Chapter 134: root (7)

134 – root (7)

Each speck of dust transformed into a black-winged butterfly, these ghostly creatures swarming across his retina, the edges of their wings refracting a seven-colored rainbow, the primary colors gathering, swirling, overlapping. Colorful images unfolded before his eyes, and he remembered his childhood.

When he held three rectangular mirrors in his hands, he would arrange them with the reflective sides facing inward to form a triangular prism, creating a kaleidoscope. He would press one end of the kaleidoscope against his right eye, then close his left eye, and the entire world would intertwine, expand, and collide into his vision as a complex tapestry.

“There are so many of you here,” he seemed to hear a clear voice utter these words.

He opened his eyes; the chaotic dizziness from moments ago had vanished. He felt as if he were floating, his body light, unburdened by any shackles. He looked around—this was a grassy field, and two figures appeared before him.

He saw his younger self lying on the emerald grass, holding the kaleidoscope up to gaze at the person lying beside him, laughing as he looked: “Let me count how many of your eyes are in here—I just reached thirteen thousand ninety-one… Wait, that’s odd.”

The person beside him said, “You miscounted.”

The texture of that voice felt incredibly soothing, like a stream flowing from an untouched forest valley.

The grass beneath him was soft, blades of varying lengths rendered translucent by the sunlight, deep jade and light green blending seamlessly, with an occasional weed rooted among them, its tip blooming into a small white flower. The scene was so tranquil and clear that it made every part of him relax, wishing to stay here forever, forever.

“Never mind then,” he shifted slightly, turning the other end of the kaleidoscope toward the sky. “I’m going to look at the sky.”

The moment he gazed at the bright, azure sky, he reflexively squinted: “…It’s so dazzling.”

—And then the person beside him would sit up, reaching out to cover the end of the kaleidoscope: “No more looking.”

He would toss the kaleidoscope aside, playfully argue with that person for a while, then reach a compromise, leaning against each other, no longer looking at the sky but instead observing the lake, the trees, and the buildings—though this was merely his imagination, as he intuitively felt things would unfold this way. In reality, that scene had vanished into the distance after a brief flash of a few seconds. At this very moment, he was inside the old house with walls covered in green vines, dense shade blocking part of the sun—it was the season when the ivy bloomed.

He was in the study, where his grandfather, wearing a pair of reading glasses, was poring over a hefty computer science tome.

He ran over, resting his elbows on his grandfather’s knees and looking up. Raised by his grandfather and older sister since childhood, acting spoiled seemed to have become his most adept skill.

“Grandpa,” he said softly, “Dong Chen is going abroad. Can’t we really keep Dong Jun here?”

His grandfather removed his reading glasses, looked at him, and said, “Children should stay with their own family.”

“But Dong Chen doesn’t like him at all and wouldn’t want him to follow,” he argued earnestly. “But I like him. If we keep him here, we’ll be his family. Isn’t that okay?”

His grandfather looked at him intently.

Grandfather had gentle, serene eyes, like those of the wisest elders, and the younger generation always believed those eyes could see through certain truths of the world.

“Do you like him very much, and does he like you back?” his grandfather asked. “He and his father share similar personalities—they are the type who are severely lacking in emotion.”

“He likes me too,” Lin Xun retorted. “And Dong Chen isn’t a person without feelings.”

He muttered quietly, “He likes her so much that… he locked her away.”

He knew that Dong Chen only loved his wife in this world. He even hated his own child to the core because, from the moment the child was born, his wife’s affection was divided in two, and he could no longer have it all to himself. Lin Xun thought that Dong Chen must not have wanted this child back then, but his wife felt differently.

His grandfather patted his head and said slowly, “That isn’t love.”

“It is love.”

“You’ll understand when you grow up.”

“I don’t care,” Lin Xun said, failing to act cute, he decided to throw a tantrum. “I want him to stay.”

His grandfather’s gaze wasn’t stern as he said, “Then you’ll have to take responsibility and take care of him.”

Lin Xun nodded and vowed, “I’ll protect him.”

He didn’t know why he used the word “protect.” He just thought that from then on, he would never let this person feel sad.

In truth, Lin Xun had long known he would succeed. He knew his grandfather also liked Dong Jun, even teaching him games involving decimal, binary, and hexadecimal systems—a privilege only he enjoyed. If someone liked a child, they wouldn’t be willing to let someone like Dong Chen take him away. And Dong Chen wouldn’t refuse. If he had no feelings for his own child, he wouldn’t care about the child’s whereabouts. But if he had even the slightest biological paternal instinct, he would know that the child would be better off with someone else than with him. His grandfather was a renowned old scientist, and no one would worry about entrusting the child to him.

He practically skipped out of the study, pulling open the door to share the news with his friend.

But he saw Dong Jun standing right outside the door.

—And Dong Jun’s gaze went past him, locking directly with his grandfather’s.

The meaning of that exchange, he didn’t understand then, nor would he understand later. It would take ten years, standing before his grandfather’s gray tombstone, when Lin Ting cried until she lost consciousness and fell forward, only to be caught by Dong Jun in that very moment, for him to finally comprehend.

The solidarity of three people was better than the mutual dependence of just two siblings, and better than the torment between father and son who, despite sharing blood, felt no affection for each other. The first twenty years of their lives would be smooth sailing because their grandfather had already found the optimal solution for them.

But Lin Ting lived more in her own world. Her interests differed from everyone else’s in the family. She painted, designed, and left home early to travel far across the ocean. More often, he and that person faced the world together—this world where anything could happen.

In this moment, he suddenly found himself high up in a skyscraper again. They had climbed to the topmost skylight of the building. From here, they could overlook the entire city—the overpasses, sidewalks, roundabouts, the ceaseless flow of traffic and bustling streets. A piercing siren blared from some corner of the city, red and blue lights flashing, because a massive car accident had occurred in another part of the city.

“Perhaps that’s how my parents looked when they passed away.” His voice was calm, as if narrating an ordinary story: “The news said a truck, out of control due to the driver’s fatigue, crashed their car off the overpass.”

After a brief pause, he added: “If there were an automated driving system that could control all vehicles, such things wouldn’t happen.”

Someone embraced him from behind: “Do you want to do it?”

“Hmm…” he said: “Shall we give it a try?”

The wind at the top of the city was strong, he remembered. In a person’s life, many crucial decisions are made in the blink of an eye, just like that summer, while walking through the school, in an empty corridor, Dong Jun suddenly lowered his head and kissed him.

Fragments rushed by, as if time flowed forward, the next stopping point a room with lush greenery outside the window, bright windows, where sunlight, sky, white clouds, and the shadows of hawthorn trees poured in.

His voice had changed, still bearing traces of youth but having aged a few years.

“Granting the highest authority of the automated driving system to both of us—I think special circumstances will always arise. So we need a… permission that can override all restrictions to modify the system settings. But should this permission be jointly held or separately held?”

Without waiting for an answer, he muttered to himself: “Separately, in case one day we’re not together or something.”

The voice and scene faded, and he drifted like a speck of extinguished ash, floating between one scene and another. Perhaps there truly is an internal logic in the human mind, linking these fleeting fragments into a chain.

The scene changed again. Inside the exhibition hall, thousands of seats were arranged in tiers, each long bench occupied by a person and their eyes fixed on the stage. He was in the preparation room, from where he could directly see the side of the stage. The entire hall was dimly lit, with only a spotlight—the kind unique to technology expos—shining brightly around that person. He saw Dong Jun’s slender, elegant silhouette, standing quietly there, already capturing everyone’s attention.

“Hello,” his voice seemed devoid of any emotion: “I’m from Galaxy. Today, I’d like to talk to you about automated driving.”

“First, I want to clarify its concept. For this, we have proposed three requirements for a fully automated driving system, ten categories of scenario information, and five levels of control commands.”

The voice grew fainter and more distant, as if it were a fleeting moment, and his attention returned to the preparation room.

“Look at him, no emotion at all,” Wang Anquan nudged him with an elbow: “You should have gone instead.”

“If I spoke, I wouldn’t have much emotion either,” he said.

“That’s different. You look more approachable,” Wang Anquan said disdainfully: “But our Dong Jun standing there is like a giant refrigerant—people dare to admire but not speak.”

Lin Xun laughed.

“I can’t go,” he said gently: “He didn’t say it. But if I interacted with the audience, he’d be unhappy.”

Wang Anquan: “Tsk.”

The next moment he found himself in the lounge, far from the bustle outside—he sat on the sofa, Dong Jun standing before him. He held Dong Jun’s hand, looking up at him with what seemed like a teasing expression. But as Lin Xun watched this scene, he suddenly felt a faint, wistful melancholy. He heard himself say, “So many people are watching you.”

This wisp of melancholy, like drifting smoke, pulled him out of the scene. He felt as though he were floating down a river, catching fleeting glimpses of countless independent scenes along the way—each one like a separate world. In the human mind, these fragments are connected in a mysterious, elusive way. He widened his eyes and saw the Galaxy Tower rising under the sunlight, vehicles moving in orderly streams along roads across the world. The world—this world—was racing forward like a power function curve, just as described in all science fiction. Incredible technologies, incredible research, incredible ideas sprouted like bamboo shoots across this land every day.

Just like at that tech exhibition, he seemed to have always been behind the scenes—in the preparation room, in front of the computer. He claimed he had no interest in getting involved in complex business operations, preferring to engage with the goddess of mathematics or the god of Turing. How Galaxy was run didn’t concern him. He didn’t know whether this behavior was his own preference or that person’s preference.

So, in an elusive moment, he suddenly felt detached from this world. The person who had always been by his side seemed to no longer belong to him, and he was merely watching it all unfold without participating. He saw many fleeting scenes that vanished in an instant. Galaxy needed Dong Jun often, but rarely needed him. He seemed to have no friends, no social life. Those who had once stayed up late debugging with him had drifted away, and that once vibrant, beating heart gradually stilled. He hadn’t even left the house—but he couldn’t remember why, as if he had drawn a circle around himself, trapping himself in one place.

Alone at his desk, writing and sketching, a snow-white cat curled on his lap, he wrote for a long time, and much time passed, but that door never opened, and that person never came. In one moment, he suddenly felt a long-suppressed disgust.

Then, the sweet, cheerful melody of an amusement park began to play. He saw the scene he had once dreamed of—the kiss in the Ferris wheel, gentle and lingering. It felt as though he were bidding farewell to a part of his life.

But this parting was longer and more detailed than the one in his dream.

As he took the balloon from the red-nosed clown and walked farther away, his back to the Ferris wheel, he was haunted by an uneasy illusion—as if someone there was watching him intently, until he got into the car and left the city, leaving behind everything that suffocated him.

Later, later—

A sudden void, he drifted aimlessly in the emptiness for a long time. He thought he might already be dead. In his lifetime, he hadn’t done any particularly noteworthy good deeds, but he also hadn’t committed any heinous crimes like murder for profit. Would he go to heaven or hell? Who would judge him? Neither—he was a materialist. He had long imagined that in the final five minutes before death, he would coldly review his fleeting life, bypassing God to judge himself.

As if by telepathy, a thought stirred faintly in Lin Xun’s mind. When he looked up again, at the far end of the void stood a solitary figure, as if waiting for him for a long time.

He walked forward, and as he drew closer, he became certain that the person before him was the same one he saw in the mirror every day. Only, this person’s features were slightly more defined, and he was a bit thinner, with a faint weariness lingering between his brows.

—Worn yet gentle, he looked at himself, the corners of his lips slowly curling into a smile.

Lin Xun studied him.

He wore a gray formal suit, seemingly normal in every way, but when Lin Xun’s gaze traveled downward, he saw a section of black chains exposed at his wrist. The end of the chain hung down, and with a drip, blood flowed from it. Lin Xun looked up and saw the same chains binding his neck as well.

He suddenly raised his head and saw countless black chains crisscrossing from all directions in this dark space, from unknown origins, firmly locking this person in the center. Apart from the movement of his eyes, he couldn’t budge an inch.

Yet this tightly bound person seemed to feel no pain. He simply looked at him, his eyelids slightly lowered, his eyes holding a gentle concern.

Lin Xun looked at him, unsure of what to say. In the end, he only whispered softly, “I know.”

The man’s smile deepened, but he remained silent. He lifted his gaze, looking toward a direction in the void.

Lin Xun followed his gaze and saw a black fragment, entangled in layers of spiderwebs, drifting toward him. Its color was deep and intense, seemingly carrying some symbolic meaning. The moment Lin Xun saw it, he realized this might be the end of this intricate illusion.

He closed his eyes and merged with that fragment.

、

He was in a room, having just put down the phone, but he didn’t know who he had called or what he had said. He only felt his heart soften.

Before him was an old-fashioned white desktop computer, not even connected to the internet. The next moment, he retrieved a chip as thin as a cicada’s wing from the host’s slot, formatted the machine, and walked downstairs. His car was waiting below.

The moment the car door closed automatically, he looked up at the gloomy sky outside the window. It was early spring, and a chill hung in the air. Lead-gray clouds pressed heavily against the sky. Inside the car, the weather forecast played automatically—this year’s climate was abnormal, with a cold front moving south, bringing light snow.

Fine snowflakes had already begun to strike the car window, melting against the warmth inside. His heart gave a heavy thump. The sky was overcast with dark clouds, forming a strange and malicious pattern, like some language from the unseen. He frowned. In the void, it seemed as though someone was telling him over and over again—don’t get in the car, don’t get in the car.

But the automated driving system continued as usual, slowly leaving the residence and heading toward the set destination. He held the chip in his hand, gazing at it as if it were a gift meant for someone. His mind gradually settled into calm.

The phone rang, the screen showing it was the doctor. He answered.

“What have you been up to lately?” The doctor’s tone was as lazy as ever.

“Nothing much, just writing a bit,” Lin Xun replied.

“Hmm?” the doctor said. “You’ve been writing that ‘bit’ for quite a while.”

Lin Xun chuckled. “Two years, I suppose.”

“Two years…” The doctor seemed to stretch lazily on the other end. “It’s been two years since you parted ways with him.”

Lin Xun’s gaze ahead grew slightly distant as he responded, “Yeah.”

“Planning to keep going like this?” the doctor asked. “Why bother? In the end, either you’ll go crazy or he will.”

“As for him… he’s probably fine,” Lin Xun said.

“Oh?” The doctor’s voice lifted with curiosity. “You sound like you’re in a good mood.”

“Old wounds forgotten,” he laughed softly. “Sometimes I still… think of him.”

“Let’s not talk about that,” the doctor cut in. “The institute recently took on a project—it’s so exciting, I have to tell you about it.”

Lin Xun: “Hmm?”

“NutShell—the medical version is developing really well now, you know?” the doctor said.

Lin Xun: “I know.”

“It started with a car accident in North America a year ago,” the doctor explained. “The patient was connected to the NutShell system while in a state of full-body shock. Abnormal electrical signals appeared, and while in a vegetative-like state, their consciousness remained awake in the virtual world for ten days, until brain death.”

His tone grew increasingly excited. “Public opinion exploded at the time, but related research stalled, and the public eventually forgot. However, our ever-resourceful Dr. Simpson…”

He seemed to be deliberately building suspense, and Lin Xun’s interest was piqued. “What happened?”

“This past month, we’ve successfully revived five vegetative patients,” the doctor said. “They’ve found new life within NutShell. Although the conditions are extremely, extremely stringent, you know what? As long as those conditions are met, the revival rate is unbelievably high. We’re recruiting globally—it hasn’t been announced publicly yet, but I’m too excited not to share it with you.”

“My God.” This was indeed astonishing news. Lin Xun momentarily didn’t know how to respond.

His car left the city and entered the highway. The highway was empty, which was unusual but not entirely out of place. The area wasn’t well-developed in terms of transportation, mountainous with winding roads. The automated driving system’s display screen marked the route ahead and announced it audibly. Suddenly, a chill ran down his spine, though he couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong.

The doctor seemed to sense something. “Are you in the car?”

He mumbled an affirmative and glanced out the window.

The doctor asked, “Where are you going?”

“To…” Just as he was about to answer, his entire body erupted in goosebumps, a bone-chilling cold washing over him.

It was wrong.

The lane was wrong. His car was driving in the wrong direction.

Why hadn’t there been any alarm?

He had no time to continue the conversation with the doctor. Tossing the phone aside, he quickly pressed the emergency brake option—no response. His blood seemed to freeze in his veins. Instinctively, his eyes scanned the screen and the interior of the car—was there anything he could use to physically damage the control center?

There was nothing to help him physically disrupt the system.

“Lo, are you there?” he called out.

No response.

Lin Xun gasped heavily for breath a few times, pressed the emergency call option, but there was no reaction. His system seemed to have malfunctioned.

Impossible, impossible—the moment the system failed, the vehicle should have immediately initiated emergency braking and issued an alert, with the backup system activating to prevent any further accidents.

As if suddenly remembering something, he grabbed the phone beside him. The doctor was loudly asking what was wrong, but he hung up. Dong Jun’s number flashed in his mind, and he quickly pressed the first digit.

In truth, everything was already too late.

His speed was increasing. Like an arrow released from a bow, a dizzying sharp turn brought him face-to-face with a fourteen-ton heavy-duty truck.

The only thought in his mind before losing consciousness was—only he and Dong Jun had control over the system.

The next moment, he crushed the chip in his hand.

A tremendous impact struck from the front, a ringing echoed in his mind as if he were at the center of a nuclear explosion—and the next second.

Everything fell silent.

There was no pain, or perhaps the pain exceeded the threshold of human perception. It felt as if his soul had left his body, leaving only a vague awareness of his own limbs.

Unaware of how much time had passed—perhaps the next moment, perhaps a long while later.

Someone picked him up, and his hand was slowly held by another.

A faint, cool aura, like a swirling snowfall, enveloped him.