The Book of Ships

This book is a collection of side stories for The Luoting Lectureship.Ma Feili and Aida were transferred by the “Final State Mapping Arbitration Bureau” to Lotting University in the core star circle of Neon Capital, under the guise of a promotion. They were appointed as oral history teaching and research fellows for a two-year term.On the surface, their duties were perfectly ordinary: lecturing undergraduate and graduate students, organizing urban memory archives, guiding students in fieldwork collection, and systematically archiving centuries of Neon Capital’s street whispers, family secrets, and urban legends.Only they themselves knew the true meaning of this transfer order — it was both a suspension and bait.Because Neon Capital was no ordinary city.It was a consciousness container repeatedly refined by superconducting networks, a magnifying glass forged by superluminal logistics and the narrative industry, and a living simulation field formed by layer upon layer of personality backups and city-scale scenario systems. The people here had long since outgrown merely “living.” They were continuously recorded, repeatedly narrated, endlessly simulated, and quietly duplicated.Every piece of gossip on the street, every family gathering, and every blockbuster drama adapted from real events silently thickened the city’s “narrative crust.”And what the “Outside” loved most to invade was precisely this: amplified human consciousness and solidified narrative structures.When a city begins to earnestly believe its own legends, to obsessively chew on its own traumas, and to commodify its own memories, what happens?History begins to walk on its own.
Archives begin to speak with their own voices.
Classrooms begin to choose their own students.
Families begin to decide the meaning of bloodlines.
Public opinion begins to judge heretics.
Institutions begin to grow teeth.