembling faintly. He assumed the guy had been scared senseless and disdainfully spat a puff of black exhaust from his tailpipe. In the end, he did not dare actually run over "Yawg." 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 granted by civilization.

Enoch's tires swayed twice. "I'm warning you, you'd better move out of Yulia's son's home soon. You have three months at most... no, two months! Got it? Before the next Gene Tax! Otherwise, I have ten thousand ways to make your life miserable!"