Hao Ren recalled the moment, which happened not too long ago—it was right before Zorm reached the critical point, and completely disintegrated.
Nolan, the only NPC in the Dream Arks, her special “soul” code had prevented her from transmitting to Crapple Research Station through the UAV link and there was not enough time to build a new retransmitting protocol in the UAV link. In those seemingly desperate circumstances, the only way Hao Ren could think of was to do everything possible to preserve Nolan’s soul. Since Nolan’s soul could not be transmitted, they found a place to keep it.
Because compatibility issues occurred only within the UAV link, and Petrachelys’s own data processing capability was sufficient to cope with this degree of incompatibility, so Hao Ren’s last attempt was possible: he downloaded Nolan to Petrachelys’s onboard mainframe.
Of course, the result of downloading in a rush was still somewhat not satisfying. Inevitably, Nolan’s soul had some damage after downloading to the mainframe. This was mainly due to the compatibility caused by the situation. So until just now, Petrachelys had been busy dealing with Nolan’s data and the data terminal also stayed here for it. But anyway, the good news was that there was nothing serious about the memory or emotion. Nolan itself was an NPC, and her data itself had a very high self-reorganizing function. After some recovery and debugging, she finally recovered.
Looking at the gray-haired lady walking restlessly in the holographic image, Hao Ren was scratching his face and wondering where to start to explain to her. He could only introduce this place first. “This is my spacecraft—Petrachelys.”
“Your… spacecraft?” Nolan’s memory stayed in the time before Zorm was destroyed, and the final stage of her memory was completely in a muddle, so she was confused about what was going on here. “Why would you suddenly have a spacecraft… Ah! I remember, the whole world… How’s Zorm?”
“Ehem, let’s confirm your state first. How do you feel now? Do you feel like you’re in a trance or any loss of memory? What about the environment around you?”
“Me?” Nolan looked at herself and said, “I think I’m all right, but I don’t know what this place is. There’s nothing here. I only see a lot of lights floating around, but other than that, humans, houses, the sky and the earth, these things have disappeared…”
Suddenly, panic flickered in Nolan’s eyes. “Is the… Is the world destroyed?”
“Zorm has been swallowed by the sun, seven hours ago,” Hao Ren said while showing another image in front of Nolan. Nolan, as a program, did not need to browse the image with her ‘eyes’, but in order to maintain the personality of ‘Nolan’, the mainframe simulated her human function in a real way, so Nolan was still maintaining common sense and senses of a human. Hao Ren saw a group of smaller holographic images appearing in the hologram. Nolan looked at it, astonished. ‘These are the images of its last moment,” said Hao Ren.
Nolan watched a huge, indescribable bio-mechanical mixture blazing in the sun and the whole planet fell apart into the sun. She exclaimed in shock, “Then now I am…”
“Don’t worry, I managed to save everyone’s soul at the last minute.” Hao Ren coughed softly. “I have a perfect soul transmission technology here, more advanced than the technology used by Zorm Ark. It can extract the soul from the matter like extracting liquid. So there is no ‘man’ on the planet that falls into the sun. You are now on a planet called Tannagost, which is billions of light-years away from Zorm, near a space station called Crapple Research Station. This is my research facility.”
Hao Ren simply explained the large-scale soul data chaining in one sentence. However, Nolan was not stupid, she still guessed that a horrifying incident that beyond the common understanding of ordinary people had happened. She could not understand the theory behind the incident, but could only accept it. “So it means… Before the last memory was destroyed, you already transferred the data of the entire virtual world to another memory?”
“Yes.” Hao Ren nodded.
“Is the new memory safe?”
“It’s certainly safer than Zorm. The Crapple Research Station can run normally even if it falls into a black hole.”
And now, Nolan finally realized what was wrong. She looked around blankly and asked, “But … Where are the others? Why am I the only one here?”
Hao Ren put his hands on the console desk, slightly leaned forward and asked, “Nolan, do you… do you find yourself different from other people?”
“Different?” Nolan frowned. “You mean keeping the memory of reincarnation? You can do that, can’t you?”
“Keeping the memory is just something on the surface. The next thing I’m going to say may not be easy for you to accept, but you have to listen—”
“If I tell you, you are not human…”
He told the whole story as gentle and calm as possible, even including the structure of the entire Zorm ark and the causes and consequences of human hiding into the virtual world 10000 years ago, because it was only then that Nolan could have a better understanding of this vast, ancient, magnificent plan, and the role she was supposed to play in the project. When she heard that the virtual world was built in the dreamland of an ancient primitive creature, Nolan could not help but exclaim, and when she heard that she was, in fact, a monitoring program for maintaining a series of mechanical equipment in dreamland, she remained stunned, unable to speak for a long time.
In just half an hour she was dumbfounded even more than she had over the past hundreds of years.
“Nolan, Nolan, I’ve finished.”
Nolan took a breath, biting his lip and looking at Hao Ren at the other end of the screen. She now finally realized what the window before her meant: This was the dividing line between the real world and the virtual world. The man on the side of the screen was sitting in front of a device in the real world, and she… was just a series of data trapped in the virtual world, and this time this series of data was not even human.
“What you just said is true?” Nolan’s voice sounded unusually calm.
“I don’t have to lie to you.”
“I’m actually just a… program?” Nolan bites her lip. “Programmed by people to monitor equipment?”
Hao Ren did not know what to say.
“So I actually have no parents, no family, no past, even in the real world these things have never existed.” Nolan suddenly thought a lot. “So my memory was invented from the beginning…”
Nolan’s reaction was understandable. Anyone who suddenly knew that he was not human at all, but only a series of codes running in a machine, and all the emotional experience and the memories since birth was actually created by a system of computer programming written by a group of programmers, would probably unable to accept it as well. Nolan was already very strong.
“In fact, to me, AI is no different from humans,” Hao Ren said. He knew that he should say something. He talked about his worldview, the open mind that was formed after experiencing some strange forms of civilization and forms of life after becoming an inspector. “If one aware of their existence, have one’s own feelings. Under this premise, all form of life is actually the same. Whether they live in a body or a machine, they are all the same. They are no different on the soul level.”
“Thanks for your consolation,” Nolan said and gave him a stiff smile, “but… It’s hard to accept, isn’t it?”
Hao Ren sighed and said, “Yes, it’s hard.”
Nolan did not want to make Hao Ren difficult and changed the topic. “Let’s not talk about this. Did you just mention that you’re working on reshaping an ecosystem? If I didn’t get it wrong… Do you have the kind of power like the creator?”
Hao Ren almost coughed up his bronchus on the spot. “You are exaggerating, my model is far from the creator. And I’m not doing it myself, at best I’m like an investor this time: the kind that provides raw materials and venues.”
“Sorry, it’s a little beyond my imagination, not easy to understand.” Nolan smiled, and then her face went gloomy again. “Emotion is really a strange thing. I should be happier, but when I know that I’m just a program used to monitor the system, the remodeling of the biosphere, whatever it is, seems to have nothing to do with me.”
Looking at Nolan’s wry smile, Hao Ren and Lily could only sigh.