Chapter 126 – End Game (2)

Zhang Xun had that dream again.

He was standing in a wheat field and he himself had become a stalk of wheat, like all the other wheat, holding a heavy sheaf of seeds, swaying carelessly with the wind blowing from nowhere. He had no brain, no consciousness, but existed purely, one with the whole earth, the whole universe.

There was no pain, no pleasure, nothing.

Then, something separated him from his senselessness.

He found himself to have sight and he saw a long figure standing far away in the vast sea of wheat fields. The man was slowly plucking away the wheat, slowly trudging towards him. His aged but stern face wasn't smiling, but carried the toughness of a rock.

A name was on his lips, but he couldn't remember how to pronounce it.

"My son, he doesn't give up easily." The cold man looked in his direction, as if he were looking at him and as if he wasn't.

The word father hovered in his mind, but he had no mouth, no way to call out and no hands to embrace him.

He realised that he seemed to have lost his father, that this dream was perhaps a final goodbye.

He began to struggle, he wanted to say one last word to his father. There was a cracking sound in his body, which had been rooted in the earth and the skin on both sides of his body ripped open and hands grew. Large wounds opened on his face, so that a mouth to speak emerged. He ripped the sheaves of wheat from his head and revealed his ears. He tore off the roots that connected him to the earth, so that he grew feet.

He was covered in blood and staggered towards his father, "Dad!"

Zhang Shuo looked at him, watched him struggle to come towards him and lifted the corners of his mouth slightly, revealing a smile.

It had been many years since Zhang Xun had seen his father smile at him. Only then did he realise that he looked so much like his father, smiling as if he were looking in a mirror.

But now, his body didn't listen to him. It was as if he had gone back to when he was a child, before he could walk and his father was waiting ahead of him and he concentrated on moving his legs, step by step, concentrating and doing his best, before finally falling into his father's arms.

The scent that enveloped him was familiar and safe, pervaded by the faint smell of summer hay.

It wasn't his father's scent, but Adam's.

His consciousness gradually emerged from the chaos of the dream, but he wasn't sure whether the dream just happened a moment ago or a long time ago. Time was misplaced in his head and his body trembled involuntarily.

"He's weak and the dose of anaesthetic you gave him was on the high side. He's shivering." There was a faint voice with some reproach and concern, a familiar voice. Zhang Xun tried to open his eyes, but his body was lazy and weak and his eyelids were too heavy. He didn't want to wake up.

"Ah-Xun? Ah-Xun?"

Adam?

Was it morning?

Was he going to take Adam to the garbage processing yard for training?

I'm so tired...... I don't want to get up......

"Ah-Xun, wake up ......"

Zhang Xun finally reluctantly opened his eyes and felt the warmth surrounding his body tighten a little more.

A pair of blue eyes were looking at him, as if they were the ethereal and clear colours of the sea and sky mirroring each other.

Zhang Xun's consciousness drew away from his drowsiness and he gradually recognised the handsome face before him.

"Adam......" The voice that came from his throat was as thin as a gnat, even he couldn't hear it clearly.

Adam? How could Adam be here? Adam's body was still in their previous makeshift base......

"How do you feel? Do you feel cold?" Adam asked softly, his tone soft and careful, as if he was afraid of disturbing him.

Zhang Xun grabbed Adam's clothes, but despite using all his strength he couldn't get a firm grasp, "Adam..... how are you here?......"

"Anya contacted me and helped me retrieve my body." Adam said simply, rubbing his palm, "You're cold, I'll go get something to cover you."

Adam left. Zhang Xun had tried to grab the corner of his shirt, but couldn't, the garment slipped through his fingers.

Adam's return was so unreal that Zhang Xun wasn't sure if he was dreaming.

That body, which Zhang Xun had thought was completely lost...... Eden actually hadn't destroyed it?

Why? Why didn't it destroy it? Eden had a purpose for everything it did and a purpose for everything it didn't do.

At that moment another figure appeared in sight; a guilty-faced Diego, with Anya standing behind him. Anya looked exhausted and even had a bloodstain on her cheek.

"Brother, I'm really sorry about before, but you were in an unstable state and we were afraid you would make an impulsive decision, so......"

A hint of anger smothered the depths of Zhang Xun's still somewhat sluggish and numb consciousness as he said in a somewhat dry voice, "You guys doubted me?"

Because he had injected the nanobots? Even though he had done it to pull Adam to their side, even though he had done it for all of them......

He wasn't fully human anymore, so they no longer trusted him?

But...... if the tables were turned, if he were in their shoes, he might have such doubts too...... What he didn't understand was how Anya had found Adam again?

"I'm sorry." Anya said simply, without unnecessary explanation.

Zhang Xun propped himself up, still a little limp and looked around, only to see that Natalie had also come to her senses. Her head was wrapped in a bandage that had blood seeping through and she was typing lines of code with the image her Button was projecting in the air.

"How long was I asleep for? How did you find Adam?" Zhang Xun stared solemnly at Diego and Anya.

Anya then briefly recounted her plan. After hiding the door to the expedition base with a block of snow she flew on a single aircraft towards a Métis Free Folk settlement to the South. There she relied on the local hackers to contact Lucille and her entire network of contacts. Nowadays, Eden's surveillance of the internet was tightening and even the most skilled hackers who used AI to help hide their identities were less likely to connect to the dark web, where any VPN could be cracked by Eden. It took a day of guerrilla warfare and changing VPNs for a few of Lucille's best hackers to reach Pan and then they used Pan's protection to create a small secure network using the satellite that Adam had taken from Eden.

They waited for about five hours and received a message from Adam.

In order to distinguish whether the other party was Adam or Eden, Pan asked the other party to identify himself in AI language. After receiving the correct response, Pan placed Adam into the secure network. Adam informed Anya, Lucille and the others that he had been roaming the Eden network in a perilous manner and hoped to find a biological computer or his body to download to.

It would naturally be best to retrieve his original body for ease of movement. The Metis Free Folk then decided to help Anya venture back to their previous temporary base to find out if Adam's body had been taken or destroyed by Eden. However on the way they came across robot police moving equipment from the makeshift base, including Adam's body. So they sieged the robot police, snatched back the body and then connected to the security network at the settlement and downloaded Adam back into his body.

The whole process had taken two weeks.

Two weeks. For Zhang Xun that had been the length of one dream.

Zhang Xun felt like he was being rude but it seemed unreal. He asked seriously, "Was it Pan himself who confirmed Adam's identity?"

"Yes, it said that AI language cannot lie, so Adam's identity can be trusted."

Zhang Xun was silent for a moment and asked, "How is Pan doing?"

"Pan has now developed some extended AI that are slowly infiltrating the Eden network secretly. It has been trying to find you, which is why we were able to make contact with it so quickly."

Pan...... hadn't given up looking for him?

"Enough talking, Ah-Xun needs to rest." Adam, who had already brought in his thermal clothes earlier, had kept quiet as he didn't want to disturb Zhang Xun's enquiries and only now did he silently walk in from the outer room. The abandoned expedition base had obviously now been equipped with some supplies that Anya had brought back.

But wasn't it risky for them to stay here for so long?

Adam wrapped the thermal suit around Zhang Xun with what seemed like a little too much force, strangling him slightly. Zhang Xun looked searchingly into Adam's eyes, as if trying to find some trace in those ethereal eyes.

What Anya and Diego had done had been reckless. Even if they didn't trust him, he was the one person who knew Adam and Eden best and they had made him sleep like that for two weeks.

There also seemed to have been no casualties in the process of them retrieving Adam's body, which was so smooth as to be suspicious.

But now, it was too late for that. He just needed confirmation......

But how to confirm it?

"Now that Zhang Xun has woken up we need to move locations as soon as possible." Natalie said, "Then we can figure out how to get close enough to Eden's core servers to implant the virus."

"You said I can't record that virus into my memory or I'll be infected." Adam turned his head to look at her, "But if I just take the hard drive with the virus on it and transfer it to Eden's core server then I'll be fine, right?"

"That's theoretically true, but you have to be careful not to go through the contents." Natalie said seriously as she closed her Button, "Although you've entered a human body, your core processor is still a mechanical brain after all and I'm not sure what this virus will do to you."

"How many copies of this virus are there?"

"There are currently three copies. We've been careful not to create too many backups for fear that if Eden were to notice, it might use extended AI or linked AI to crack the virus or build firewalls and exploit fixes against it. By then any more backups would be useless."

"If there are three copies, we can try to infect Eden from three different access points." Adam spoke slightly faster, "Eden is currently using the cloud to store its core modules in order to secure itself, meaning that countless computers around the world are carrying its core modules together, each with only fragmented information, making it very difficult to implant the virus effectively, very different from before the god descent plan."

"But because it aspires to analyse data more effectively and quickly to take control of all the extended AI, it's currently building servers similar to the Feathered Serpent City bio-computers, which are limited in number and concentrated in location. So if we're going to strike, it's best to target these bio-computers."

"You know where they're located?"

"I don't, but Eden will likely move these bio-computers in the near future, after all, I've been in its network long enough for it to worry about location leaks." Adam finished and followed up by dumping a long list of coordinates. Three were in Europe, two in Asia, one in Africa and four in North America.

"Most of them are secret military bases, or classified locations guarded by robot police, with hardly any human guards." Adam paused and said, "Any living organism that tries to approach is immediately neutralised."

"So how are we supposed to get in? Pretend we're robots?" Diego asked with a cigarette in his mouth.

"The bio-computers need to be regularly replenished with nutrients and sometimes the person delivering the nutrient solution may be human." Adam replied comprehensively, "It's impossible to get too close, but we can fire an electromagnetic pulse at close range that will temporarily paralyse most of the robot police. The few robot police that use biotechnology can be disrupted using nanobots. Only, Eden would then immediately learn of our movements. So after that's done, we will probably have less than five minutes to inject the virus."

Zhang Xun, who had been silent, spoke up at this point, "......This plan is too risky. What if Eden knows we're going?"

Adam frowned slightly, as if sensing Zhang Xun's suspicion of him, "As long as only the five of us know about this, Eden won't know."

Zhang Xun wanted to say something else, but in the end, he didn't speak.