The Fault in the Gears of Empire

The skies over the Pearl River Delta were no longer bright with the glittering promise of industry. Instead, they hung heavy with the thick, ashen smog of failure, a remnant of fires that had long ago burned out. The factories that had once hummed with ceaseless activity lay silent, their skeletal frames half-collapsed like forgotten relics. No one lived here anymore. No one except Yi.

Yi Liang was not the last of his people, but it often felt that way. In the aftermath of the Great Collapse, China’s population had plummeted, with famine and political purges taking what little the economic fallout had left behind. But Yi had a secret. Something that kept him one step ahead of the scarcity that clawed at the others. In the vaults beneath a long-abandoned bank, deep in the heart of what had once been the economic hub of Shenzhen, Yi had discovered the plans. The ones that were never supposed to surface.

They were filed away in an old terminal—a terminal that still had enough juice to power on if one knew where to look for the hidden solar cells. Yi had stumbled upon it one fateful night while searching for anything to trade. And now, in this ghost of a city, he had become a different kind of scavenger—hunting not for food or water, but for knowledge.

The plans were labeled simply: The Gears of Empire.

It didn’t take long for Yi to understand the truth. The collapse hadn’t been an accident. Nor was it some natural consequence of reckless over-lending or an economy propped up on a rotting foundation. The fall had been engineered, planned meticulously by the very minds who had once propped up the great Chinese financial system. The vaults Yi had uncovered contained a detailed timeline of how and when key industries were meant to implode. And at the heart of it all—manipulating the gears from behind the curtain—was a shadowy corporate entity that had seen itself as the savior of a new world order.

But the plan had gone too far.

"Control the fall," they'd written. "Cripple the world economy just enough, create the dependency, then bring it back under controlled terms." It had been designed to give China the leverage it needed to ensure global dominance in the new era. Only they had miscalculated. The dominoes hadn’t stopped falling. They just kept going until the entire system buckled under its own weight.

"Greed," Yi muttered to himself, as he navigated the maze of rusted shipping containers that had once transported endless goods to distant ports. Now, they stood as a silent testament to an empire that had choked on its own ambitions.

He knew what he had to do.

In the days following his discovery, Yi hacked deeper into the vault's archives. The terminal revealed just how far the tendrils of the collapse had spread. It wasn’t just about trade wars or bad loans. It was about sabotaged infrastructure projects, politically engineered droughts, and digital sabotage aimed at foreign competitors. It was a dirty game, one that had spiraled so far out of control that no one was left holding the reins.

But somewhere, deep in the documents, Yi found another note. A failsafe. A way to stop the worst of it.

By the time Yi reached the remnants of the once-sprawling financial district, dusk had begun to settle over the crumbling skyline. He hadn’t seen another living soul in days. Not since the riots had broken out over food rations at one of the inland refugee camps. He’d tried to avoid thinking about it—about the cries for help that had been swallowed up in the chaos. The world wasn’t what it once was. And it wasn’t likely to return to anything resembling order anytime soon.

He had the failsafe now. The last piece of the puzzle. All that was left was finding the right access point.

The failsafe, buried deep within the Chinese government’s data servers, was not a tool to restart the economy. It was something far more dangerous—something that had been designed to ensure that those at the top of the system remained untouchable, even as the rest of the world crumbled. It was, as Yi discovered, an algorithm—one that could reprogram the global financial markets, making the collapse look like a series of natural disasters and human errors rather than deliberate manipulation.

Yi's breath caught in his throat as he plugged his access code into the terminal, the glow from the screen casting eerie shadows across the empty boardroom.

"System Override," the screen blinked.

With trembling fingers, he hovered over the final command. If he activated the failsafe, he could wipe the trail clean. No one would ever know the truth about who had caused the fall of China. No one would ever learn that it had been by design. But it would also mean locking the world into an even worse fate—a fate controlled by the same hidden elite who had already wrought so much destruction.

"Is that what you want?" Yi asked himself out loud, as if speaking to some invisible presence. "To let them win?"

He stood there, staring at the screen, time seemingly suspended in the stillness. He could fix it. He could fix everything, but not without a cost.

Suddenly, the silence was broken by a faint, metallic creak behind him.

"Don’t move."

Yi’s heart raced. He knew that voice—had heard it on the emergency broadcasts during the early days of the collapse. It belonged to one of the rogue officers from the state security division. They had been hunting down anyone who might possess information that could jeopardize their grip on power.

Yi turned slowly, his hand still resting on the keyboard. A man dressed in a ragged government uniform stood in the doorway, a gun pointed at Yi’s chest.

"You’re not supposed to be here," the man growled. "Step away from the terminal."

Yi clenched his jaw. "You think I don’t know what’s at stake here? You think I’m just going to hand this over to you?"

The officer smirked. "You won’t have a choice. Either you leave now, or we both know what happens next."

In that moment, Yi realized the weight of his decision. The entire world teetered on the edge of his fingertips. He could surrender, let the officer erase everything and walk away. Or, he could do the one thing that no one expected—the one thing they had overlooked in their meticulously crafted plan.

Without another word, Yi slammed his fist down on the terminal’s keyboard, initiating a system-wide broadcast.

The officer lunged, but it was too late.

The screen lit up with streams of data, flashing across the global network. The failsafe had been overridden. Yi had released the truth into the world, revealing every lie, every manipulation, every piece of the empire’s broken gears.

"You fool!" the officer shouted, but Yi felt an odd sense of peace as he was dragged away.

At least now, the world would know.

The Collapse had not been inevitable—it had been orchestrated. And the price of greed was now laid bare for all to see.

As the sun set on the horizon, casting long shadows over the silent, crumbling streets, Yi whispered to himself, "Let them decide."

The source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: Why China’s Economy Is On the Brink: A Crash Waiting to Happen