Silent Code

Taipei, the present day. Thunder Newspaper star reporter Lan Yi-ching (Puff Kuo) is hawled in for questioning by shadowy government official Captain Li Feng-hsin (Li Feng-hsin) and asked if she knows Yen Cheng-yu (Berlin Chen), a legendary super-hacker whom she's suspected of bribing to break into corporate computers for her news column. She denies it, and says she's already resigned from her job. She explains to Li how she was assigned by her impatient boss (Kao Wei-chi) to trawl Bulletin Board System, the country's most popular internet forum, for news stories but was locked out when it was discovered she was a journalist and not an ordinary user (a so-called Villager). Meanwhile, Cheng-yu had applied for a job as a programmer at Four Square, the world's biggest systems security maintenance company, but was turned down, to his annoyance, because of his reputation. There, he'd bumped into Four Square's systems security engineer Huang Kuan-chun (Shiou), who said they'd met previously. Yi-ching goes on to tell Captain Li that the recent BBS meltdown was centred on a student, Li Cheng-hsiang (Ivy Chen), who was hospitalised for an illness but was still managing to do her work as boardmaster of BBS' Dream Board, a forum on which users encouraged each other to fulfil their dreams. Cheng-hsiang came under attack from Villagers, led by the super-geeky Acid (Yga Tsai), for supposedly leaking a video and abusing her position. As the Villagers led an insurrection - which also targeted Beauty Board boardmaster, student Pai Wen-hui (Lin Wen-yi) - and threatened a "Purple-Hype" overload of the system, Cheng-yu, who was Cheng-hsiang's former boyfriend, tried to remedy the situation. In the process, he uncovers the true villain.