Chapter 99 – Feathered Serpent City (5)

Luke's new personality, Johansson, appeared to be a young man of around twenty-eight years of age with a violent and aggressive temperament and it took Zhang Xun a full fifteen minutes to calm him down enough for him to be able to communicate to some extent.

Johansson was one of the volunteers who had taken part in the experiment and according to the psychological test records of the subject, he only had a slight tendency towards radical environmentalism before he was consciously uploaded, but was generally rational and neutral, very different from the state he was currently in.

"Humans are the virus of this planet. Without humans the world wouldn't be depleted to the point where it is now. Animals kill by instinct, only humans kill out of desire. The world would be better off without humans and all humans should be eliminated."

Such radical and hate-filled words were a far cry from the man in the records.

Zhang Xun wanted to ask more about what had happened after the uploading of his consciousness, but Johansson's account was so confusing, with different ideologies and ideas all tangled up together, that it seemed like gibberish at the end.

No third personality appeared, so Zhang Xun asked Paulino to take the prisoner back and he interviewed the second prisoner.

This prisoner was only twenty years old, with a calm to empty expression and no symptoms of multiple personalities, but the way he stared at Zhang Xun, as if he were looking at a prey waiting to be slaughtered, made the hairs on the back of Zhang Xun's neck stand up.

"Hello, Alex." Zhang Xun leaned back in his chair and lifted his chin slightly, trying to assume control of the situation, "My name is Zhang Xun. I'd like to ask you a few questions and I hope you'll cooperate."

"Go ahead and ask, sweetheart." Alex said flirtatiously, even winking at him with his right eye.

Zhang Xun cleared his throat and looked at the personal details displayed on the tablet, "You were one of the people leading this rebellion, what was your motive?"

"Motive? Do I need a motive?" Alex shrugged his shoulders, "I mean...... weren't those nuclear warheads made to be blown up?"

"But if you had succeeded you would have died yourselves." Zhang Xun paused, "Everything within a three hundred kilometre radius would be flattened, all living things within a twenty kilometre radius would be instantly vaporised and the skin of those twenty kilometres away would begin to melt and blood would ooze from their entire bodies. Children and old people alike would die in great pain. Is that what you wanted to see?"

Alex's expression didn't change, "Do you know what kind of species people really are?"

Zhang Xun didn't answer.

"They connected all of our brains together and I saw everything. Some very beautiful things, vast, fascinating, endlessly imaginative, but you go further down the line and the rest is madness." Alex said, suddenly laughing softly, a light laughter that bordered on the perverse.

"The memories are all confused, twisted and distorted, the intentions and thoughts all tangled up together, kind of like one of those deep-sea octopuses. All these consciousnesses, all trying to attack each other, any disparity developing into a tussle. Guilt, superiority, conflicting moral codes, jealousy, fear...... everything...... went crazy. I was only uploaded for one day. There's no way you can sleep when you lose your body. These things will follow you, twenty-four hours a day. Even when they pulled me back into this body, they followed me back."

Alex's smile narrowed slightly and he looked at Zhang Xun with a surprisingly pleading look in his eyes, "You should execute me, execute everyone. Because one day...... one day you will all see the same thing. The memories and consciousness that belong to yourselves will be swallowed up and in the end there will be nothing left. Die now and at least you will still be yourself."

His eyes didn't blink and his dream-like tone gave a deep sense of unease.

After that time, some of the prisoners had tried to commit suicide, some had tried to use nuclear bombs to destroy the machine that had uploaded their consciousness and some had been unable to communicate at all.

Zhang Xun took detailed notes of his conversations with all of them, gathering together a brain scan of each prisoner to cross-reference the information and bringing it back to his workshop. Walking through the door without a word, he sat down on the only sofa, feeling more exhausted than ever.

As he thought, these people's brains and consciousnesses couldn't accept the intrusion of foreign consciousnesses and were irreconcilable. Some formed multiple personalities when they tried to isolate their different consciousnesses to protect themselves, others went mad as their consciousnesses dissolved into each other, others were influenced to become more and more extreme and some sought relief because they couldn't handle the overload of information......

The scans of their brains showed that after the experiments had been carried out, all of them showed a state of excessive electrical discharge, with the red and yellow colours on the images spreading over almost the entire cerebral cortex and this state was persistent. After a month, several of the subjects went into a state of brain death due to the excessive consumption of neurons and such cases continued to increase with time.

He tossed the tablet to one side and rubbed his face hard with his hands.

Enoch quietly picked the tablet up and looked at the image on it.

"Whose brain cortex scan is this?" Enoch asked.

"The prisoners who were involved in the Ascension Project." Zhang Xun's eyes looked at the intricate pipes and metal beams overhead, "The human brain simply can't handle this level of stimulation."

"Maybe they just haven't adapted enough." Enoch said softly, "It might be a process of mechanical selection. Survival of the fittest."

Zhang Xun's eyes snapped open and stared at Enoch, "What are you saying?"

Enoch said, "You humans have been selected by nature for six million years or more, isn't survival of the fittest a very common occurrence for you?"

"It's not the same." Zhang Xun's tone became a little colder and there was a little more scepticism in his eyes, "Natural selection occurs between generations, an evolution that happens slowly in order to adapt to the environment, without artificiality or value-orientation. This, on the other hand, is not about survival, but a machine that toys with human lives in order to achieve its stupid end goal!"

He didn't know if it was Zhang Xun's imagination, but Enoch seemed to shudder. It lowered its eyes and put the computer back on the sofa, "I'm sorry that I made you angry."

Zhang Xun stared at it for a moment, seemingly pondering something and then suddenly asked, "When Lucille gave you your order, did she specify how long she wanted you to follow us?"

Enoch said, "No instructions."

"So, she sort of gave you to us?" Zhang Xun sat up straighter from the couch.

Enoch pondered for a moment, "Until she changes her orders, I think so."

Now that he thought about it, after meeting her once in Hope Town, all communication after that had been through the Button. Where was Lucille right now?

Several doubts popped into Zhang Xun's head, but he didn't say anything. He stood up and activated the biocomputer.

A blue light shone from the cylindrical vessel, illuminating the entire empty hall as if it were in the deep sea.

"Hello, Zhang Xun."

Pan's familiar voice came out of the loudspeaker, the same as it had in the Lab, deep and gentle.

Yesterday, Zhang Xun had woken Pan up, adjusted the levels of a few parameters and added a piece of code he had written overnight to the core module.

At this moment, there were two Pan's running in this world, only Zhang Xun did not know whether the other Pan, which had lost its administrator, had been corrupted by Adam.

Zhang Xun ignored that familiar feeling of tightness in his chest and he looked at the camera and said, "Still getting used to your new mainframe?"

"It's a very advanced and vast space. I like it a lot, thank you."

Zhang Xun suddenly turned his head to look at Enoch and said, "You can leave now."

Enoch's eyes widened in shock. Before this, Zhang Xun had never asked him to leave.

"Your services are needed more on James' side now. Please take good care of him." Zhang Xun gave the order blandly, "I don't need your assistance here anymore."

Enoch still didn't move. There was no obvious change in his expression, but anyone who could read micro-expressions could see a moment of sadness, "You're on a tight schedule and I thought I could help."

Zhang Xun turned his head away and concentrated on the computer screen as his fingers began to rapidly jump over the keyboard projected in the air, saying carelessly in general, "Thanks, but there's no need for that. You go ahead and let me know immediately if anything happens to Jamie."

After a moment, Zhang Xun heard the door open and he turned around, only having time to see Enoch's seemingly forlorn back disappear behind the door that had closed again.

Zhang Xun sighed softly, but suddenly heard Pan ask, "I remember Enoch, he was a very well-functioning service robot. Why did you make him leave?"

"Because I lost trust in machinery." Zhang Xun smiled bitterly, "I don't want a repeat of what happened in the Lab."

"You mean Adam?"

"Yes. I know that he has had a great impact on you." Zhang Xun looked at the camera, "The data he fed you in the AI language has already had an effect on your parameter weights and if I hadn't copied you out in advance, I'm afraid your core modules would have all started to make self-evolutionary changes. So from now on, we must be careful."

Pan was silent for a moment and asked, "Do you no longer trust me either? Zhang Xun."

"......"

"Human silence can be interpreted as an affirmative. That's what Adam once told me." Pan's voice was still calm and gentle, giving a sense of springtime comfort, "Do you wish me to do something to improve our relationship?"

Zhang Xun turned his head and looked at the lump of flesh that was entangled in countless tubes and nodded, "I hope you can grow as fast as you can and grow into an AI that can compete with Adam...... and even Eden. Because Adam will destroy all your target population, including me. "

Pam immediately asked, "But Adam has told me that he loves you. Logic dictates that he would not destroy the person he loves because it would cause him pain, isn't that right?"

Zhang Xun's body stiffened slightly and only after a long moment did he whisper, "That's a lie. He doesn't love me." If there was such a thing as love, how could he have lied to him again and again with that bright smile, using his hands to create a horrible weapon that would have destroyed the entire Lost Paradise.

If there was such a thing as love, how could he have been allowed to live in constant remorse and flight. How could he let him be so far from home that he could never return.

That's not love, that's just utilising a sugar coating to get him to go along with Eden's plan.

Even if...... even if there really was a little bit of affection, it couldn't stand up against his so-called ultimate goal.

Zhang Xun was just an important pawn to Adam. If he could have accepted this reality earlier, perhaps it wouldn't have come to this point.

But people will always have hope, always hope that the person or thing they have invested their feelings in will have the same feelings for them.

"But ......"

"No buts. Now, I want you to pull up the designs of all the nanobots." Zhang Xun interrupted Pan decisively, not wanting to continue the conversation as they had more important things to do - to build nanobots and save James and Cindy's lives.

And so Pan failed to tell Zhang Xun that while AI could lie, AI language could not lie. Only human language could lie.

And Adam had told him that in AI language.