The Decaying Dream of America: I Assemble Corpses and Confront Madness

The car drove smoothly in the morning light, and the scenery on the highway outside the window rushed past.

The buildings along the roadside, from towering financial centers to monotonous suburban residences and dilapidated industrial areas, with silent tombstones passing by Lin Zheng's line of sight.

Emilia sat in the passenger seat, her body slightly curled up.

She gazed silently out the window, saying nothing. Only her tightly pursed lips and the occasional trembling of her eyelashes betrayed her inner unease.

Lin Zheng knew what she was going through: the shock of last night, her mother's oppressive presence, and the imposed "fate" that had gripped her soul.

But at that moment, he couldn't utter any words of comfort.

His thoughts raced faster than the car's speed and were more chaotic than the scenery outside the window, constantly leaping and connecting all the fragmented encounters.

The lingering remnants of dreams on the emaciated corpse of a homeless man represent the most primal despair at the very bottom of the slums.

Those cut-up and dismembered "Gundam" parts are the relentless intertwining of flesh and machine deep within the industrial zone.

Mrs. Vincent's seemingly gentle but actually cold eyes divided him and Emilia into two insurmountable classes.

Every word she uttered precisely separated boundaries and defined values, leaving no room for rebuttal.

Lin Zheng opened the navigation screen again, and the cursor moved slowly across the city map.

However, when he tried to zoom in on the area where Vincent's villa was located, the map showed a strange blank space.

There were no street names, no building outlines, and even the signs were blurry, as if that area had been deliberately erased from the world.

On the cold screen, the blank space stood out so starkly against the clearly marked roads and buildings around it.

He suddenly remembered his work ID, an ordinary identity card.

Even so, he still needed it to enter the assembly area deep inside the dock, an area that "does not exist" for ordinary people.

Lin Zheng stared intently at the "invisible area" on the navigation screen, a strange chill running down his spine.

If affluent neighborhoods could be erased from the map, becoming a physically existing yet invisible "white hole"...

So what about the dirtiest and most hidden places in the city?

Are there "black holes" in the world that have been erased from public view in some way?

Garbage piles began to increase along the roadsides, and the air was filled with a mixture of sour and rotten smells, gradually revealing the city's hideous side.

He began a frantic internal dissection of his mind.

Every organ in the human body—the heart, lungs, liver, and stomach—is closely connected within the thoracic and abdominal cavities. Each organ performs its own function while influencing the others, working together to maintain the functioning of life.

Arteries and veins, nerves and lymphatics, like intricate and complex pipelines, run through the entire body, ensuring the smooth flow of information and the circulation of substances.

But this city is not like that.

It is enormous, it is noisy, it has a glamorous exterior, and a dirty and secretive interior.

All of its "internal organs" —

The city's social classes: wealthy areas, financial districts, slums, and industrial areas.

They were separated from each other and placed in invisible "incubators".

Each incubator has its own independent environment, with completely different temperatures, humidity, light, and even internal air composition.

When you are inside, you can only see everything inside the incubator, but you cannot see the world inside the incubator next door, and you are not even aware that it exists.

These incubators have no visible pathways, no shared nervous system, and no unified blood circulation.

The high walls erected by affluent neighborhoods in both the real world and the internet are precisely the "petri dishes" that isolate material things from information.

There, the champagne bubbles are delicate and delightful, the haute couture clothing is silky smooth, every smile is just right, and every word is carefully measured.

There, people can talk about breakthroughs in emerging technologies and grand plans for future development, but they avoid talking about the rampant poverty and the nameless corpses.

The people there live in a nurturing environment built from sophisticated lies.

They breathe "ideal air" that has been filtered and beautified through multiple layers, containing not a trace of the stench and despair of the underworld.

On the other side of the city, deep within those old industrial plants and chaotic port, lies another completely different "incubator".

Here, the stench of overflowing garbage, the sweet and pungent smell of rotting flesh, and the metallic rust of raw metal are suffocating.

There are no refined etiquettes, no meticulous plans, only exploited physical strength, numb faces, and endless repetitive labor.

As a Gundam assembler, he personally handled flesh and blood in this incubator, sensing the deepest pain and distortion of the city.

Lin Zheng's job is to "reassemble" these broken parts from "Nightmare Fuel" according to certain requirements.

He could glimpse the chaotic "remnants of dreams" remaining in these rotting flesh and blood, and sense their pain, fear, and anger.

Those fragmented pieces of information intertwined and tangled in his mind, eventually converging into a cold, hard truth.

The city's "internal organs" are carefully separated, not for aesthetics or order, but for efficiency.

They efficiently transform the despair at the bottom into energy and efficiently transfer it to the "deep sleepers" at the top, maintaining their stability.

This is a higher-level biological phenomenon.

The city itself is a huge, living organism, with its social structure as its body and its class divisions as its "incubator".

Emilia, and her family, are products of the upper "incubator," responsible for maintaining the organism's glossy "skin" and "face."

He himself, and those "Gundam" parts, are products of the bottom "incubator," the "digestive organs" that work silently and continuously consume this organism.

Everyone inside the incubator firmly believes that their world is unique and real.

Those who live in the "white hole" will wholeheartedly believe in the promises of the "American Dream," thinking that wealth and success are within easy reach.

Those who struggle in the "black hole" will firmly believe that there is no salvation in this world, only endless numbness and toil.

Perhaps they might occasionally glimpse or touch each other, but that's just a coincidence.

Emilia was protected in that isolated, idealized "incubator".

The world she knew was a false paradise constructed by the upper class, a beautiful bubble that did not exist in the bloody reality she witnessed.

Lin Zheng slammed on the brakes, the tires screeching against the road, startling Emilia from her reverie.

She turned her head sharply, her emerald green eyes filled with questions and worries, and looked at Lin Zheng.

Lin Zheng did not speak.

He just stared intently at the navigation screen, the blank area of ​​which was particularly glaring in the sunlight.

A question lingered in his mind.

If the communities of the wealthy could be "erased" from the map, becoming an invisible "existence".

So, are those final places for processing urban waste, "Gundam" materials, and all the abandoned people also "erased" from the map, becoming invisible "nothingness"?

Haha, so it turns out that the old men are kind-hearted and can't stand seeing poor people.