Outside the window, streams of maglev traffic wove rivers of light through the city's steel canyons. Holographic billboards projected dazzling images advertising the latest neural interfaces, genetic optimization treatments, and the Mars colonization program that would soon launch.
But inside the holographic café called Old Times, time seemed to have turned back two centuries.
A retro wooden counter, yellowed jazz posters, and even an old vinyl record player in the corner, slowly spinning as it played the low voice of some long-forgotten singer. The holographic projections had deliberately been turned down, casting only a soft firelight across the ceiling.
Liu Zhipeng sat in the least conspicuous corner booth, holding a steaming cup of synthetic black coffee.
Synthetic though it was, it actually tasted quite good. The twenty-second century's food industry could already reproduce the flavor of any natural ingredient perfectly at the molecular level.
He wore a somewhat cheap-looking black suit, with loose threads still hanging from the collar. His face was expressionless, like an ordinary office drone who had just finished work and was too tired to do anything but find somewhere to sit and zone out.
If anyone had examined him with the most advanced biological scanners, the result would have been "Ordinary human, healthy, mildly fatigued."
But anyone with sufficiently keen psychic perception would have discovered something profoundly strange-
This man's soul was unfathomable.
It was like a seemingly calm sea, yet when you tried to measure its depth, no matter how much line you let out, the probe never touched bottom. No, more precisely, gazing into his soul gave you the illusion that you were not looking at a person, but through a window into an entire universe, tranquil, vast, and so deep it made your heart tremble.
Liu Zhipeng took a sip of coffee and