I'm using flashforwards (prolepses) here, okay. Also a loosely narrated flashback somewhere, I think.

In this great future you can't forget your past.

A boy, tanned and lanky, looks cautiously, spitefully at Song Qian— no, Victoria; she has to get used to that name now.

The young gatekeeper, tanned and lanky, fixes two sharply spiteful, cautious eyes at the woman standing next to the man he has, for the past few months, considered as a brother.

“But …why?”

“My name is Song Qian,” she repeated exasperatedly. “Or have you forgotten?”

“I won't forget you.”

He walks through the threshold, and Song Qian flinches at the unfamiliar sight of a bedraggled man entering her Cube. Almost immediately, she reproached herself because he did introduce himself. Changmin.

“You're Victoria,” he insisted, echoing the first word the young woman heard in the many years of her solo adult existence.

Shim Changmin, the lost boy.

“My Victoria.”

Long ago, before his parents whisked him off to Elsehere, where people did not live protected by invincible Cubes and unbreakable laws, the lanky boy with lonely eyes recounted stories prohibited by the powers and the ages; they were of deities, beings higher than even the World Council, and they fought for justice and power. One of them did not have a story, but she was victory, he said with a slight smile curving up his cheeks. She remembered, he said, “You can have her name. It suits you.”

“She's just,” the older hesitates.

Maru the Gatekeep looks on expectantly, apparently hoping for some justification for the interloper to be accepted.

“She's different. Like us.”

With those words, Victoria wonders how anybody can be different where everybody believes in the same thing. Just as she had before, in the world she escaped with Max.

Setting himself on the floor in front of her, he looked up directly into her eyes before questioning, “You know these glass thingies?”

“Cubes,” she reminded, rolling her eyes and abandoning the chat monitor where she'd been conversing with friends, slightly irked by the pretentiousness of the wild man rapping her floor with his grimy knuckles. “Don't pretend that you don't know what houses are called, Changmin.”

“Whatever,” he mumbled, proceeding to take his hands into his lap to fumble with his fingers while staring at them.

“Anyway, everybody can see everything because of them, right?”

Song Qian nodded, intrigued.

“Well, do you even care about what anybody does now?”

Oh.

“What makes you think that anybody cares anymore?”

Her brow creased into furrows, deep with thought. She did not even notice that her knees have crumpled next to his, as she listened to what he had to let her know.

“Conformity,” he began, looking around her gleaming, translucent dwelling; the words he wanted to say are lost in her brightly curious eyes, but he found them there, just as he looked back into the dark but starry depths. “It's just an illusion.”

He breathed in and moved close; just enough for Song Qian to find that she is unbothered by the intimacy proposed by her old playmate.

“There are laws, but there are no penalties. They just chase us around before giving up.”

With a knowing smirk, he added, “Everybody just follows blindly.”