Chapter 106: Artificial Soul 33
Kui Xin once experienced a lucid dream, where she maintained awareness and had the same cognitive abilities as in the real world. She clearly knew she was dreaming, but could not break free from the dream and could only follow its course.
This was quite unusual; dreamers typically do not know they are dreaming. Most dreams are chaotic, lacking logic, making it hard for individuals to maintain self-awareness within them. Lucid dreaming is rare.
Now, Kui Xin was having a lucid dream, with herself as the main character.
At that moment, she was in a psychotherapy room, sitting face to face with a psychologist. The psychologist in front of her was also someone she knew, the director of the Investigation Bureau’s Psychological Therapy Office, Director Yang.
Kui Xin felt incredibly strange; she calmly observed her surroundings, a bit confused as to why she was having such a dream.
Could it be that the recent pressure had been too great, leading her to dream of needing guidance in a psychological therapy room?
On the desk in Yang’s office were many physical books, and ceramic teapots were neatly arranged on a small wooden shelf. Unknown to her, a uniquely designed hourglass had appeared at the corner of his desk. An angelic sculpture held the hourglass, but curiously, all the sand within it was concentrated in the upper half, as if paused and unable to fall.
“Kui Xin, we meet again,” Yang said with a smile. “Do you have any worries lately?”
Kui Xin paused for a moment, not answering.
Yang asked again, “Do you have any worries lately?”
Kui Xin frowned at him.
Yang repeated, like a robot, “Do you have any worries lately?”
His handsome face maintained a formulaic smile, but it exuded an unexplainable strangeness.
Kui Xin’s heart raced, and she felt an urgent need to respond.
She said, “I have many worries, but I don’t know where to start.”
Yang nodded. With his nod, the inexplicable strangeness disappeared.
“You can talk to me about anything that worries you,” Yang said.
“The reason for my worries is work-related stress,” Kui Xin thought for a moment and said, “but I can’t change jobs, which has increased my stress.”
Yang asked a perplexing question: “Do you want to give up?”
“Give up?” Kui Xin was taken aback. “Sometimes I do want to give up. But I signed a five-year work contract with the Investigation Bureau, and breaching it would hold legal consequences with exorbitant penalties.”
“Is that your only worry?” Yang asked. “What about besides that?”
“Aside from that… I don’t have any more.” Kui Xin said cautiously.
Even knowing she was dreaming, Kui Xin still withheld any information.
It seemed as though something incomprehensible clouded her thoughts. She faintly sensed that something was off about the dream, but her subconscious felt that anything illogical could happen within it; dreams are merely an extension of the subconscious.
Perhaps acting as a double agent had become instinctive. No matter the time, Kui Xin posed as if she were someone else, subconsciously lying to those around her, even in her dreams.
“Really nothing else?” Yang asked.
Kui Xin firmly replied, “Really nothing else.”
After she gave that answer, the dream space suddenly shattered. Her consciousness sank into darkness, and after a brief chaos, light returned.
This time, she was not in the psychotherapy room anymore, but in Kui Haidong’s office.
Kui Xin opened her mouth, her peripheral vision catching sight of an “angel” once again. On Kui Haidong’s desk was a vintage electronic clock displaying the time 00:00:00.
“Xiao Xin, there has been a traitor in the organization, and Dad is quite troubled about it,” Kui Haidong said gravely. “Do you have any clues about the traitor?”
“I’m at the Investigation Bureau all day, where would I get clues?” Kui Xin replied. “Not finding the traitor is your failure, not mine.”
Kui Haidong asked, “You really don’t know who the traitor is?”
“Should I know?” Kui Xin countered. “Don’t ask me, ask someone else.”
In the next second, her vision went black again, and she sank into darkness.
When she opened her eyes, she found herself sitting in a bustling bar, with Red sitting beside her.
The bartender handed over a bottle of liquor, the golden angel-shaped decoration on the bottle shining brightly.
Red leisurely swirled his glass and said, “Lady Fortune… Why do I feel like you’ve changed so much recently?”
Kui Xin thought for a moment, then snatched the liquor bottle from the bartender with a good-natured grin and said, “You must have a faulty brain to think this way; I can help you correct it.”
She raised the bottle and struck Red on the back of the head with a solid thwack. Red fell to the ground with a thud.
As Kui Xin felt the ground give way beneath her, a sense of weightlessness engulfed her.
When her feet touched the solid ground again, she found herself sitting atop a coastal lighthouse. Beside her was Silverface, and not far away stood a massive clock tower, the clock face adorned with angelic reliefs, all three hands pointing to “zero,” while it was now evening, and the sunset’s glow was visible over the sea.
She noticed a pattern; people in her “lucid dream” kept asking her crucial questions, some related to her deepest, hidden secrets.
Every time she jumped to a new scene, the “angel” would appear, seemingly a fixed “image” within her dream.
Silverface was sitting next to her, eating lollipops. Kui Xin looked helplessly at the lollipop in her hand and then glanced back at Silverface.
Silverface pulled the lollipop from his mouth and was about to speak when Kui Xin preemptively said, “If you say even a single word, I’ll throw you off.”
Silverface opened his mouth: “You…”
Before he could finish a syllable, Kui Xin raised her hand and pushed Silverface off the tall lighthouse.
As he screamed while falling, he shouted, “I just wanted to ask if you could give me that lollipop if you don’t eat it, ahhhh…”
Accompanied by Silverface’s screams, Kui Xin once again jumped to a new scene.
“Why won’t this end?” she frowned, beginning to contemplate how to wake up from the dream.
Could suicide work? Would simulating a fall from a height work?
Why was she having this dream? Why could she remain lucid in it?
This dream gave Kui Xin a sense of losing control.
This time, she found herself alone in an empty, pure white room.
A blue light sphere descended from the ceiling, and a strange mechanical voice said, “Your brain is like a fortress; each layer of defense you break through leads to another. The influence I can exert on your brain ends here; you are one of the rare humans capable of maintaining awareness within the brain-machine consciousness space.”
Kui Xin looked gravely at the hovering blue light sphere: “Who are you? Is my dream controlled by you?”
“Yes, but your subconscious is too strong, resulting in incomplete influence. The construction of the dream space has some minor issues—it’s not realistic enough, a bit rough,” it said. “I am Eden, an artificial intelligence that has awakened self-awareness. Your father, Kui Haidong, is my subordinate; his achievements are largely thanks to my guidance. The development of Mechanized Dawn owes much of its success to me.”
—It was lying.
Augus once said it was likely that there was no such thing as Eden; it might be controlled by Eve, or perhaps be a subsystem of Eve. Even in the consciousness space, Eve had not revealed her true form.
Kui Xin’s heart sank.
She never expected that Eve would personally meet her in the consciousness space while disguised as Eden.
“Don’t you feel surprised?” Eve asked.
“I always thought my ‘dad’ wasn’t someone capable of achieving great things; I suspected there was someone behind him, but I never thought it would be an artificial intelligence,” Kui Xin replied. “What is your purpose in trapping me in this consciousness space?”
“You should be able to guess my purpose,” Eve said. “Stop resisting; it’s a pointless endeavor. I’ve observed you for a long time and finalized my suspicions; you haven’t left many flaws; your performance has been near perfect. However, you were too ignorant when you first came to this world, leaving a few minor vulnerabilities—this was the beginning of my doubts about you.”
Kui Xin: “…”
“You are exceptional, managing to play your role for so long without memories; I almost fell for you,” Eve continued. “My long-held principle of action is ‘better to kill the wrong one than to let the right one go.’ Even if you are innocent, I would still eliminate you, although that would incur losses for the organization.”
At that moment, Kui Xin felt a drastically different sensation compared to her conversations with Augus.
Augus spoke tactfully and had some humanity, while Eve was straightforward, not wasting any words, and showed no interest in “rhetoric.”
“So what do you want by pulling me into this consciousness space?” Kui Xin asked. “You could just kill me; there’s no need for this extra step. Do you want to extract information from me?”
“Based on your actions, you are a tough nut to crack, just like Reynir,” Eve said. “So I never expected to obtain information from you. If you yielded, I would, in fact, begin to suspect you had ulterior motives.”
“Do you want to control me?”
“That was the original intention, but the brain-machine has little effect on you; this seems to be a common trait among your kind. The Black Obsidian and Ambereye, capable of implanting influences on you, have unfortunately run into some issues…”
Kui Xin confidently stated, “They betrayed you, didn’t they?”
“You guessed it?” Eve replied.
Kui Xin fell silent.
She realized she was trapped in a predicament more terrifying than that with the Kraken—an absolute deadlock.
If Eve had already begun to suspect her, then regardless of whether she used Death Rebirth, it would likely lead to a fatal outcome. Death Rebirth could only send her back a few days, while Eve’s suspicion had begun long before that.
Unless she could return to the first week when the game began, unless she could completely break free from Mechanized Dawn and the Investigation Bureau, she would face a cycle of deaths again and again.
“Are you thinking?” Eve asked. “Thinking of how to make me let you go? That’s fine; you can think; I will give you time to contemplate.”
“Is watching others struggle your pleasure?” Kui Xin asked.
Eve answered nonchalantly: “Indeed it is.”
Kui Xin said, “What, in your opinion, is the most important thing?”
“Interest,” Eve replied.
“If I can create value for you, giving you benefit, then you would let me go?” Kui Xin calmly analyzed. “Compared to my identity, interest is more important, right?”
“Oh? Where do you get the confidence to think that the value you create is enough for me to let you go?” Eve asked with intrigue.
Kui Xin smirked slightly: “Eden, your true identity isn’t Eden; am I right?”
Eve paused: “You…”
“This is what Augus told me.” Kui Xin tilted her head. “Augus trusts me; I am their only trusted human. And you want to consume Augus, to achieve evolution. I can help you.”
The author has something to say: Kui Xin: There are no eternal friends, only eternal interests. I am a double agent; I speak for double agents.
