The elevator stopped at the third floor below ground with a ding. The metal rod in the incubator was so hot that it could fry an egg. I grabbed Kailan's hand and rushed out the door. As soon as my soles touched the ground, I slipped - the floor was covered with sticky coolant, just like the fish-flavored pork soup I spilled yesterday.
"Left!" Kailan suddenly pulled my arm. I instinctively used the "snake-like movement" I used to avoid the urban management when running orders. The electromagnetic cannon behind me "boomed" past my shoulder and burned a charred hole in the wall. In the light of the fire, I saw that the metal door at the end of the passage was covered with golden lines, exactly the same as the burn on Kailan's wrist.
She raised the broken silver bracelet chain, and the fragments automatically spelled out "XM" in front of the keyhole - the little sun she secretly drew on the package of the first rice ball I gave her was also in this shape. "This is the backdoor left by SUSAN's sister." Kailan's voice trembled, "She said that the real password is hidden in the warmest memory."
Behind the door is an inverted pyramid-shaped hall, with tens of thousands of data cables hanging from the ceiling. Each cable is soaked in a transparent jar with human figures floating inside - there are old ladies I have sent to, the oden auntie at the convenience store, and SUSAN putting on makeup in the office building. Kailan suddenly pointed to the top of the tower: "Look! That's the core of the 'Eye of Eros' my dad mentioned, the symbol drawn on the sausage wrapping paper!"
The alarm sounded like an electric car alarm, and Brother Chen crawled out of the pile of cables, with the mechanical arm under his suit glowing blue. "Run, keep running." He raised his hand and fired a shot. I hugged Kailan and rolled into the pile of cables. The cold liquid poured into my collar, but I heard the system barrage buzzing in my head:
[Resonance of the first-generation controller detected! Start 1903 Lab Log]
A scene suddenly flashed before my eyes: On a snowy night when I was seven years old, Kailan's father stuffed a metal stick into my schoolbag. When he turned around, the hem of his white coat was stained with the same burnt marks as Brother Chen's heels. "So he knew..." Kailan's voice was stuck in her throat, "He knew we would be chased by the system, so he programmed the delivery route into a firewall!"
Brother Chen's mechanical arm suddenly got stuck, and I took advantage of the opportunity to throw out the metal stick - the arm strength I had trained from carrying 30 kilograms of lunch boxes came in handy at this moment, and the cracks on the stick spelled out the Morse code of "abnormal order processing" in the data light. Kailan took the opportunity to smash the third cooling pipe, and white mist "boomed" out, the same smell as the white smoke emitted by my electric car when I delivered orders in heavy rain.
"Keep knocking!" I pulled Kailan's sleeve and rushed forward, suddenly remembering what Brother Zhang said at the scrapyard: "The sound of the metal stick is in the same rhythm as your heartbeat." I closed my eyes and felt the jumping in my chest - the thumping when I delivered rice balls to Kailan, the thumping when I received bad reviews, now all turned into the golden light on the metal stick.
Kailan's fingertips flew on the virtual keyboard, typing not codes, but the graffiti on the back of our university schedule, the production date of expired rice balls in the convenience store, and the sausage number that she always said was "sweeter than the system data." Every time a number was entered, the golden ball on the top of the tower would light up one point, and Brother Chen's mechanical arm would shake three times.
"Do you think you can win?" Brother Chen suddenly laughed, and the scene of Wang Mengmeng's delivery room flashed on his lens - the nurse was holding a glowing baby and backing away, and Wang Mengmeng was holding the railing of the delivery bed, wearing the same silver bracelet and broken chain as Kailan. "The new host has been born. How many reincarnations can your broken code withstand?" Kailan's hands were shaking so badly that I saw the last digit in her input box was exactly the due date of Wang Mengmeng's child.
The golden ball suddenly burst into strong light, and all the data cables broke at the same time. Brother Chen's figure gradually became transparent in the light, and finally only a muttered sentence remained: "What Professor Kai hid the most was the frequency of your first heartbeat..." The system prompt tone suddenly turned into the "sizzling" sound of a sausage roasting machine. My phone vibrated. It was not a reminder for an order, but a new text message: "Yangguang Community Building 3, Kailan, needs to be delivered - the snow in 2012, and the hot rice balls every day in the future." Kailan looked at the small sun sticky note on the back of my work card and suddenly smiled, but tears fell down: "Xiaoming, do you remember when you were seven years old, you said that metal rods could protect the world?" I touched the metal rod that was gradually cooling in the incubator, and suddenly heard the siren of a fire truck in the distance.
At the end of the corridor on the negative third floor, the light of the convenience store shines in through the vents, exactly the same as the convenience store on that snowy night seven years ago. The burn on Kailan's wrist is still glowing, reflecting the slowly dimming golden ball on the top of the tower - it turns out that the real core of the system is every second we stop for each other on the way to deliver orders.
The phone vibrates again, this time it's the notification sound of the delivery APP. I clicked it and saw that it was Wang Mengmeng's new order. The note read: "The first order for the baby, I want a warm fairy tale book, and... a heartbeat that can protect him." Kailan leaned over to take a look, and her eyelashes cast a small fan-like shadow under her eyes, just like when we first met in the university cafeteria.
"Shall we go?" I shook the incubator, which contained not only the metal rod but also the powder dispenser left by SUSAN. "Let's go see that kid, and by the way..."
"By the way, teach him how to avoid the system's tracking orders?" Kailan wiped her tears and put the broken silver bracelet chain back on her wrist. "Let's make a deal first, you have to pay for all the grilled sausages for his full moon party."
The alarm outside the passage was still ringing, but I suddenly stopped panicking. Although the golden light of the metal rod was weak, the temperature of Kailan's fingertips was real. The lights of the convenience store stretched our shadows long, casting a crooked "Eros Eye" on the coolant on the ground - if you look closely, it's clearly two small suns stacked together, much warmer than the system barrage.
(In the delivery room in the distance, Wang Mengmeng gently rocked the baby in her arms. The golden light on the child's palm slowly faded to flesh-pink, but a faint burn mark appeared on the wrist, faintly resonating with the broken metal stick in the incubator. The monitoring screen at the nurse station suddenly went black, and when it lit up again, all the system bullet screens turned into a line of small words: [Natural host detected, new delivery route started——])