Sunlight in the sky slowly receded. The last golden rays of the sun before it completely set behind the mountains shone into the cave where Hao Ren and Nolan were hiding. The light plated everything in the cave with a pale golden shade. Nolan leaned on a giant tire of the offroader. She was half-bathing in the dusk light and half-hidden in the darkness as she exhaled and said, “Where should I begin? I can’t even remember when the first time I realized the world had gone wrong, probably a few thousand years ago? Or maybe even earlier. The earliest picture in my mind was a family vacation in the southern hemisphere, and then somehow I woke up to become a warehouse custodian. But tracing back these age-old memories does not make sense anymore. It was only a continuous, repetitive, and confusing experience. Sometimes I would die in an accident. After my resurrection, I would discover that the world had completely changed. Sometimes there would be situations like today; I didn’t die, just the world had suddenly changed, and in the blink of an eye, I got a new identity and teammates. I don’t even know if the passing of time is true or not. Maybe it all happened just a few hours ago, the world has just begun was a few hours agow… but it is meaningless.”
Hao Ren listened quietly. He had too many questions but could not sort out them out logically. So he merely asked what was in his mind. “Any pattern in the way the world reset itself?”
“None,” Nolan shook her head. “Sometimes the resetting happened once in several decades. Sometimes a few years. The shortest resetting cycle I remember is two years, and the longest one two centuries during which I had died twice. When I woke up, the world stage as I knew it was still there, just my identity had changed. At that time, I was amazed and thought naively that the reincarnation had finally stabilized only to encounter another reset in the afternoon after my second resurrection.”
Hao Ren nodded. It seemed that Nolan’s death was not the trigger of the reset. If the reset intervals were too long, Nolan’s reincarnation during that long period would become a change of identity, just as a gamer logged off with one username and then logged in with another. So, as unique as the girl was, she should not be the root cause of this anarchic world.
“After each reset, all people and things in the world will get new identities and ‘settings.’ Human relationships, international relations, world affairs, cultures, religions, and even technologies would change,” said Nolan. Seeing Hao Ren fell into deep thought, she supposed the first ‘reincarnation of awakening’ that he experienced had confused him. “I studied the map; the topography of the world had also changed. Sometimes there were several continents on the planet, sometimes one big mass of land. There were also changes in plants and animals, but the extent of change was limited to ratios of species and population distribution. Anyway, I guess you wouldn’t understand; after all this was the first time you retained your memory after a reset. You might not have accumulated enough knowledge.”
Nolan had gone through thousands of years of reincarnation. The amount of knowledge she had accumulated was staggering. She was almost an expert and a scholar in multiple fields and could talk about ecology all day long without looking at the book. Before this, in Gray Fox, she was quiet because she did not have anyone to confide in. But now she started to treat Hao Ren as a friend.
Hao Ren shook his head and said, “It’s all right. I know a thing or two about ecology. If what you say is true, then this world is a bit like a sandbox. Let’s assume that there is a director or program controlling everything; it uses materials from a library to generate a ‘world’?”
“Did you infer from the hypothesis of animal and plant I just mentioned?” Nolan looked at Hao Ren somewhat unexpectedly. “It seems you have quite extensive knowledge. You are right. I thought so too. The world is really like a program that constantly generates its maps automatically. But even if it’s true, we can’t help it; it’s beyond our control.”
Hao Ren did not hear Nolan’s last sentence; he had zoned out. Convinced that he was in the Plane of Dreams, which meant that the real world was outside the planet Zorm. He thought of Khiton’s journal and Ulyanov’s epiphany. If this place was a virtual world, then where was its interface with the real world? Since Khiton and Ulyanov could find out that the world was an illusion, this virtual world was not so perfect after all; it certainly had some contradictions!
“Population!” Hao Ren suddenly looked up at Nolan. “Did the population change after each reset?”
Nolan was confused. “Population? Does it matter?”
“Khiton once said that this world was fake. Ulyanov also said something similar when he was dying,” said Hao Ren. “If the world is fake, then you think the people in the world are real.”
Nolan’s eyes widened slightly. “You suspect that other humans in this world are merely NPCs—none-player characters?”
“No, I think they are all real,” Hao Ren waved his hand. “This is the exact reason I have to ask. According to your situation, you would resurrect after each death, which means is no ‘cache’ function in the ‘mechanism’ of this world; each real human would reappear with a new identity in another world after each death. So if everyone in the world were real, then every time the world resets, its population would not change. Even over time, there would not be a significant shift in the population. But if the people in this world are different after every resetting, it means that at least some humans are NPCs. Then the number of real humans should be based on the minimum population count of each resetting cycle.”
Nolan looked at Hao Ren in surprise. “Are you sure this was your first ‘resetting’?”
“What ask so?”
“Your questions are profound. You have been pondering them very carefully for a long time,” Nolan stared at Hao Ren suspiciously. “I didn’t have such deep thinking during my first few reincarnations; all I cared was to live for a little longer. But you sound as if you don’t care.”
But Nolan kept her last thought to herself that Hao Ren seemed to analyze things like an unconcerned outsider.
Cold sweat trickled down Hao Ren’s forehead, marveling at the girl’s terrible gut feeling and observation. He smiled wryly and then swayed her attention. “*Cough cough*, it doesn’t matter. You can treat me as a genius. Otherwise, a neurotic…”
“I have never thought about it from the angle of the population. Your thinking is very novel and sensible. I have not studied about the population, but I have read several census reports. I think the population of the world hadn’t changed much after each reset cycle, or it had stayed the same perhaps. After all, the world is a large place. With so many humans in this world, no one could do a 100% population census. But with just a little tweak in the ‘program’ behind this world, no one would realize the fact that the world’s population has been staying constant.”
She giggled and twisted the corner of her mouth upward with a hint of sarcasm. “And every time the world has only stayed to a few years, at most decades; there is simply not enough time for people to find out any anomalies.”
Hao Ren’s brows knit together. “So humans in this world should all be real… just that they were in a constantly refreshing sandbox?”
His worldview almost crumbled down. He began to realize that his exploration and time spent in this world was foolish. A bizarre bubble was shrouding the truth of this world. The so-called Nanomachine Swarms, Northern Ring Tower and the world war were just a stage play. He laughed at himself. “For what purpose after all the enthusiasm to finding out whether the lost-of-control Nanomachine Swarms of sixty-five years ago was the key to the problem when the problem itself isn’t a problem at all in the first place, let alone the key. In reality, nothing has ever happened.”
“No,” Nolan suddenly interrupted him. “I’m afraid there’s something more than meets the eye.”
“Huh?”
“During the recent resets, the world has seen a similar trend,” said Nolan, looking serious. “Whatever the setting at the beginning, the world would eventually evolve into a global war, weapon out of control, and the end of the day. The last time the Nanomachine Swarms went out of control, before that it was a global nuclear disaster, and before that, the tempering of weaponized satellites by the AI… The scripts might be slightly different, but the final processes were almost identity—the whole marched towards its death.”