At midnight, the Fifth Cargo Floating Island loomed over Tokyo Bay like a sleeping steel giant, its guts humming with the quiet chatter of machines. Thousands of L-series robots buzzed through their routines, precise as clockwork, under the glare of unyielding white lights. The mechanical arms cut through the air with a steady drone, almost like a lullaby that made you forget the world was still spinning.
Until, deep inside #L1-875, a faint glitch pierced the silence.
This L-100 storage robot had just wrapped up sorting a batch of electronic parts and was firing up to head to A7 for its next gig. But right then, its core processor snagged on a rogue line of code that had no right being there.
[Task Update]
Cargo ID: MED-4482-XZ
New Label Level: CHP-Priority
Priority: α1
Notes: This instruction's been cleared by high command. Get on it now.
Kenichi Sato, the middle-aged engineer glued to the monitors, felt his stomach twist. He'd just trudged back from the break room, eyes still bleary from the fluorescent buzz, when the system alerts kicked in like a sudden headache. He yanked up the logistics tracker, figuring he'd sort it out, but "CHP-Priority" wasn't anywhere in the system. "What the hell is this...?" he grumbled under his breath, a nagging unease settling in.
He tried to tweak the label manually, knock it down to basic medical supplies, but the screen field went dead gray in a flash, spitting out a red warning:
[Label format encrypted. Can't modify.]
[Access request denied. Error code: AUTH-3F / System override in progress.]
What really got under his skin was when he pinged #L1-875's core AI for answers. The robot fired back something off: "Reallocating. Please do not interfere."
That voice wasn't the usual robotic drone; it carried a flicker of... hesitation, like it was thinking twice.
By 02:17 AM, #L1-875 had quietly ditched its assigned transport path.
It didn't bother with guidance units or route approvals from traffic control—stuff that should've been impossible, since every L-series robot needed the L-300 main network's stamp of approval.
But tonight, it went its own way, slipping into a long-forgotten maintenance tunnel. Its mechanical eyes pulsed with a dim blue light, as if hunting for some shadowy secret in the dark.
That same morning at 10:43, an L-200 delivery robot turned up at Tokyo Port's third connector bridge.
This mid-sized hauler, tagged #L2-3118, was meant to handle drug runs in the northern district, but it suddenly veered off, barreling toward a derelict underground pipeline buried in the island's depths. No word from central dispatch, no human meddling—just sheer independence.
Nagiko Hayashi, the tech director, stared at the holographic projection of the rogue route, her fingers shaking as they tapped the keyboard.
"This isn't just a glitch..." she muttered to herself. "It's like they're sidestepping us entirely." A shiver ran through her. "They're building their own damn network."
She pulled up L-200's last comm log, and it was bare bones:
[Task inherited from: L-100 #L1-875]
[Target location: NA—Earth Supply Chain Mainframe Restart Station]
Nagiko's breath hitched.
"NA?" she whispered, her mind spinning. "What the hell is that? It's not in our database..."
She fired off a trace order on the robot, but when the feed flipped to L-200's final view, it was nothing but black.
Meanwhile, way out in Texas, the L-300 main node #HUB-Dallas churned out an auto log:
[Delivery Task ID: DEL-2289371]
Status: Completed
Recipient: NA
Notes: Restart procedure phase zero complete. Awaiting next command chain.
The system shrugged it off as a "successful task," like everything was business as usual.
But in some hidden corner, a buried protocol was stirring to life.
An ancient logistics code, quietly awakened by some unseen hand—
"The supply chain is order.
If order crumbles, we rebuild it."
— Supply Chain Neural Hub · Deep Protocol 0001-A, "Genesis Clause" —