“So,what-do-you-think？”

With a slight clapping of his hands by a man in a gray cloth suit, Harman's face twitched and he pushed away the woman in the blue dress and disappeared from the big white screen, and the light around the two disappeared first, and then turned on again. When the lights in the cinema theater where the two of them stretched out came back on, Adam, dressed in gray, asked Arlando, who was sitting next to him.

"Very... Unique. ”

Arrando, who had been supporting his cheek with his left hand, straightened his neck, and after shaking his left hand into a fist a few times, Arlando gave this answer.

"You can't find a word that fits." Adam turned sideways to look at Arlando.

"yes, it's weird." Arlando tilted his head, met Adam's gaze for a few seconds, and nodded.

"Confusion, anger, anxiety from worry, mania wanting to get out of here, all gone, right?"

"Now that you mention that, I think [there should be these emotions], but I don't feel them, I... I don't have those feelings," Arlando shook his head slightly, "Uh, why am I shaking my head?" ”

"That's because these [emotions] have been cut off or erased," Adam pointed to his temple, "You know what's going on, you're still concerned about her, you want to get out of here, but you're not letting some of the negative human emotions dominate you, you're always thinking about what to do, aren't you?" You will feel ... Unique because this is the first time you have officially entered this state consciously. ”

"I don't understand."

"Imagine a person who enters a completely new environment to explore, may feel fear because of the unfamiliar factor, may feel excited and curious because of the same factor, most of the time the two coexist, you are just forced to let one side prevail."

"How is this done?"

"Oh, a program that can make you believe in [sensory signals], a program that allows your brain to output signal instructions to be reflected in the world, a program that can make you forget about the different control mechanisms between you and the world, don't you think it can make you lose some curiosity, lose some emotions?"

"I think you're right," Arlando nodded after a moment of contemplation, "but, still... ”

"You want to learn about the past."

"But it's just for the sake of the future, not out of pure curiosity about the past, right?"

“。。。。。。 yes, you're right. ”

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As you can see, you and I, our home world, are in an irreversible death. But death is a natural thing, just as all mothers die; It's just that in most cases, the death of the mother cannot be entirely attributed to the child, and our mother died completely because of us.

If the child is already free of the mother's home, then the mother's death may not be devastating to the child; However, when we discovered the demise of our home planet, we were also unfortunate to find that unless a miracle happens, we will never be able to find another planet to call home before our home planet exceeds its limits.

No one wants to be helpless for the end.

So, we took measures, and in a way that most people could not have imagined--- organized and planned population reduction, to put it bluntly--- killing. But of course, we can't just tell people "Hey, if you don't die, we're all going to be doomed," and if people were noble enough to give up their lives, we wouldn't have gotten into that trouble in the first place.

And as you have just seen, a well-organized war cannot last forever. Why? Because such wars must take place in areas with a high rate of consumption of individual resources in order to be effective, that is to say, those wars that take place in remote areas of the world, regardless of whether they live or die, are ineffective, they must take place in those developed regions--- where human desires and desires bring the greatest consumption of resources. So, it is impossible to have wars all the time in these areas, people will not allow it, and as for why, I will not explain.

So, we need to find another way to eliminate the population, and the original SOPs existed for this purpose. To die--- that's the meaning of their existence. They are a group of people who reject the existing world, and the organization organizes them into a circle of "internal communication loops" that isolate them from the world until the world does not become alarmed by their demise.

However, this is not a long-term solution, this extinction is too time-consuming, requires resources in its own right---- requires more efficient extinction. How to gather all the set goals and eliminate them all at once, this is the next problem to be solved--- you can't swagger and press hundreds of millions of people together and throw down one*.

While the committee was struggling with this problem, a turning point came when humanity had a lucky breakthrough in a technology that would help them walk between the stars--- a breakthrough that came from a mineral found under the ice at Callisto. This mineral is extremely limited enough for all human use, and it is questionable whether its quantity can be sustained until the experiment is completed. So, naturally, the experiment was moved to a virtual environment.

It was at this time that a scientist came up with the idea of gathering those SOPs into a network of worlds that could be used to experiment with new materials and technologies, meet the needs of those SOPs, and then kill them later.

The scholar may have suggested this out of last mercy--- that at least these people who were destined to die early for the sake of humanity as a whole should be provided with a world in which they could spend their rightful years, perhaps for a few short years in their bodies, but for decades in their spirits.

Ironically, sometimes good intentions can induce some bad results.

In order for these SOPs to live for decades in a matter of years, people who connect their spirits to the network must be "accelerated", a concept that was often talked about many years ago, before the development of virtual technology--- "time ratio to reality". At the time, people didn't think it was a problem---- it wasn't a problem for people to go through years online and then come back to the real world.

They were wrong, but no one blames them for their optimism for what happened next.

People who have been isolated from the world for a long time, and who have returned to society after many years of disasters, usually experience great mental anguish, but there has never been a record in the history of mankind that these people who have experienced a time gap in time have died directly because of mental anguish.

However, when the first experimenters experienced dozens of times the speed of the real world in the network, the pain killed them---- their spirits could not properly connect with their physical bodies.

They dissipated into the network, and this was the first Phantom Pain disaster.

The committee of the organizers saw an opportunity to connect the SOPs to the optoelectronic world and then use the Phantom Pain to kill them. Then in that virtual life, the SOPs will finally serve humanity. They will test a structure of social domination with their own lives, exposing the problems of that structure; Their joys, sorrows, and sorrows will be collected into emotional data, which will then become the basis for controlling the emotions and thoughts of all human beings; And then their death will make up for the last flaw in that virtual world---- how to make the human spirit effectively [killed] in the network.

After that, you know ---- the [online game crash].

The spirit of SOP is distorted, manipulated, polluted ... The signal is projected directly on their spirit, they see, they listen, they speak, and ultimately it is all manipulated. The Commission has distorted their world, but perhaps not something deeper. Deeper down in the spirit of the SOPs, they know that something is not right.

They don't know what it is, what is wrong, but they can feel --- as irritable, resentful, and unable to be at peace when they are oppressed by society in the real world... This sentiment has led them to begin to create large amounts of abnormal mental data in the network. The Committee decided that the data had research value and decided not to delete them immediately. These anomalous data accumulate, accumulate, until one day they find an exit.

The algorithms occupied by these anomalous data provided a means for some SOPs who were [particularly alert] to the world in which they were located to counter the controlling AI of the network at the time, allowing them to bypass a large part of the data manipulation against the spirit of the SOPs--- allowing them to see some fragments of the future.

Fragments of their future, a shattered future.

The SOPs began to rebel, and by the time the committee tried to delete the anomalous data, it had become indeletable; These abnormal data provided the rebellious SOPs with the power to reverse modify the network, and by modifying the network, it had an incomparable impact on the human society that was already fully informationized at that time.

To use an old phrase--- hacker, but without having to hit the keyboard by hand.

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"I'm one of them, an SOP?" Arlando asked Adam.

"Third generation."

"My father, my mother, my...

"So are your parents, and so are your friends," Adam drew a circle in the air, "Your life is an elaborate closed circle where the offspring of the SOPs will play together and become the SOPs of the next generation together. ”

"This world..."

"One of the main purposes of this world is to kill you."

"I... My mom... Mom, I remember you," Arlando slowly raised his arm, as if someone was forcibly holding it down, "I... I remember you ... Mom... ”

"Yes, the last time we met, through me, you saw the last remnants of your mother's thoughts--- your mother, the resistance fighter who rebelled against the fate of the SOP...

"What was the last time I saw it!!" The flat tone vanished, and Arlando's arm jerked up, covering his face.

"Your mother's last wish."

"Why, why find me now, I have a love, a life, a future that I want to fight for!! I want to have a family, a love and a respect--- all a man can hope for!! Why... Why find me now ... ”

"You can see your present life in this way, which is one of the main reasons I found you," Adam sighed as he looked at Arlando, who was already bent over in pain, "Yes, the world is built on human data, and even your lover is --- describe her in the original work, her [past] as described by people in the distant past; But these alone are not going to make Harman now. Karn was born. Her love, her hate, everything you feel, can't be described simply with a data string, it's not as simple as showing a character's joys, sorrows and sorrows in words in the old days, I want you to feel those emotions... The love of the past SOPs for her, the expectation of her birth, these invisible thoughts in this world... ”

"But it's so fragile...

"Yes, it's fragile, and as human beings, we fear higher beings--- like God, and in this world, God is a very concrete thing." Adam nodded.

"What do you want me to do, like my mother?"

"No, I want you to 。。。。。。。。"

"No, no, no, no, don't say it, I don't want to know." Arlando interrupted Adam with a wave of his hand.

"So what do you want?"

"In my 20 years of life, everything was arranged to be destroyed, what do I want? What do you say I want!! Love, affection, hatred, revenge... I want everything ... ”

The movie theater where the two of them were sitting began to collapse violently after the word "everything" was squeezed out of their teeth, and large cracks spread on the ceiling and walls, black flames gushed out from the cracks, and finally the entire [movie theater] was engulfed by black flames.

"It's your decision to embrace the power you've always hated, feared?" Standing in the midst of a black storm of fire, Adam shook his head.

"What I hate ... FEARED ... ”

"There is absolutely no way you can defeat Ali. Al. Shacheth] and killed him, Orb, Moresby, the universe, you have overcome all the way, but in the depths of you you hate your victory, you fear what is behind your victory, but you don't know what it is? These black flames ... ”

“。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。”

"This is a world built on death to a large extent, usually the dead cannot be connected with the living, but here it is different, death here has its own will--- the desires of the SOPs who dissipate here, their anger, their cries, here death has its own will, and this will of death has found their offspring...

"An exit..."

"No, a container, haven't you noticed, the power that turns the tide of battle appears when you are consumed by hatred, anger, despair--- and you are most closely connected to the fragments of the dead!"

"I 。。。。。。"

"Your ancestors are the very concept of death in this world, and you have become death; You become a segment of the equation, you become the result, so no matter how much you struggle on the other end of the equation, it has to be equal to you in the end. ”

"So what?"

"So, is this what you want, you want revenge and you want love, you want to sow fear but you want love, you want to drink the blood of the enemy and you want love? Do you hate everything but want to love too? If that's what you really think, the individual named Haman won't be attracted to you in the first place. ”

“。。。。。。 Now I finally remember," the black fire was still burning, but Arlando's voice was still coming out, "why I was attracted to her, why we were together... ”

"Remember?"

"I am a commoner, and she is of noble birth; I was doing nothing, and she led a war; I lament to the world, she is trying to conquer the world。。。。。 Every little bit of us is different, but ... But we all want ... From the bottom of my heart, no, from the depths of my soul I hope to move forward towards a beautiful future that we can't even tell... AND WE ALL RECOGNIZE FROM THE DEPTHS OF OUR SOULS THAT EACH OTHER IS ... ”

"Plus an accident."

"What?"

"This desire coupled with a coincidence, believe me, you were not meant to meet her, it was not something they had planned, your encounter with her was a procedural anomaly--- the choices you made without being affected led you to her side."

"It's not fate..."

"It's not."

"Ha, I don't like the word fate either," the next moment when Allando said [I don't like fate], the black flame disappeared without a trace as if it had been sucked away by an invisible giant vacuum cleaner, "but you still haven't answered my three questions, why did you come to me, what did you do with me, and what results did you do with me?" ”

"I found you because the moment of choice is approaching, whether to control, or to change, or to maintain...

。。。。。。。。。

。。。。。。。。。

。。。。。。。。。

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"So, that's it, right?" Adam smiled and hugged the big boy [in front of].

"Well, I made a promise to her, and I want to keep it."

"Oh? What guarantees? ”

"I thought you could see everything."

"I'm just a black guy."

"Haha, okay, I'll 。。。。。 with her

In dreams, I once believed in the power of my own gentleness;

but forced to be strong to the point of turning his back to meekness;

In dreams, once believed in their own merciless power;

but I found gentleness before me, and I could not catch up;

Now, I can slowly feel those things that are gradually changing;

Open up distant memories with strong feelings;

extinguish the remnants of anger in a tired body with tears;

Hold up those tears and pour them down, maybe the soul can bloom again;

I do, I do;

I am willing to struggle to float from the bottom of the abyss;

to reach that height I have never been to before;

I do, I do;

I'm willing to smile again at tomorrow;

There is no more fear;

As long as I have you, I am willing;

In the tears, a new hope emerged, flowing in front of my eyes;

Whether the old days, whether they are gained or lost, will be reproduced again;

I am willing to pursue the other side of time, the new end that has been frozen;

As long as you want, as long as you want;

I'm going to reinvent myself;

by your side, with you forward;

As long as you want, as long as you want;

I will walk again on the nick of memory that makes me ache;

I do, I do;

to believe that tomorrow will be better;

As long as you want, you will;

Go with me beyond this solid world;

I do, I do;

To greet the rising sun with a smile;

As long as you want, you will;

Stay with me in the dark night。。。。。。。。

"I-do, right?"

"Well, I made a vow of love, and I intend to fulfill that vow."

"With her presence, the power of the dead will never completely occupy you, so now she is at the bottom of that abyss, and my lover is protecting her with all his might, but if you want to go, you can only rely on yourself."

"That's not a problem, it's just that when will I have this memory?"

"You're not against memory blocking?"

"I hate being manipulated, but ... Isn't all life under some degree of control? ”

After saying this, Arlando jumped down towards the [crack] that he had just made!

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[Honey, what's going on?] 】

[He jumped, where are you?] 】

[She jumped]

[Then, the spark of hope is left]