Awakening the Daily Intelligence System

Ethan Carter hears the familiar engine roar on his seventh check of the cheap digital watch. The thirteen-year-old’s sneakers were long soaked by the snow, his hand clutching the sketchbook in his canvas bag containing the three-month meticulous copy of "Avril Stone: From Child Star to Oscar Winner" cover photo. As the stretch Lincoln halted like a ghost in the back alley, he saw the dream goddess, draped in a mink coat, approaching leisurely, with the scent of her endorsed Midnight Rose perfume wafting through the air.

"Oh my god!" Avril covered her mouth with both hands, the diamond watch reflecting galaxies under the streetlight, "Did you draw this?" Her trembling fingertips grazed the edge of the sketchbook, but as they touched the paper, she imperceptibly curled her fingers—damn kid, coloring with crayons, ink stained her Chanel gloves.

Ethan felt his heart almost burst through his ribs, stutteringly explaining, "I, I used my part-time job money to buy professional coloring pencils... but the boss said child labor couldn’t..."

"Shh—" Avril suddenly knelt on one knee, an action that caused her million-dollar Harry Winston necklace to dangle into the puddle. She held the boy’s frozen red cheeks, speaking with the choked tone she used to thank her mentor during the Oscar acceptance speech, "You remind me of myself at fourteen, receiving an award at the Saint-Denis Film Festival." In reality, that year she was being frozen out by her agency for stealing props from the set.

As the boy was led into the top-floor presidential suite, Avril gave Marcus a look. The former Marine immediately switched on the jammer, while hiding three GoPros behind the Persian tapestry—paparazzi could never capture her late-night secret rendezvous with the mysterious boy, but it was enough to keep the "Avril supports poor art students" tag trending on Twitter for three days.

"Would you like some hot cocoa?" Avril twirled the bar knob, in actuality hitting the emergency call button. She watched the boy reverently spread the sketchbook on the crystal coffee table, then suddenly grabbed a champagne from the ice bucket and splashed it across the drawings.

"Ah!" Ethan watched in horror as the crayon portrait blurred with the alcohol, "Miss Stone, I’ll redraw it right now..."

"No, it’s more beautiful this way." Avril stroked the dissolving colors with her diamond-studded nail, smiling cruelly at an angle the boy couldn’t see. These filthy pigments were like her life; since being sold to a casting director by her stepfather at nine, each color was a cage built from lies.

When Marcus burst in to "rescue" the "star harassed by the sasaeng (private) fans," Avril was crouched in the corner of the couch sobbing, shredded paper floating like snowflakes into her disheveled hair. The next day’s New York Times entertainment front page featured a photo of the boy being taken away in a police car, with the headline "Genius Child Star Reduced to Capital Plaything? Exposing the Dark Underbelly of Hollywood’s Star-Making Machine."

At this moment, Avril stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, watching the police car lights fade into the distance. She untied her silk robe, letting the cold wind sting the rose tattoo on her chest—the medal she carved with a broken wine bottle the night she won her first Golden Globe. Her phone lit up with a new email notification; Universal Pictures had agreed to her 20% profit-sharing demand for the remake of "Black Swan."

"Tell Lucas, I want to see the donation plan for the San Jose Children’s Home at the breakfast meeting tomorrow." She threw the crayon-crumbled gloves into the fire, the bluish flame reflecting a cold smile on her lips. Outside, the enormous screen in Times Square looped the public service announcement she endorsed, her gentle voice echoing over the Hudson River: "Every child deserves to be treated gently by the world."

New York · Manhattan Star Hotel Top Floor, February 19, 2025 19:08

Outside the floor-to-ceiling window, the spire of the Empire State Building pierced through the twilight, Richard Wolf tossing his Patek Philippe watch onto the Persian carpet. This financial magnate, controlling three hedge funds, was now grinding scattered children’s teeth under his custom crocodile leather shoes—the molars from various ethnicities shone with a pearl luster under the crystal chandelier, much like the illegal diamonds in his collection in the Cayman Islands.

Twelve-year-old Lin Mo twitched unconsciously, nano-fiber ropes cutting data pattern-like wounds into his wrists. Eight hours earlier, this Chinese-American child prodigy, who had just won the New York Youth Technology Award, couldn’t have imagined that his invitation to his idol Alicia Stone’s private tea party would turn him into the latest host for the black market blood bank.

"Type O Rh-negative." Alicia’s mechanical eye scanned the pulsing veins on the boy’s neck; her nails embedded with neural sensors traced the electric shock wounds yet to scab, "You know, baby? Your hematopoietic stem cells could trade for three yachts on the black market." The newly crowned Grammy Best Pop Female Vocalist, at this moment, had more shocking bloodstains on her lab coat than on her red carpet dress.

The intelligent thermostat suddenly dropped the room temperature to 12 degrees Celsius, Richard taking out the seventh vacuum blood collection tube from the refrigerator. The ice crystals on the glass tube reflected his twisted face—the Wall Street predator, needing weekly infusions of virgin blood to maintain telomere length, now slicing through the skin inside the boy’s thigh with a laser scalpel. As the blood flowed into the portable centrifuge through the Teflon conduit, the wall’s holographic projection updated the dark web transaction data in real time: today’s blood plasma futures prices soared by 17%, with a Middle Eastern royal family having just snapped up 2000cc of panda blood.

Lin Mo regained consciousness amidst intense pain, retinal memory fragments from three hours prior lingering: the hummingbird emblem on the door of Alicia’s private plane, the macarons laced with nerve-blocking agents bitter in his mouth, the last image he saw before losing consciousness, a holographic projection showing a billion US Dollars flowing through blockchain nodes towards a ghost account in Panama. Experience new stories with NovelBin.Côm