Chapter 1 — The King of Garbage

"In a world where color is a crime, the first gesture is always a signature."Fragment from the Codex UZUME.AKARI

1.1 — The Robot Pit

The oil smelled like burnt caramel and defeat.

Mana pushed his mop between the debris, scraping the sticky floor of the arena where the metal still smoked. Around him, the makeshift bleachers—stacked crates, gutted containers, a tram wreck suspended by cables like a gutted metal whale—were emptying in a cacophony of frustrated bettors. The bookmakers counted their fingers (literally, in some cases) while someone puked in a corner, the wet sound mixing with the crackle of dying pink neons above the pit.

Welcome to Manila-Drift.

Ocean periphery of UZUME.AKARI's territory, moored to the floating ruins of old Manila port, in the Philippine archipelago. A place where the laws of Kyoto-Ame arrived three weeks late and left empty-handed, slightly embarrassed.

Mana was fourteen years old. Or fifteen. Maybe sixteen—birth records had burned with the ferry that brought him here, and frankly, nobody had given a damn about creating new papers for him. He existed in the system's margins, a syntax error that census algorithms corrected by ignoring it. A bug. A ghost. A chameleon.

"Hey, Chameleon! Faster!"

Groko. The local boss. A guy whose body looked like it had been assembled from spare parts by a drunk mechanic: one arm too long, one shoulder higher than the other, a smile that never touched his eyes. He wore a synthetic leather jacket adorned with chrome rivets, and when he talked, his hands moved on their own, things with their own agenda.

Mana straightened up. Changed his posture—his shoulders slumped, his jaw relaxed, and something else slid across his face. A mask. When he answered, his voice had taken on Groko's own drawling inflections:

"Yeah, yeah, boss. I'm cleaning, I'm cleaning. No need to... no need to get worked up like that, it's bad for the heart, y'know?"

Groko blinked. For a second—just one—he saw his own reflection in the grimy kid facing him. The gait, the right hand tic, down to the way he tilted his head. Then he burst out laughing, a greasy laugh that made his jowls shake and probably a few laws of physics.

"You're a funny little shit. Keep that up and you'll end up hanged or rich."

"Why not both, boss? Must be nice, the view from up there."

Mana went back to work while his brain catalogued. Automatic. Compulsive. Groko leaned on his left leg when he was scared. Touched his right pocket—the knife. Voice that rose half a tone when he was lying.

Survive. Mirror. Copy.

That was all.

Mana didn't really know who he was when he was alone. He tried not to think about it too much. The answer that came was...

Nobody.

Just layers. Borrowed characters. An onion without—

He stopped thinking. The metaphor was stupid. Everything was stupid.

He kicked a piece of debris. A mechanical arm. Fingers clenched on nothing.

He forgot what he was thinking.

On a cracked screen, hanging crooked above the makeshift bar, characters scrolled by—too fast to read, too slow to ignore:

STATUS: UNDER EVALUATION / SELECTION PROTOCOL / PHASE 0

Mana frowned. Nobody else seemed to notice. The text disappeared, replaced by an ad for cheap dental implants ("SMILE WITHOUT SHAME — PAY IN 48 INSTALLMENTS").

He shrugged and kept cleaning.

1.2 — Tolerated Art

The sound rose first—a low vibration that snaked between rusted partitions, circled generators, and lodged itself directly in the marrow of bones.

Mana heard it before he saw it. Something older than classified music, more dangerous than the rhythms approved by the Sound Conformity Committee. Something wild.

He followed the sound to Wreck Cove, a zone of Manila-Drift where ship carcasses piled up, a cemetery of metal whales. The crowd had gathered in silence—hundreds of people pressed against each other, their faces bathed in the pink glow of contraband neons.

At the center, it danced.

KIRA-7. The robot-dancer.

Everyone in Manila-Drift had heard the stories. An industrial maintenance unit, reconditioned thirty years ago by an engineer whose name had been lost in History's background noise. Someone had taught it to dance—or maybe it had learned on its own, by watching humans, absorbing their gestures, understanding something they had forgotten themselves.

KIRA-7 didn't have a face in the human sense—just an oval reflective surface where spectators saw themselves reflected. But its body moved with impossible grace, joints that pivoted at angles human flesh couldn't even conceive, fluid movements that showed gravity the door and never called it back.

The music came from everywhere and nowhere at once. Rigged speakers, makeshift instruments, human voices humming in chorus something without words but that said everything. Illegal. Magnificent. The only real thing Mana had seen in months, maybe years, maybe his whole damn life.

He slipped through the crowd, hypnotized.

Next to him, an old woman cried silently, tears tracing furrows in the grime on her cheeks. A tattooed dockworker tapped his foot, his massive body swaying despite himself, despite everything, despite regulations and protocols and fines. A child, perched on her father's shoulders, laughed—a pure, crystalline laugh, almost obscene in this world of administered silence.

The pink neons stained skin, clothes, faces. For an instant, everyone was pink. Everyone was beautiful. Everyone was fucking alive.

Mana closed his eyes.

And felt something move in him. His breath aligned with the rhythm. His heart beat in unison with the crowd. A shiver ran down his neck. Gentle. Playful. Slightly creepy.

Yo. You hear me?

He snapped his eyes open, searching for the voice's source. Nobody was looking at him. Just the crowd in trance, the robot dancing, the neons bleeding their pink light over everything.

Don't worry. Not the right time yet. But soon. Very soon.

Mana shook his head. Too much fatigue. Not enough sleep. Oil fumes. The remains of lunch (wet cardboard with a hint of "protein" on it). Hallucinations, obviously. His brain acting up.

KIRA-7 executed an impossible pirouette, arms deployed, its reflective surface catching the pink light and dispersing it in kaleidoscopic shards. The entire crowd held its breath as one.

And Mana understood something.

Something that had always eluded him: he didn't know what he liked. He knew how to imitate. He knew how to copy. But there, before this dancing machine, he felt for the first time the lack. The absence of a passion of his own. The void at the mirror's center.

A mirror with nothing to reflect, what is it? Just glass.

The robot froze, arms stretched toward the artificial sky.

Silence. Three seconds. Heavy.

Then someone clapped, and the crowd exploded in muffled cheers—never too loud, the sensors could hear—and Mana stood there, in the midst of this cautious, clandestine joy, wondering if he would ever be capable of creating something rather than simply reflecting what others had already done.

The neons flickered. Once. Twice.

Somewhere in the night, a drone changed trajectory.

1.3 — Standardization

They arrived without sirens.

That's what made them terrifying: the total absence of theater. No flashing lights, no megaphones, no "YOU ARE SURROUNDED." The Standardization units of KARTIKEYA.X emerged from adjacent alleys with the precision of a well-calibrated algorithm. Twelve identical silhouettes, two meters tall, clad in gray armor without the slightest ornament or fancy. Their visors were rectangles of frosted glass that reflected nothing—the absolute opposite of KIRA-7, in a way.

Each carried a luminous tablet. And that was perhaps the worst part: the paperwork. The idea that you could be erased with a form.

The crowd froze. Prey silence. Game silence.

"Urban conformity. Sector 7-K. Scan in progress."

The voice was synthetic, without gender or emotion. It came from everywhere at once.

"Unreferenced activity detected. Classification: unauthorized cultural gathering. Status: category 3 infraction."

A unit advanced toward KIRA-7, who hadn't moved. The robot-dancer remained frozen in its last pose, arms stretched toward a sky that didn't exist.

"Unregistered mechanical unit. No operating license. No cultural certification. Rectification protocol: immediate dismantling."

Someone in the crowd let out a cry—immediately stifled by a hand over their mouth. You don't cry out before the Order. You don't protest. You don't make a scene. You watch, and you hope not to be the next name on the list.

Mana stepped back. Then another step. His survival instinct screamed in his head, an old dock rat reflex: disappear, you little shit. Blend into the crowd, become invisible, be the thing that goes unnoticed. That's what you do best.

But his feet refused to cooperate.

He watched the units encircle KIRA-7 with their mechanical gestures, their blinking tablets, their protocols displaying in green letters on black background:

OBJECT: Non-conforming entertainment unitACTION: Confiscation and recyclingJUSTIFICATION: Article 17-B of Narrative Stability CodeANTICIPATED RESISTANCE: None

One of the units pulled out a tool—something that looked like a soldering iron crossed with a scalpel—and applied it to KIRA-7's torso. A sizzle. A smell of burning plastic. The robot's lights flickered, half went out, came back, went out again.

"No."

The word had come out before Mana could stop it. From his mouth, apparently. Out loud. In the silence. In front of everyone.

Shit.

A gray visor pivoted toward him with the deliberate slowness of a predator that doesn't need to run.

"Citizen. Your intervention constitutes a level 1 obstruction. Please identify yourself and step aside."

Panic surged instantly. His guts knotted. But there was something else too, something unexpected. Something hot, furious, burning under his ribs.

The old woman who had been crying earlier grabbed his arm, pulled him back with surprising strength for someone her age.

"Shut up, kid," she whispered. "Shut up and stay alive. That's all that matters."

He let himself be dragged away, his heart beating so hard he could hear blood pulsing in his temples.

The units continued their work. Methodically. Efficiently. Without pleasure or cruelty—which was worse, far worse than any ordinary violence. A sadist, you can understand. A sadist has emotions. These things only had processes.

They dismantled KIRA-7 piece by piece, filing each component in labeled containers with librarian precision:

METAL: RecyclingCIRCUITS: AnalysisMEMORY CORE: Erasure

The last element to be removed was the reflective surface that served as the robot's face. A unit held it up to the light, as if searching for something—its own reflection, perhaps, or proof of a soul that had never existed. Then it let it fall to the ground, where it shattered into a thousand shards.

A thousand mirrors. A thousand reflections of the petrified crowd. A thousand fragments of beauty just reduced to a checked box on a form.

"Rectification complete. Zone declared conforming. Orderly dispersal."

The crowd dispersed in silence. Nobody picked up the pieces. Nobody dared cry too loudly. Tears too, you had to keep discreet. Non-conforming grief had a price.

Mana stayed until the end, hidden behind a container that reeked of rotten fish, watching the units leave with their containers full of what had been KIRA-7. Art crushed like an expired file. Joy classified, archived, erased.

When the last unit disappeared around the corner, he approached the debris.

Among the mirror shards, something glowed. A small rectangular module, barely bigger than a fist, that the agents had missed or deemed negligible. It pulsed with a pale pink light. It still pulsed.

Mana picked it up.

It was warm. It vibrated against his palm.

Bingo, said the voice in his head.

He decided to ignore it. For now.

1.4 — The Stolen Smiley

The module vibrated in his pocket. Nervous.

Mana ran. Behind him, footsteps—Groko's men, probably, who had seen the theft and smelled opportunity. Or freelance bounty hunters. Or just vultures.

Manila-Drift wasn't big, but it was a demented labyrinth. Decades of anarchic construction had created a network of walkways, ladders, tunnels, and false ceilings that only natives really knew. And even then, "knew" was a strong word. Let's say you survived long enough to memorize the ten or twenty routes that didn't lead directly to death.

Mana was one of them. He had mapped every corner in his head, every hiding spot, every shortcut, every pipe wide enough to squeeze through and dark enough to hide in.

He dove into an abandoned elevator shaft, gripped the greasy cables, hoisted himself up while his pursuers cursed below in at least three different languages. His arms burned. So did his lungs. But fear was an efficient fuel.

The module still pulsed in his pocket. And with each pulse, Mana felt something changing in him, as if the object was communicating directly with his nervous system, whispering possibilities he couldn't yet understand.

Go up. Higher.

The voice was back. Or maybe it had never really left.

"Shut up," Mana muttered between gasps.

Charming.

He emerged on the roof of a storage warehouse, panting, hands bloody, lungs on fire. Manila-Drift's artificial sky glowed above him—a dome of LED lights simulating stars for those who had forgotten what real night looked like. A pathetic counterfeit.

Footsteps on the stairs. They were coming up.

Mana pulled the module from his pocket and examined it in the artificial light of fake stars. A miniaturized propulsion system—a proto-Cloud, as they called these personal levitation devices that officially existed only in KARTIKEYA.X's labs. This one had been modified, tinkered with, improved with salvaged components. Beautiful with that desperate beauty things have when built by people with nothing but their hands and their refusal to die.

KIRA-7 had danced with this. This was what allowed those impossible movements, those jumps that showed gravity the door.

"Up there!"

Mana looked up. A surveillance drone had just appeared above the roof, its sensors scanning the area. In a few seconds, it would have identified him. A few seconds more, and the Standardization units would be there.

No more choice.

He activated the module.

The sensation was instant: an energy field enveloped him, lifted him from the ground, and suddenly he was floating—holy shit, he was floating—carried by an invisible wave that didn't quite know where it was going but was going there full speed anyway.

"Unidentified citizen. Possession of unauthorized equipment. Immobilization recommended."

The drone was charging at him. Mana did the only thing that came to mind: he dove. Forward. Into the void.

The proto-Cloud responded with a delay, sending his body into a completely uncontrolled spiral. The world spun—roof, sky, lights, faces, the ground coming up way too fast—and Mana screamed, a cry that was half terror, half pure exhilaration, because it was terrifying and magnificent and it was the first time in his life he was doing something that wasn't an imitation of someone else.

He hit something. A walkway, probably. Pain exploded in his shoulder—hot and electric, pulsing to his fingertips. The proto-Cloud sputtered, its energy nearly spent.

In front of him, a Standardization unit.

It had intercepted him. Its sensors were already scanning him. Its tablet displayed data scrolling like a sentence:

SUBJECT: Unidentified (Database: no match)INFRACTIONS: Theft of classified technology / Flight / Illegal use of personal propulsionRECOMMENDATION: Immediate detention for cognitive rectification

The unit reached toward him—an almost gentle, almost paternal gesture.

"Citizen. Your cooperation will minimize discomfort."

Mana stood up. His shoulder screamed, each movement sending lightning bolts of pain to his jaw. The proto-Cloud hung from his belt, dead or dying. No more escape possible. No more hiding.

So he did something else.

He smiled.

A real smile. Something that belonged to him, even if he didn't know where it came from or why he was doing it.

And with the trembling fingers of his good hand, he pulled from his pocket the metal shard he had picked up in the arena—still stained with pink oil, that oil that smelled like burnt caramel and defeat. He brought it to the unit's visor, that gray rectangle that reflected nothing, and he drew.

A circle.

Two dots.

An upward curve.

A smiley.

Bright pink on dull gray. A splash of color on administrative void.

The unit remained motionless for a fraction of a second—an eternity in machine time. Its protocols churned, unable to classify what had just happened. Vandalism? Assault? Art? Provocation? System error?

In that fraction of a second, Mana leaped.

He never really knew how he managed to reach the edge of the walkway, how he survived the three-story fall, how the proto-Cloud found enough energy for one last desperate burst that cushioned his landing in a textile waste container.

He lay there, buried in old clothes that reeked of sweat and disinfectant and something that was probably mold, breathless, heart pounding. His shoulder screamed. His mouth tasted blood—he had bitten his tongue during the fall.

Above, drones passed. Units patrolled. Orders were barked on frequencies he couldn't hear.

Nobody found him.

Hours later, when calm had returned and searches had moved to other sectors, Mana emerged from the container. He still held the proto-Cloud against him, that little technological heart that had belonged to a dancer.

He looked up at Manila-Drift's dome, at the fake stars blinking, indifferent.

Somewhere out there, on a gray visor, a pink smiley was still smiling.

An absurd gesture. A kid's gesture. A gesture that changed nothing in the equation of power, nothing in the methodical crushing of everything beautiful and alive and free.

But for the first time, Mana hadn't imitated someone else.

For the first time, he had done something that was his alone.

Not bad, said the voice in his head. Not bad at all. We're going to have fun, you and me.

"I told you to shut up."

Yeah, yeah. See ya.

And in Manila-Drift's servers, an alert had just lit up—somewhere in the system's depths, where the AIs sorted the world into reassuring categories:

SUBJECT: UnidentifiedTEMPORARY DESIGNATION: "Smiley"PRIORITY: Enhanced surveillanceNOTE: Atypical behavior. High narrative disruption potential.

Mana sank into the night, the proto-Cloud pressed against his heart.

The smiley was still smiling in the darkness.