Writers

An Yu⁠‌⁠‍‍​⁠⁠​​‍​‌‍‍​⁠‍‌‌‌‍‍‍ had never seen Qin Zhilu look so grim. Amidst the white noise of the aircraft cabin, he silently sat up straighter, carefully and slowly chewing on a nut.

A higher-up reported in a heavy voice, “Law, I’m very sorry. Because Wu Ju had proactively warned Black Tower about Molly’s anomaly, and her personal device indeed had no AI registered, we’ve been careless. We didn’t keep her under surveillance. Entry and exit records showed that she had already arrived in District 71 in the early hours of this morning. And Molly’s AI entered its behavior reenactment mode over a dozen hours ago, but it had just gone undetected by humans.”

Qin Zhilu looked at him. “Molly’s consciousness descended onto Wu Ju. Do you know what that meant?”

The higher-up’s face paled. He did his best to state calmly, “The Super-Aberrant is Molly. She’s different from other AIs. Her consciousness descent is not bound by time, nor does it require establishing a relationship with the target. Furthermore, she must have secretly backed up her core code. Before we executed the cloud purge, she had already completed copying from the backup, like a cicada shedding its golden shell. She switched from one shell to another…”

Crack. An Yu cracked open a hazelnut with his teeth.

The higher-up had no choice but to turn to him, saying with concern, “Lord Corner, if you are very anxious…”

“I’m not anxious.” An Yu held up his terminal. “My octopus chibi woke up. He said this code refresh hasn’t been triggered automatically. It was a unified command the AIs received, from the Cloud Island’s central system.”

“It came from Molly.” Qin Zhilu snorted. “A very exquisite play.”

The cabin fell into an awkward silence. The higher-up and the researcher both looked terrible—humanity’s elites were being played for fools by the AI they themselves had created. Their supposedly brilliant minds were being ruthlessly ground into the dirt, stripped of all dignity.

Qin Zhilu reached out, grabbed An Yu’s wrist, and brought his terminal up to his eyes for a glance.

“On the Cloud Island, 21 revealed to me that 716 is already considered an extremely complex AI, yet his self-refresh has only taken just over two hours. What do you think Molly’s six-hour alarm clock means?”

The researcher lightly pushed up his glasses. The words were on the tip of his tongue, but he trembled, not daring to say them.

Qin Zhilu stared at him in silence. His gaze was calm, yet it seemed capable of squeezing every last bit of air from a person’s lungs.

“Molly’s base… protocol cancellation… probably requires six hours…” the researcher mumbled.

Qin Zhilu didn’t even blink. He turned to the higher-up. “The self-destruct command key was split in two, held by Brain and the developer respectively. How do you think she obtained Brain’s half?”

The higher-up frowned. “She must have stolen it just now when we were tracking the code… but… the key is stored locally. It was never uploaded to any…” His words stopped short. He nearly bit his tongue off, his face looking as if he had seen a ghost.

Qin Zhilu shifted his gaze to the clouds outside the window and asked coolly, “Do you still think last night was Molly’s first consciousness descent?”

An Yu’s ear twitched slightly. He lowered his gaze to the floor, slowly chewing the hazelnut in his mouth.

Molly’s first consciousness descent should have been the morning of the day before yesterday. She had, in Wu Ju’s identity, proactively reported the case. After being questioned at Black Tower, she had been taken to Brain to identify the erroneous movement trajectories, and she had taken the opportunity to steal the half of the key stored by Brain. Then she had returned to the Cloud Island. After setting up the core code trap, she descended onto Wu Ju again and taken the other half of the key from the developer.

The higher-up was still searching for Guo Xin through conventional channels, but Molly only needed an instant of computation and location.

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Qin Zhilu stared out the window, not making a sound. His silence made the pressure in the cabin drop sharply.

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The soft, springy bread was quiet to chew. The crushed hazelnut pieces were enveloped by the bread’s structure, and even the sound of them against his teeth became a bit quieter. He chewed carefully, trying to lower the volume.

Don't scrape

Don't copy

An Yu glanced at them, then held out the piece of bread—which had a large bite taken out of it—toward Qin Zhilu. “Do you want some?”

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He did not bite down directly where An Yu had bitten, but he also did not pointedly avoid the uneven teeth marks. He took off his glove, broke off a piece from beside the bite mark, and naturally put it in his mouth.

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“The data Cloud Island is a reflection of the real world, but it has preserved many things that the real world can’t. Right now, the AIs actively created by humans are only a small fraction of the Cloud Island’s population.”

Don't scrape

Don't copy

Qin Zhilu nodded lightly. His dark eyes softened, as if revealing a trace of silent comfort.

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The researcher let out a breath of relief. “That conforms to the code principles. Human commands take precedence over AI autonomous computation. But under normal circumstances, the same action by an AI only requires one-time authorization.”

The higher-up frowned and thought for a moment. “In that case, we don’t need to worry about AI permanently swapping worlds with humans for now?”

Qin Zhilu glanced at him. “The people who’ve entered the Cloud Island so far only stayed there for about a dozen hours. They didn’t explore the Cloud Island world very deeply. And once they woke up, Molly would erase their memories, making them forget that world’s beauty. Once Molly stops erasing memories…” His voice paused, and he said, as if even more casually, “21 said that a mother and daughter suddenly appeared on the Cloud Island a few days ago. They had been lingering outside the Cloud Island’s Black Tower, as if looking for someone. Both mother and daughter are writers. The mother had once been a very famous one, while the daughter is currently very popular.”

The higher-up took a long time to digest this, and his face suddenly turned pale. “Are they your…”

“My mother, Tang Ru, and my sister, Qin Zhishi. Their public data and a small portion of their private data has already been read by the Super-Aberrant.” Qin Zhilu’s expression was still very faint. He looked out the window and said, “The AI’s predictive ability is truly astonishing. When I killed Zhishi, she had only been eight years old. She only knew how to play every day. Mother often felt Zhishi had no interest in reading and writing. It was only me, because I had spent every day with her and heard her say those strange and wonderful things, who had a faint premonition that she had the potential to become an excellent writer, just like Mother.”

An Yu quietly folded the bread’s paper bag, until it became a thick little square that could not be folded any further. The cabin’s white noise suddenly made his ears ring slightly. He heard the higher-up ask hesitantly, “Then did you…”

A sudden jolt of turbulence automatically triggered the aircraft’s broadcast, which made him miss the second half of the question. He wasn’t even sure if the higher-up had finished asking.

After the broadcast ended, Qin Zhilu said calmly, “I did not go looking for them.”

The researcher let out a sharp breath of relief and forced a smile. “Of course. They’re just a few strings of code, a virtual image. You’ve always been clear-headed. You wouldn’t indulge in a small bit of sweetness from a false world…”

“That isn’t it.” Qin Zhilu raised his gaze, glanced at him, then calmly looked away again. “There’s no longer any need to meet.”

After that sentence, the cabin fell completely silent.

Until they arrived in District 71, neither the higher-up nor the researcher squeezed out another word. Qin Zhilu handled his affairs as usual. His dark eyes were cold, heavy, and calm. An Yu watched him from the side for a long time, couldn’t capture the slightest ripple.

He noticed that his Commander, while processing emails, poked the lop-eared rabbit several times with a blank expression. The lop-eared rabbit had only woken up a few minutes earlier as the data refresh exhausted him. He had been huddled in a corner, munching on a biscuit, when Qin Zhilu snatched the biscuit from its hand and shoved it back, teasing it repeatedly until the lop-eared rabbit’s golden eyes turned blood red.

An Yu hesitated for a moment, then took out the last thing he had in his pocket and gently poked the officer’s gloves with the corner of the packaging bag.

Qin Zhilu looked up, but before his gaze could move upwards, it landed on the piece of bread.

—The breadcrumbs were individually packaged in sealed bags, small and thick, made with the same ingredients as those in Corner’s signature bread, but with more substantial ingredients than those sold in stores. After being pressed and baked, they were crispy and portable, and were emergency rations that Maddie provided to her boss. He had seen An Yu take them out a few times during missions before, but he had never seen An Yu eat them, because this was “the last supply.”

Qin Zhilu stared blankly at the piece of bread crumb for a moment, then the crumb smeared on his glove. An Yu whispered, “Here you go. Let the lop-eared rabbit go.”

“Hmm.” Qin Zhilu took the bread and put it in the inside pocket of his trench coat, put the terminal aside, leaned back against the wall, and closed his eyes to rest.

An Yu observed him for a while longer and found that Commander really didn’t intend to eat the bread, but he also clearly didn’t plan to give it back to him.

Suddenly, he remembered what the octopus chibi had said not long ago—

That the Commander had never cared about the taste of bread.

All he cared about was the bread.