This is how it starts.

Lu Han, heir to Lu Industries, is the image of a perfect eldest son. Soon, he’ll be ready to take over his parents’ work one day  and head the industry of liquid energy and provide the citizens of Korea with the power to function day-to-day.

Said no one ever.

“Corporate Monopoly Prince Gone Wild,” the tabloids call him.

Lu Han thinks that’s a bit of a stretch. In reality, Lu Han is bored. His whole generation is bored as and there’s not much anyone can do about it other than let the need for useless thrill run its course and then embrace them as useful member of society afterwards.

Or, if you’re a hard- like Lu Han’s father, you can try to impose that transition quicker. Lu Han had dyed his hair fluorescent blue last week on a dare and his father had locked him in his room for three days as retribution, thankful that he had caught his son before the press did.

Day one, Lu Han entertains himself by cutting open one of his light bulbs and manipulating the stream of electricity into pretty shapes.

By the second day, Lu Han starts singing.  He’s glad that he recklessly spent his allowance from the last year on a diamond coat for his diaphragm and titanium-enforced lungs. Walls can never be perfectly soundproofed.

Day three, and he is completely and thoroughly bored. They know he can survive for a few days off the electricity taps in the bathroom so his father doesn’t even send anybody to bring him liquefied light, and surprinsingly, no one has even knocked on his door to tell him to shut up. 

A bored Lu Han is the worst kind of Lu Han. He represses the urge to destroy something (even he knows that's a bad idea). There are a couple sparklers he’s been hiding in his drawers (his father calls them “unnecessary wastes of power”), but he’s been saving them for days when he needs to cheer up his brothers. 

Instead, he kills time by turning off his lights so he can see how his hair glows in the dark and decide whether or not he regrets the decision. The Backstream, a river of used electricity and broken gadgets, snakes its way across the night sky and casts his room in a soft neon glow. Up close, it’s a mess of electronic debris, but It looks really pretty from afar.

A really bad (but really good) idea worms its way into Lu Han’s brain. His father doesn’t know that one time, Lu Han got a bit careless with a flame thrower he picked up from the Light Market and accidentally melted a corner of the glass plane. His father confiscated most of his good items when he locked Lu Han up, but he still has a diamond plated ruler, a useless novelty since no one even uses rulers in school anymore, that he shoved in the back of his desk drawer.

There’s a reason that every parent drills into their child’s head that they shouldn’t visit the Backstream, although in this day and age, no one actually listens much anymore. It’s potentially dangerous, and the bodies that turn up floating in the stream, empty shells of humans that couldn’t get out and ran out of fuel, that are broadcasted on the news are proof. If they’re extremely lucky, they might be hooked out of the stream and saved. Sometimes, it’s too late to try. Sometimes, people just don’t bother.

It’s not the danger that keeps people away now— it’s the stench of burning. That’s why light has to be passed out of the system and toys have to be replaced. The collective dump of it all is even worse and Lu Han plugs his nose. But up close, the flickering neon is mesmerizing: broken lights that still flicker, pink strings of discarded data files, the occasional jelly animal from last week’s fad, and a constant flow of blues and reds and yellows from the city's collective energy discharge. No one knows where it all goes; the scientists just say that it will flow through space forever.

It would be kind of cool to follow that stream and see the rest of the universe, Lu Han thinks, even though he knows that’s completely impossible.

“Dude, watch out!”