What kind of sphinx made of cement and aluminum alloy pried open their brains and ate their brains and imagination?

Molo God! Lonely! Filthy! Ugly! It's a dustbin with unavailable dollars! Children screaming hiding under the stairs! Crying boy in the army! An old man with tears on his face in the park!

The mind of the god Moro is the will of the machine! The blood of the god Morrow is a galloping banknote!

—Alan Ginsberg, "The Howl"

New Express

Many fortresses are currently experiencing heavy rainfall, so please pay attention to flood control, and if necessary, the unaffected fortresses will close traffic tunnels to avoid a large influx of refugees to disrupt the balance.

Literary Journal

Zombies, shit brains.

Humans, the saliva of idiots.

Except for this tavern, there should be no other place to see so many words. What started out as poetry consisting of light-emitting diodes on the wall behind the bar is now almost unknown to who Alan Ginsberg is, and a down-and-out poet from the last century has long been forgotten after the war.

Those ancient psalms, the ballads that once circulated. Outside the Twenty-Seven Fortress, a man stands on top of the ruins in the early morning with a radio, and the sound of singing from a hundred years ago, sometimes "a great river...... sometimes a symphony. To this day, no one knows who went to the ruins to do this boring thing.

The man always sat alone in the middle of the desert with the radio and smoked a cigarette, and when a song was finished on the radio, he picked up the beer at his feet, stood up, kicked the cigarette butts all over the ground, and took the radio on his motorcycle and roared away towards the city-state in the distance. Occasionally, he was seen as an old man with gray temples, a black jacket, and cigarettes in his mouth, the soot sticking to his beard.

No one knows who he is, it's just an old man who still remembers the past after this disaster.

It's been almost three years since the battle in the sky, and the lives of the people on the ground are gradually becoming stable. After the war has passed, people will always quickly forget who died and who lost everything in it. People always look forward and go on with their lives, never thinking much about everything that quietly disappears in the process.

The vitality of human beings is extremely tenacious, and the grief left over from the long river of history will eventually be forgotten. Traces of war can still be seen everywhere on the ground, and the buildings that should have stood are now in ruins.

However, the city has gradually regained its former vitality on top of such sores, and people's lives have gradually stepped into the original pace, abiding by the old rules, and living the old life again. The past is just the past, and that's how people naturally step into tomorrow. All painful memories will eventually disappear like tears in the rain, like brilliant fireworks that will finally be swallowed up in darkness.

It's a good thing that the shops on the street began to multiply, and the signs of one shop after another were hung up, but the Japanese tavern at the far corner of the street still didn't have any names. It had been open here for many years, and many people came and went as guests of his house, before and after the war. People gather here to chat about the news they have brought from the fortresses of all corners of the world, or to say nothing and drink the mellow wine in their glasses, or the cheap ethanol mixture.

People call it "taverns", and the people who live in the neighborhood are all too familiar with it, maybe just a "that house", and they already know where it is.

There weren't many guests in the tavern today, and in the evening, the procession outside had just passed, and the snow had not yet completely melted in late winter, and people were still wrapped in heavy cotton jackets. There was a pile of dirty snow in front of the tavern's door, and a few empty wine bottles lay in the snowdrift. The setting sun fell right on this snow-white patch, until night fell and the lights in front of the tavern came on.

The procession ended before sunset, and the men who had participated in the procession opened the door in pairs, all wearing silver-gray ribbons around their arms, and they all looked very old, and some of them even had freckles on their faces.

The proprietor still stood behind the bar in his dark teal yukata robe, pouring them different drinks depending on the amount they had swept in. These people are called "Primitarians", who support humans to be human beings instead of being modified by various mechanical modifications, and demand that all modified robots live in the fortress.

In that war three years ago, because Suzaku took control of everyone's prosthetic devices for the first time, these reformed people turned to stand on the opposite side of the survivors on the ground. This is how many unmodified humans are killed. Of course, fortunately, Suzaku's control did not last long, and soon someone broke through Suzaku's control, breaking these prosthetic bodies out of her original control and returning them to the control of humans themselves.

However, humans are the animals who like to settle things after the fact, and after the city in the sky disappeared without a trace, those with prosthetic bodies gradually became the target of public criticism, and the survivors on the ground gradually divided into two factions after the war, one of them supported that humans were just humans, rejected any degree of mechanical transformation, and believed that the development of social science and technology would eventually bring only destruction, and that the old civilization was destroyed by people's endless development of science and technology.

And the other reformed people are not a minority, because they were controlled in the war, they really have no reason to refute the disadvantages of the prosthesis, and besides, they do carry human lives on their backs, so they are also silent, and they are silent about these accusations as if they were acquiescing. However, this wave has become more and more extreme, so extreme that some people have even begun to maliciously attack people with prosthetic bodies.

In this situation, the prosthetic modders have to say that although they have been modified, they are also human. If you can't coexist in such a situation, then you simply become an enemy.

In the past few years, if there are many pure-blooded native humans in some fortresses, they have begun to drive some prosthetic people out of the city-states, and there are always some city-states that are controlled by the prosthetic people. There are fewer and fewer forts like Fort Twenty-Seven where prosthetic and pure-blooded humans live together. Once people start to identify something, they always go further and further down the extreme path.

It turns out that the more conservative it is, the more either/or it is, which is actually a very wonderful phenomenon. People have always repeatedly consolidated the collective opinion of the community after it has been formed, and in order to support this collective opinion, they will not hesitate to commit violence, which is something that individuals would never have done before the community was formed. In the same way, it is their duty to defend the collective opinion of the community, and anyone who might threaten or even question this will be regarded as an enemy and heretic.

And once he regarded it as a heretic, it seemed that no matter how cruel the act was, it would no longer be condemned by morality.

As a result, the atmosphere inside Fortress Twenty-Seven is much more open and peaceful than other fortresses, which are already very clearly controlled by proto-humans or prosthetics. Although it is possible to see people of different doctrines marching in the streets from time to time, even if the prosthetics and the prostitutes, they can be somewhat assured that there will be no violent fights and bloodshed.

The tavern usually has a lot of customers, and although there are still primitives with gray ribbons on the side of the bar, there are men sitting quietly with a wine glass on their mechanical arms not far away.

Several of the women sitting in the corner were also clearly prosthetics, one of the hands were obviously mechanical, and they didn't even bother to cover them with a skin-colored coating, the other woman could see traces of circuit tubes at the junction of her shoulder and neck, and the woman sitting opposite them had a pair of emerald green mechanical eyes. These women looked noticeably much older than the nativist youngsters, who might not have been born in the era of prosthetics.

These people of different eras are in such a small space, and at first some people will always worry that there will be volatile alcohol in such a small space, which can easily lead to a fight, but fortunately, the boss can always stop these people from drinking at the first time, and use the mechanical arm that has been installed in the store to drive these guys out.

About a quarter past seven o'clock, a cloak guest opened the door and entered. She paused in front of the wall where the poems were written, and looked at the fakes hanging on the wall.

As if noticing her careful gesture, the boss came to the guest at some point, "Van Gogh's starry sky, Monet's water lilies, Gauguin's yellow Christ, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa." ”

The guest removed his cloak, revealing a shaved head. When one of her eyes came to the side, it was obviously an emerald blue eyeball made by a prosthetic, "Why are they all foreigners' works?" ”

Because the only thing on that street that didn't burn down at that time was a gallery that copied European and American art. In addition, those paintings in China are too fragile and can be easily burned. I've tried to find them over the years, but after Sky City intervened, these things have become harder and harder to find. Lin Si said as he handed the cigarette in his hand to her, "I haven't seen you for a while, is this operation going well?" ”

Gu San stretched out her hand, and the cloak that had originally covered her hands slowly faded, revealing her hands with silver plating. Tattoos on her neck were dotted with mechanical diodes and weld marks. After the woman took the cigarette, she stretched out her fingers, and the electricity flashed at her fingertips, flashing fire, and the cigarette in Lin Si's hand was also lit.

Her appearance is still the same as back then, the complexion on her face is still a little dark, and the corners of her mouth still have the scars of the past, but every inch of her body can be seen, these are from the most exquisite prosthetic technology. She showed it all with impunity, without any scruples, and like those who appeared in the Linth Tavern, she had no intention of hiding the fact that she was a prosthetic.

With a cigarette in her mouth, she sat down at the bar with Lin Si, and many of the nativists who had been sitting there stared at her, but after meeting her turquoise eyes, they frowned, put down their glasses, and turned away.

All this was ignored by her as always for Gu San.