The city has retained much of its former glitter as one of the world's leading financial and technological hubs. The streets are not as full though; Hong Kong was affected like all other cities of the world with a sizeable population of kromeheads. Almost half the population either died in the various riots and subsequent war or left for more isolated places like Oymyakon and Tristan de Cunha. Long Wenling considers it a blessing in disguise. Once the most expensive neighborhood in the world, Hong Kong's abandoned houses and apartments have become giant communes where people from all over the world live, work and thrive together.

We figured something was wrong from the get go. There were five of us. Meng the half-English bastard, Ai the passionate activist, Kong the muscle and Murali, an Indian student who discovered he loved hacking into mainframes more than he did writing and submitting essays. We worked out of this small burger and fries joint in Sham Shui Po every evening, sifting through news websites, ezines, Facebook posts and confidential forums for even the tiniest tidbit that could be analyzed, compared with the data we had already collected and then published.

What motivated us to do what we did, one might ask. We risked the wrath of the HKPF and the communist agents regularly by running a game right under their noses. Well, it was different for all of us I guess. Murali and Meng for example were hooked to the thrill doing some illegal work provided, a healthier substitute to all the coke and hashish pouring through the city. Ai's father had once been an outspoken critic of the CCP and the CCP, true to its nature, picked him up one day for routine procedure. The procedure never ended, needless to say. Kong was politically aware and an intellectual. Me? I just needed something to forget the existential dread which lurked at the back of my mind as soon as I woke up in the morning.

So that night we were working late. Ai had chanced upon an obscure blog on Livejournal by an anonymous person who claimed to be a former member of the Central Intelligence Agency. It described in grim detail about how patients suffering from something called cerebral stagnation were being taken to secret facilities all over America and experimented upon. Now before you look bored at the Hollywood trope of an upright citizen stumbling across disturbing secrets, let me tell you that we received an average of ten emails every day claiming to have found the Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, evidence of extra terrestrial life and nanites in dandruff shampoos. Most went to the spam folder automatically.

This was different. Kong sat in front of his laptop and analyzed the style of writing from several angles, the blogger's knowledge of how security systems worked, black sites used by the CIA and NSA, methods of advanced interrogation and testimonies of other ex and serving personnel. Some of them turned out to be startlingly accurate when cross-referenced with our database. The group looked to me for guidance. I looked at my watch. It was 9:30 and mother was not due home for another hour, so I thought what the heck, let's contact this interesting guy or girl.

They had a mail address at the bottom of the blog. I sent a message identifying myself as the captain of The Bloodhounds and added I was interested to know more. A mere five minutes later the inbox pinged with a new mail. It had a phone number with the US country code. Now that got me thinking. Was it a trap designed to lure hackers and vigilantes in? China has done this before, setting up dummy accounts that pretend to be journalists and government officials on the run after getting on the wrong side of the Party.

After much debate and discussion it was decided I would make the call from the Burnphone app. You know it? It was damn useful in the time before the war. The app provided you with a temporary number which self-destructed after use without you taking the trouble to purchase a new, actual burner phone after each call. The line rang for approximately three minutes before someone picked up on the other end. My heart stopped for a second.

"Hello, this is-"

"Do not speak. Time is of the essence. You may call me Perseus. I was a senior analyst at the CIA for twenty years and now I fear my conscience can no longer support the things I have seen. I will send you a complete and comprehensive dossier about the Digital Psycho Program and you will ensure the whole world gets to know about it. Do we have a deal?"

A man. Middle aged, clear-voiced and precise with his instructions. It made me feel like I was taking an order from him, not a mere request. But the fact that he was for real made my languid heart race in excitement for the first time in a long, long time. So I promised him we would send it unadulterated to all the news outlets in the world no matter how small or popular. He thanked me and hung up. Another five minutes later, a 120-pages long document dropped in the inbox.

I interrupt him here. "This would be the Kromehead Papers, yes?"

Absolutely correct. What we discovered that day was a literal goldmine. Paragraph after paragraph detailing a secret experiment on people suffering from a new mental illness that turned them into mindless bots ready for reeducation. Blank slates waiting to be written on. They were prone to fits of extreme violence and would kill anyone and everyone in their immediate territory once unleashed and dropped via special delivery vehicles. To turn them even more compliant, the subjects were shown bloody, aggressive videos like the ISIS beheadings and animal cruelty. Young men and women, even teenagers as young as 16 had been picked up from Wisconsin, Alabama, Texas, Manhattan and even Toronto and Montreal. More were on the way, and the budget for the program came directly from the Treasury. It was the wet dream of every conspiracy theorist come to life in one glorious moment.

My hands were shaking as I explained my plan to the other members. Murali looked skeptical and tried to dissuade me, but Ai stood by my side and argued that we would be doing those poor kids a great service. Their families probably did not even know they had vanished. In the end it was agreed that we would comply with Perseus's wishes and make it viral.

We wrote a small prelude, stamped it with our seal and released it to the internet. Nobody was spared, including outlets that had been inaugurated a day before. Then we waited for a full week with bated breath and insides twisted to knots with worry.

The results were atomic. The Digital Psycho Program made to the headlines of newspapers in 75 countries. YouTube channels dropped whatever mundane unboxing and reaction they had scheduled and covered the leaks. Senators and congressmen were swarmed by reporters asking for a byte. Primetime debates shook the nation. Once again, questions bombarded the veil of secrecy that shrouded CIA and other intelligence agencies and concerns over taxpayers' money being abused were raised at every meeting, every cocktail party, every borough council. It was the Stargate scandal all over again.

Forget about American wrath. We were shielded from the subsequent shitstorm by strong government support from Iran and North Korea, Russia and China. Countries which were tired of the former political colossus's exceptionalism and arrogance. The common folk lauded us as heroes, as protectors of the Vox Populi and guardians of justice. We basked in the glory and the admiration. Murali sold part of his Ethereum holdings and bought us all a dinner at Kowloon Shangri-La. Yeah man, time was good and only seemed to grow better with each passing hour.

Night has fallen over Hong Kong. Wenling taps away at his cheap laptop while talking to me. The internet has regressed to the noughties but the occasional cyberworm can still be found slithering across systems. The Hong Kong Provisional Government has hired him to take care of the immense mechanical grid which supplies water to and ferries waste from the district of Sham Shui Po. He works with a crew, of course, but the old team of The Bloodhounds scattered when the war came to their city. Wenling still scours the Global Missing Persons Database in hope that someday, at least one of his friends would pop up from some corner of the new world.