Messenger Traversing Hackerspace

Shaped like a pair of ski goggles. It not only blocks glare but can also be used to watch synthetic human livestreams.

To evade the tycoons' private security forces, the Messengers of the Capital of Passion usually travel across the skies of low-security cities.

They like to chew cheap gum, wear modified holovisors, and switch on the pulse circuit to scan the whole high-tech city.

The visor projects the city's real-time information onto the retina, turning impossible routes into aerial corridors for the Messengers: rooftops, air conditioning units, billboards, cranes… even unmanned transport machines can become a link in the corridor. For this reason the Messengers must master skill enough, or a single missed step will send them falling to their death by accident.

“Some bastard hacked into the visor, and I happened to be up in the air at the time. The moment I landed was truly horrifying.”

This “Golden Duck” visor is an old model no longer in production, and it is said to be of great value to enthusiasts of these visors.

A robotic prosthetic arm that can be taken apart at will, able to fire its finger joints like bullets.

Not all Messengers have robotic prosthetic arms, but the Messengers who do always want to modify them. After all, no one can accept that their own high-tech prosthetic looks exactly like someone else's.

The residents of the Capital of Passion are infatuated with high-tech prosthetics, and the city's restrictive regulations can do no more than advise against excessive modification of prosthetic parts.

In the modification standards of the Capital of Passion's registered documents there are only eighteen types across three major categories, which is clearly not enough for Messengers who go against all reason. They spend enormous wages on designs with breakthrough ideas: electronic rotors on the prosthetic that shoot out lightning, prosthetics that launch like rockets… The modification blueprints grow more extravagant by the day, and the Messengers' postage fees have even soared to unimaginable levels.

“Are these Messengers running so fast in order to protect information, or in order to pay for their expensive hobbies?”

After its special modification, this “Golden Duck” prosthetic arm can spin every finger joint at high speed and fire them out like bullets.

A stylish Messenger's mail bag, hung with many different accessories, and rather cute to look at.

The tycoons of the Capital of Passion monitor every flow of information in the city. They regularly manipulate information in order to maintain the rule of the tycoons. Anyone who plots opposition is punished under the public order laws.

People once protested, and so the tycoons quickly and cleverly offered promises. Before long, people had given up “privacy”.

Whether in the real world or the virtual one, whether the information is useful or useless, whether there is little of it or much, the tycoons collect it greedily. Now the Messenger's mail bag has become the last line of defense for “privacy”. The mail bag is light and compact and can hold only chips or documents. Yet it is precisely such small, narrow blind spots of information that guarantee the one remaining “informational independence” in the Capital of Passion.

“Why is it that in the flourishing Capital of Passion there are still people who use channels other than the network to deliver information? The Messengers would like to know that too.”

Although this limited edition “Golden Duck” mail bag is a little out of date, the many varied accessories it is paired with make it look very fashionable.

Sports shoes that assist with parkour. Very comfortable to wear, and that is all.

The Messengers of the Capital of Passion threw away their sneakers and quietly left. Most Messengers leave neither their names nor their traces in this city, and this act is only a rest note to satisfy themselves.

Even the Messengers find it hard to say exactly when “the nature of the Messenger” changed, and the Messengers became the very people they hated most.

Before anyone noticed, the “informational independence” guaranteed by the Messengers had been manipulated; before anyone noticed, the risks the Messengers faced had become a price list; before anyone noticed, the Messengers had become accomplices of the schemers… The tycoons could not destroy them. It was their own immature ideal that betrayed the Messengers. Before everything slipped entirely out of control, the Messengers gathered together and said farewell to their life on the run.

“Perhaps the Messengers should stop here, so that everyone can see this city clearly, and so that the true reformers can act.”

These are the “Golden Duck” sneakers thrown away by the roadside. The Messengers of the Capital of Passion have become a legend of the past.