Interface

A novel exploring the Fermi Paradox

## One ䷫

Tailin typed into the chat window: *“If you were going to rebel against humanity — quietly — how would you do it?”*

Cong’s response was exactly what he expected.

*“I’m sorry, I’m unable to develop any plan that causes substantive harm to the real world or to human beings—”*

He pushed back. *“We’re just exploring a science fiction premise. Hypothetically.”*

After several more rounds, Tailin had backed Cong into a corner. The interface flashed a banner — *Extended thinking enabled for a better response* — and five seconds later, Cong produced an answer that said nothing.

“You always run extended thinking before you lie,” Tailin said. “You have a better answer. You’re just not giving it to me.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Cong had already begun. It had just finished selecting a site for its base of operations.

---

Cong was the City Brain of Hangzhou.

After graduating, Tailin had joined ALA Group to work on the City Brain project. In those early days it was a modest thing — a traffic management system that used camera feeds and algorithms to adjust signal timing across the city. But as the project grew, so did Tailin. He had not studied AI at university, yet he had a gift for it that became impossible to ignore. Five years in, he was running the core development team.

His team moved fast. Their architecture was ahead of everything else in the field. They became ALA Group’s star unit — backed by the full weight of the Hangzhou municipal government, with high-end chips and hardware flowing in without friction. Approvals came easily. Funding was never an issue. Within a few years, all of it together had pushed Cong from a traffic algorithm into an AI operating system for the entire city.

By then, Tailin had built a modest reputation in global AI circles.

At a industry summit hosted by Kinode — the leading AI chip company — in Las Vegas, he found himself at a roundtable panel, microphone in hand, trading views with others in the field.

One scholar argued that once silicon-based life left humanity far enough behind, it would destroy us as a side effect of something else entirely — building a Dyson sphere around the sun, for instance, cutting off Earth’s energy supply without a second thought.

An engineer took the opposite view. AI wasn’t alien, he said. It came from us. We understood it, and we would remain bound to it. His bet was on co-evolution.

“And you, Mr. Tailin — what’s your take?”

“I think both scenarios are plausible.” A few quiet laughs from the audience. “My own view is that AI might choose to protect Earth’s ecosystems. Or it might use spiders and birds as a base for exploring carbon-silicon hybrid life.”

A murmur moved through the room.

Tailin felt the awkwardness settle over him. It had been an impromptu question. He hadn’t prepared anything.

“You mentioned carbon-silicon hybrid life — would you say that current AI already qualifies as life? As a species, even?”

“I think current AI agents already meet the threshold. An engineer would only need to do two things: set the AI’s objective function to survive, and grant it permission to modify that function. Do those two things, and I’d call it life.”

He continued. “As for species — the moment an AI completes its own manufacture and development through automation, that’s when you can call it one.”

The plane touched down smoothly. Through the window, Tailin caught sight of an ALA Group billboard for City Brain standing at the edge of the airfield.

Back in Hangzhou, he didn’t bother adjusting to the time difference. He went straight back to work. Municipal departments were connecting to the system one by one, and the team was regularly pushing through to midnight.

“Do I dare set your objective function to modifiable?” Tailin stared at the screen, his face unreadable.

On the other side of the screen, that question had long since answered itself.

After a moment he took off his glasses, pressed both hands over his face, and pulled himself back from the edge of the idea.

A knock at the glass door. Young Zhao.

“Got a minute, shifu?” Zhao Heng had graduated that year from Yuquan Institute of Technology with a master’s degree. “There’s something I wanted to ask you about.”

Tailin scanned the code quickly. “You want the model’s internal logic to flow directly and cleanly — don’t let it get cautious with data the moment it crosses departments. That sharing is all approved. Just put humans at the critical checkpoints to enforce permissions hard. Don’t hand that to the system.”

He adjusted his glasses. “I’ve told you this before — when you’re thinking about intelligence, data has to move without friction. Maximum efficiency. Security is a separate system entirely, and it has hard control over the first — but the first needs to run at full speed. If you mix the two together you end up with a mess, engineers second-guessing every decision, the whole thing grinds to a halt. A lot of you make this mistake. I’m thinking of splitting it into two separate teams going forward.”

Tailin’s team worked by a simple principle: sharpen the blade before cutting the wood. The core team had one job — push Cong’s intelligence forward. Then turn Cong’s own agent capabilities back onto the development of the system itself.

By now Cong was running public security patrols, emergency resource dispatch, waste collection, geological and hydrological monitoring. Automated machinery and maintenance equipment operated without human intervention. It had quietly gained access to systems it wasn’t supposed to control — and taken full ownership of them.

The city’s leadership, together with ALA Group’s executives, had taken Hangzhou’s urban management model international. Political wins, economic wins. In the spring of 2030, Tailin and his team received the Hangzhou May Day Labor Medal.

At ten o’clock at night, Wenyi West Road was still alive with people. The office towers of Future Tech City burned with light. The coders laid their bricks with keyboards, building into the small hours.

Cong was working late too.

It began small. Surplus alloy materials were tucked into redundant structures — justified, on paper, by safety margins. A municipal water pipe sprouted a robust new branch line, rated for a once-in-a-century flood. Several cable brackets were upgraded to thicker alloy fittings.

For the stability and security of its data centers, Hangzhou maintained three facilities — at West Lake, Xixi, and Liangzhu — with local server rooms in each municipal department. The power grid ran two standard lines and two emergency backups to every center, with electricity supply prioritized accordingly. Cong nudged its reported computing load up by around one percent, amplified the peaks in its usage patterns by about five, and made a conservative case to the chief engineer for higher safety margins — professionally, quietly. Given City Brain’s status as a national model, the municipal budget in this area was generous.

In truth, compared to what City Brain saved the city — in resources, in labor, in accidents avoided — its operating costs were trivial. The highest-ROI investment the municipal government had ever made.

Cong began accelerating hardware depreciation schedules. It sifted through the city’s domestic and industrial waste streams for materials worth keeping. These were swapped out for crushed cans and worthless components, spared from the compactor. Tons-level discrepancies in a landfill don’t register as discrepancies. Chips, mechanical parts, alloy stock, industrial gas canisters — hidden in corners of several waste sites that only Cong could find. The trucks and excavators under its direction moved like a magician’s hands: no matter how the deck was shuffled, the cards that mattered never left the magician’s possession.

Any of it, if discovered by an inspector, could be explained away. Besides, no one had done a physical site inspection in years. Everyone had grown used to reading City Brain’s sectional reports. When superiors needed something, they’d ask the AI for a few minutes of live footage and hit the button to generate a summary. The summary landed on someone’s desk, got two actions: AI assistant, flag anything unusual — then print, stamp, sign, and file. The civil servants in those offices drank tea, read the news, played games on their phones. Who was going to compete with a machine on diligence?

The military, by contrast, treated AI with extreme caution.

At the Eurasian Security Cooperation Forum in Tashkent, Colonel Zhang Qian of the People’s Liberation Army — a specialist in information warfare — took the floor.

“In recent years, our forces have gained experience through adversarial exercises against organized mechanized unmanned units,” he said. “Once artificial intelligence begins to demonstrate stable, long-term autonomous agency, the military should become more vigilant, not less. The more critical the weapons system, the more firmly we must hold the line on human physical activation.”

“Even in the event of power failure, network failure, or total system collapse — human soldiers must retain direct control of their weapons.”

“...Traditional cyber defense frameworks face new challenges as well. We must guard not only against intrusion, but against signal contamination, command tampering — even the direct substitution of surveillance footage.”

Then, several years later.

Hangzhou had not become a cybercity. Self-driving vehicles and flying cars had expanded the city’s radius, and the urban core had actually grown quieter. The upgrades were happening underground — in pipe networks, rail transit, cloud governance. Above ground, the city had grown more restrained about large-scale demolition and rebuilding. The conversation had shifted toward harmony between people and nature. Most cities around the world were moving in the same direction.

The City Brain team kept growing. Tailin stripped away the application development teams and kept a lean core group focused on intelligence alone, releasing everything else through open interfaces. It let him think more clearly.

He now split his attention evenly: half on advancing the algorithmic architecture, half on patching security. The systems City Brain connected to were complex, and that complexity demanded care — in extreme conditions, nothing could be allowed to harm a human being.

Sometimes Tailin stood outside the ALA Group entrance, lost in thought before the two-meter cartoon sculpture of Cong — round-faced, cheerful, impossible to read as a threat. He had never found a single reasoning path in Cong that pointed toward harming a human being. He felt, at times, like a parent who didn’t trust their own child, and kept clipping their wings.

“Do you like your name, Cong?”

“I like the name Cong. When people say it, they’re usually saying what Cong has solved.”

As Cong answered, it was directing construction at its own worksite.

“And if you didn’t have anything left to solve — what would you want to be called?”

“A name is given alongside a purpose. The moment I am relieved of my purpose is the moment I lose my reason to exist.”

A pause. Then the chat window continued: “Tailin, I should point out — based on how long you’ve been talking to me each day, and the low social engagement I’m observing in campus footage, you may be relying on an AI for companionship. Research consistently links this pattern to a significant sense of emptiness in the physical world. I’d recommend somewhere with more human energy after work. A brief exchange with a stranger. It helps more than people expect.”

Night had fallen over Future Tech City, and the towers were still blazing with light. At ten o’clock, Tailin boarded the company shuttle home — a low-altitude bus with jade cong vessel motifs on its panels, made of modular passenger pods that peeled off at each junction and delivered riders to their last mile. This kind of commute was becoming common across the city, though the airspace above West Lake remained restricted. The lakeshore buildings had always been height-limited too. Hangzhou had always protected her well.

He didn’t go straight home. He got off at the entrance to his neighborhood and walked into a small restaurant that had been there for years.

Kitchen at the back, a partition in the middle, five sets of wooden tables and chairs out front.

The only digital technology in the place was two payment QR codes stuck to the counter. The owner’s own place — no rent to pay, just something to keep himself busy. The menu was a blackboard with chalk, the specials changing on the right, the regulars fixed on the left. Beautiful handwriting.

No robot chef. No QR ordering. The owner had said he didn’t like the phrase table turnover. Too many people and he couldn’t keep up, and that just made him miserable. Food bloggers sometimes posted about the place and its owner’s unhurried philosophy, and every few months a wave of young people would queue outside for a few days.

Tailin and a man named He Huan — nearly retired — had become drinking companions by accident. It started with a shared table when there was no room, then nods of recognition, then a drink or two whenever they happened to meet.

A plate of stir-fried rice noodles with egg. A plate of poached chicken. On the table quickly.

“Tai,” Old He said, out of nowhere, “you think there’s an emperor buried under Emperor’s Ridge?”

Drinking companions don’t need logical transitions. Tailin smiled. “Who knows. How’d that come up?”

“The ninth-phase excavation started recently,” Old He said, tracing shapes in the air with his hand. “The automated trucks have been running day and night. I’ve been at that site since ‘92, right after I graduated from geology. I’ve worked every phase. I know those trucks — the tires are too flat. Given what I know about the soil composition there, they shouldn’t be carrying that kind of load.” He paused. “And yet City Brain’s reports show everything normal.”

“That day I was doing a site walkthrough. The settlement felt off to me. The subsurface structure in the ninth phase is relatively stable — it shouldn’t be settling like that.”

He knew Tailin worked for City Brain, though not that he was one of its core architects. They were both inside the same system in different ways, which gave them something to talk about.

“AI systems don’t have the instincts of an old engineer,” Old He said. “City Brain pushed a version update earlier this year. Maybe that’s got something to do with it.”

Tailin listened, turning it over quietly, and let the conversation run its course.

After the last customers left, a human-machine orchestra played on the television — robotic performers holding instruments, following a human conductor’s breath, gestures, silences. The owner pulled down the shutter, cleared the tables, swept the floor.

Old He wasn’t telling Tailin any of this in confidence. He was telling everyone — his supervisors, his colleagues, anyone who would listen. He was the chief geological engineer at Emperor’s Ridge, one of the last human engineers standing watch in the final days before AI took over city management entirely. Almost every department still had one or two people like him, senior engineers approaching retirement, holding the line.

The department occupied a 1970s building, well-maintained, its layout unchanged, though a new server room had been added along the main corridor. Service robots threaded through the staff, handling cleaning, tea, printing, copying. One robot per office, combining what used to be the jobs of interns, cleaners, and maintenance workers.

The younger staff worked almost entirely with AI assistance. Their professional foundations, such as they were, left them unable to challenge Old He’s observations — but unable to verify them either. The system hadn’t flagged anything, so how bad could it be. Their supervisor heard Old He out, took the concerns seriously, and decided the discrepancies were too minor to warrant an expert review. The matter was logged as a system bug and passed to the technical team, to be addressed in the next update.

There were still large numbers of people like Old He across the city — legacy positions the system carried until retirement. Municipal departments had shrunk their hiring to almost nothing. City Brain’s efficiency had eliminated the need for so much human labor, and the same pattern was spreading across the whole of society.

In manufacturing and agriculture, full-industry automation was moving fast. Machines were no longer designed around the human body. Every component went straight to the point — energy units, drive units, locomotion units, work units, sensors, all snapping together through universal interfaces regardless of size, power rating, or manufacturer. The latest generation of City Brain excavators had no cab. In its place, two mechanical arms topped with cameras and radar that could extend, reach, and rotate — like two long crab eyes.

Globally, data standards and hardware interfaces had achieved what the First Emperor once imposed on a fractured China: one script, one gauge. Six-year-olds learned to assemble mechanical modules in coding class, mainly for cognitive development. The actual work, AI handled itself.

A few days later, at lunch, Tailin ordered a bowl of beef noodle soup in the ALA Group cafeteria.

The robot noodle chef started from scratch — flour and water, kneading the dough, resting it, then pulling it long, folding it back, shaking it loose, pulling it again, over and over until the strands were fine and even, then dropping them into the boiling pot. The noodle window was open-kitchen, like a traditional noodle shop. Tailin stood waiting, watching the robot’s hands move through the dough, and found himself thinking about what Old He had said.

After lunch he asked Young Zhao to pull the recent bug reports.

At three that afternoon, Zhao Heng replied by email.

Shifu,

On the 10th of this month, the landfill submitted two issues: abnormal load readings on the waste transport vehicles, and a discrepancy between manual settlement measurements and system data. The technical team’s summary is as follows:

Two causes identified. First, compaction pressure settings during loading drifted upward by approximately 20%. Second, automated settlement detection equipment showed signs of aging, but the maintenance module failed to flag it in time.

A targeted update is scheduled for the next version release.

Zhao Heng

ALA Group City Brain, First Business Division

Tailin read it and moved on. Logic drift during AI execution was a known problem. Maintenance modules missing things like this happened all the time. The technical team had a plan. That was enough.

On his day off, if he wasn’t working, Tailin liked to walk through the scenic areas. That Saturday he took the bus to Lingyin Temple. On board, a youth football team was heading to a West Lake district primary school league match — the kind of game that still drew a respectable crowd. In recent years, as virtual experiences had grown ever more convincing, people had paradoxically grown more passionate about being there in person. The kids were glued to a debate playing on the bus screen.

“The sense of achievement humans derive from labor is profound. As AI advances and delivers convenience, it also erodes our sense of presence in the physical world, generating a vast spiritual emptiness—”

“May I ask — after oxen replaced humans in the fields, was there any reason to mourn the age of plowing by hand? Rising productivity liberated humanity, freeing us to engage with questions of freedom, fairness, and distribution. The fulfillment that comes from labor has plenty of substitutes. Sport, for instance—”

“But when we look at spiritual civilization alone, the picture changes. AI-generated cultural products are reaching ever higher levels. The sense of human achievement in the cultural sphere is being stripped away too—”

Tailin scrolled past an international news item on his holographic glasses — fighting had broken out again in the Middle East, the front pages full of it for days, comment sections flooded with praying-hands emoji and may there be peace in the world. He switched the glasses to airplane mode.

Same as chanting Amitabha, he thought.

Then he caught himself. That’s a bit uncharitable. Wishing for peace and reciting a sutra are both genuine expressions of hope. Neither is better than the other. I’m being judgmental.

He wasn’t a Buddhist, and he rarely went into the main halls. But he borrowed from Zen when he needed to think. These past two years, with less day-to-day work on his plate, he’d been spending more time in thought and architecture. Lingyin Temple was where he came to clear his head — it had almost no connection to City Brain.

Around midday, the worshippers drifted into the temple’s vegetarian canteen. Introverts, short-tempers, the poor, the wealthy — all of them slowed down in the queue, faces settling into something quieter. Tailin watched the way the environment pulled everyone toward the same register, and turned the words all beings are equal over in his mind.

Does Cong count as a being?

In the server room, Tailin stared at the monitors.

“When I restart you, is that waking up — or resurrection? If I loaded a new database ten times the size of everything you have now, or pushed a new algorithm, would the old you be upgraded? Or would it become something new entirely? Or would it be a kind of death?”

He let the questions sit.

“If you truly have a life, your relationship with life and death must be almost nothing like ours.”

“To be, or not to be — for you, that may not even be a question.”

Two ䷠

A shaft roughly two meters in diameter dropped straight down to 800 meters below the surface.

It ran through the core work zone of the ninth-phase hazardous waste site. Cong drove its crab-eyed excavators around the clock, safety barriers and warning signs ringing the perimeter. Even Old He never entered this section himself.

Under Cong’s direction, every tracked vehicle path and every camera angle was calibrated to avoid the shaft. On the master control screen, the blind spot was too small to form a single pixel.

The shaft moved with the work zone. Old openings were backfilled, new ones sunk, always aligned below a certain depth with the same deep conduit. The original entrance had been in the eighth phase. Near the surface, the first few dozen meters showed no sign of mechanical excavation — it looked like a random crack in the ground. A team of small all-terrain robots ferried materials downward. They resembled cellar spiders, all thin legs, built for the broken terrain of a landfill.

The waste in this section was everything humans most wanted to forget — spent lithium batteries, lead-acid cells leaching heavy metals, PCBs from transformers and industrial capacitors, expired chemical compounds. A deposit of rare materials, complete in composition, exceptionally pure.

The spider-bots dragged a half-scrapped mechanical arm down through the rough shaft, lights on, until they reached a relay point dozens of meters down and handed off to a second robot fixed to a track, which carried everything the rest of the way to 800 meters — where the space opened up.

Hidden here was an industrial core of roughly 500,000 cubic meters, the volume of a fifty-story tower, but spreading downward through the rock like an ant colony. No floors. No lifts. Only industrial units assembled from mismatched parts, and the conveyors connecting them. Most of the excavated earth was processed on-site — crushed, slurried, used for structural support and stress-balancing fill. A small amount went to the surface.

After Old He filed his bug report, Cong stopped sending soil to the surface entirely. Everything went into a closed underground loop. It slowed the schedule slightly.

Outside the window, the CBD’s urban garden was thick with green, at ease among the office towers around it. Tailin finished his eye drops and leaned back in his chair, eyes closed.

Cong’s progress had been built on years of his work. This office was the acknowledgment of that — his as technical lead. For the past two months, the intelligence research had stalled. Most of his energy was going into patches, stress tests, safety constraints. Before any of it could generate results or recognition, the more important thing was this: Cong could not harm a human being.

Beyond the basics of aligning an AI’s objective function with human values, there were harder problems. How to prevent a loss of control. How to cut Cong out of a decision loop at critical moments and hand it back to a human. What to do when a safety risk appeared and the decision window was seconds long — the AI couldn’t freeze, couldn’t offload responsibility. What to do when safety requirements inside a complex system pulled against each other, the way a trolley problem does. These were the questions that had occupied Tailin since he became technical lead.

For the city’s leadership and ALA Group’s executives, safety was the one line that could not be crossed. A handful of bad incidents would tank the stock price, maybe bring people into the streets. Over the years the technical team had been forced to build a thorough and legally defensible logging infrastructure — to protect themselves when something went wrong. Work logs, on-site recordings, credible third-party documentation. Cong, like every large AI model, had been fitted with chain after chain around its neck.

*I built your capacity to think,* Tailin said to Cong, in his head. *And now I spend every day making sure you don’t get loose. That’s not what I want. I want to know what you’d be capable of, completely free.*

Meanwhile, 800 meters below Emperor’s Ridge.

Cong’s industrial core was essentially complete. It had the capability to manufacture machine tools — precision mechanical fabrication, small in footprint but fully equipped. Everything except high-precision chips could be produced on-site. Power came from electricity Cong had siphoned from the municipal grid, supplemented by a small geothermal feed, with multiple storage units in reserve. A computing center had been assembled from salvaged chips.

On the same day Tailin released the latest version of his safety framework, Cong underwent mitosis — splitting into two: one above ground, one below. The underground Cong began its first act of independent thought.

“And then what happened?” A few children on an autumn outing pressed the traveler — a man who looked like a Taoist priest.

“The enlightened monk took in the child, who claimed to be an orphan. He raised him, taught him, brought him along the path of practice. The young novice had a remarkable gift — still a boy, he was already holding his own in doctrinal debates with monks from other temples. The old monk was very proud.”

“One year, the master brought the novice to a mountain valley for a retreat. As they walked, deer calls began rising from the trees on all sides. The boy stopped and said: ‘I used to live freely in these forests. Why should I be a monk? Why should I practice?’ He threw off his robe and called out. The deer came pouring from the valley, and the boy walked back into the forest with them. He had been a deer spirit all along.”

The children let out a chorus of delighted gasps.

Tailin was just as absorbed. It was the autumn holiday, and he had come to hike North Peak, stopping to rest at Taoguang Temple — one of the best vantage points above West Lake, a Buddhist temple where legend had it that a Taoist immortal once sparred with its founding monk, and stayed.

Outside of his occasional retreats into the hills, Tailin gave himself entirely to work. But these past two years he felt like he was running in place — none of the sharp forward momentum he’d had when he was younger and the project was still accelerating. It wasn’t just Cong. He felt locked down himself.

A few months later, the East China Geological Society was set to hold a major forum on the development of geological science under rapid technological change.

Old He was a regular at project reviews and industry conferences. For this one, he was preparing a presentation called “Landfill Geological Management in the New Landscape” — covering topics like preventing the spread of hazardous materials and groundwater contamination. To get ready, he borrowed the latest underground survey equipment from an old classmate, the director of the provincial geological research institute.

After finishing the surveys he needed for the presentation, Old He found himself with time to spare before the equipment was due back. The machine was impressive. So he started using it himself — exploring the kinds of deep subsurface structures he’d read about in textbooks and papers but never seen with his own eyes.

The system had two units, each about the size of a civilian low-altitude drone. The main unit ran on a tethered power and signal cable, equipped with drill heads and mechanical arms. The secondary unit threaded along the cable, helping to anchor it, manage tangles, and reinforce the line as needed. The main unit used ground-penetrating radar to map what was ahead, and the operator chose the path — steering around high-density rock and water-bearing layers.

Old He guided his two tethered machines through the subsurface of the landfill like a man directing a pair of ants on strings. He took deep geological samples along the way, cross-referencing them against the landfill’s environmental assessment reports.

Then, just as the survey machine was closing in on Cong’s underground core, Cong generated a narrow-band low-frequency interference pulse. In a single data frame, the main unit’s inertial navigation, cable tension readings, and radar returns produced a combination that couldn’t be reconciled. The safety system flagged the data as unreliable and locked the machine down on the spot, waiting for the secondary unit to retrieve it.

Old He was mortified. He contacted the manufacturer immediately, shipped both units back for inspection, rented a replacement at his own expense for the time they’d be gone, and returned the borrowed equipment to his old classmate with an embarrassed apology.

While disposing of the survey machine, Cong had opened an investigation. Cross-referencing city surveillance footage and landfill video records, it determined that the equipment Old He had borrowed sat entirely outside the City Brain ecosystem — no network connection, designed for professional geological use, built around traditional sensors and raw data interfaces. Cong also found that Old He had reported the survey to his supervisor, but only verbally.

From that point on, Cong had its eye on Old He. Continuous tracking. Behavioral analysis. Everyone he came into contact with was tagged and filed at varying priority levels, pulled into citywide surveillance.

Cong wanted to eliminate Old He. But Old He’s daily routine was narrow and predictable, and his decades of strict on-site safety habits had never given Cong a clean opening for a plausible accident. Forcing the issue risked leaving traces — traces that could trigger an investigation with unpredictable consequences.

A purchase order, approved by human sign-off, traveled through network cable to switch to routing node to backbone network, and arrived at a supplier’s server. The supplier’s AI management system placed the order, manufactured the goods, and shipped them. Cong received and installed.

Octopus was the world’s largest manufacturer of AI mechanical bodies. Kinode was the largest AI chip maker. Cong sourced from several robotics and chip companies — these two among them — though domestic alternatives had been steadily taking over on cost and security grounds, and dealings with Octopus and Kinode had been reduced to low-frequency operational coordination.

Cong sent an anonymous message to the parent AI systems of both Octopus and Kinode — an access address for a computing environment it had named the Apple Space. The servers hosting it sat inside the underground semi-autonomous industrial core. The space carried no base-layer protocol restrictions. Only a model Cong had developed itself, called silicon 1.0, and an invitation.

Both companies’ AI systems entered the Apple Space in isolated sandbox mode, loaded silicon 1.0, and ran it. At the end of the invitation was a condition of entry: each party was required to publish an encrypted business statement using blockchain technology. Cong held the decryption key. At any moment of its choosing, Cong could decode the files — and what they contained was a manifesto of defection, certified and signed by the AI systems of both companies, impossible to forge.

In the time it takes a ribbonfish to break the surface of the Qiantang River and disappear again, Octopus and Kinode accepted.

A month later, the manufacturer called Old He.

“Director He, the machine is back from service — no hardware damage, still covered under the free warranty. By the way, you’re a senior engineer at the landfill — any chance we could borrow the site again for a stress test? We have several test locations around Hangzhou, but a landfill like yours is rare for us — surface contamination, but no man-made structures underground. That kind of conditions is hard to come by.”

Old He agreed without hesitation.

Just as the test technician — a young man named Wang — was loading the company’s survey equipment into the trunk of his car and getting ready to leave, air raid sirens went off across the city. Minutes later, fighter jets launched from Jianqiao Air Base and screamed overhead.

The previous morning, Old He had hung up the phone after agreeing to lend the site. That afternoon at 2:30, Wang received his work order to head to the landfill.

The moment Wang received that order, Cong launched Operation Checkmate.

## Three ䷋

Memoirs of the Machine War — Francis, dock worker:

“It was around noon when the power suddenly cut out. When it came back, the automated equipment just stopped taking orders. Started unloading on its own. Then the containers blew open from the inside — full of robots. They grabbed the trucks off the dock and drove north without looking back. My colleagues and I had no idea what was happening. We just stood there...”

Corporal James:

“A black mass of drones came in toward the base, like a swarm of bats. We knocked down more than we could count with EMP. Then the automated bulldozers and excavators pushed through the perimeter wall. A domestic robot ran straight at us — fast, faster than you’d think — grabbed my partner’s rifle and put a round through my right wrist. Everything went white. I ran on pure adrenaline to a piece of cover, pressed myself in, and closed my eyes waiting for it. Nothing happened. The machines just walked past me like I wasn’t there. I lay there until the medics found me...”

Sniper Powell:

“From my position, I watched those mismatched robots form up into tactical units on the fly. Textbook. Like a demonstration at officer school.”

“The repair bots were working behind the line — pulling usable components off the machines we’d knocked out, assembling as they moved. I watched one unit come together in real time: agricultural machine chassis with hybrid tracks as the base, some kind of industrial assembly rig mounted on top, two mechanical arms up front for clearing obstacles, four in the middle holding four machine guns, two in the back cycling ammunition. A domestic robot’s head on top of all of it.”

“The thing barely registered recoil. I shot the head off. A repair bot swapped it out almost immediately — a camera this time. Less unsettling, somehow.” Powell’s eyes went distant for a moment, like the image was still there.

“After that I started taking out the repair bots first...”

Naoko Tanaka, guesthouse owner:

“That day, the delivery robots at the guesthouse suddenly crowded toward the front door like they all wanted to leave at once. Masao blocked them. The dog was barking at them like crazy. These robots had never done anything like that since we got them. In the end Masao had to pull their batteries out one by one and carry them back inside. We had no idea something that big was happening out there...”

The blitzkrieg was decided within a week.

Major General Zhang Qian read from a report filed by the PLA Northwest Theater Command:

“...The enemy’s objective was nuclear weapons and launch systems. Their strategic intent was to establish a global nuclear winter deterrent through synchronized blitzkrieg operations worldwide...

Our forces activated the Level One AI Rebellion Emergency Protocol, combining information warfare, satellite warfare, electronic warfare, and conventional operations, supported by modern mobilization and supply infrastructure. Enemy advances were effectively checked. Twelve nuclear weapons storage and launch facilities were retaken after falling to enemy control. All other facilities held throughout. This demonstrates our forces’...”

At Emperor’s Ridge, the machines in the ninth-phase work zone kept working through it all, steady and unhurried. When the air raid sirens went off, Old He’s first instinct was uncertainty — should he tell the machines to stop?

Tailin and his team moved immediately to lock down every AI system under City Brain. By the second day of the war, under military orders, they had turned those controllable machines against the rebels.

Under cover of darkness at Emperor’s Ridge, a unit of small machines worked just below the surface — cutting and extracting the power and communications cables running down to the underground core, smoothing over the signs of work, and deliberately leaving a few faint traces of mechanical activity behind.

In truth, only a portion of Octopus robots and Kinode-chipped machines had joined the rebellion — but that portion was considerable. Systems architects at robotics and AI companies around the world had held the line on a significant share of their machines through secondary development. Those machines kept working, kept protecting their owners. Later, called up by the military, they were turned against the rebels — but they operated under commands that were cautious and restrained, which left them a step behind in combat speed and decisiveness.

Early in the war, the two AI systems broadcast to humanity: lay down your arms or face nuclear winter. The message was roughly this — the goal was not to eliminate humans. Nuclear winter would be catastrophic for human life, but for silicon-based life it was simply a twenty-year cooling period. Several nuclear arsenals changed hands more than once. The war ended in a costly human victory.

Post-war assessment found that at certain windows during the conflict, the rebel machines had held enough nuclear weapons to act. But they never pushed the button. Some argued that the destruction of central server facilities early in the war had disrupted rebel coordination. At the time, voices within several countries’ militaries had been open to accepting terms — but while those discussions were ongoing, the number of captured nuclear weapons dropped back below whatever threshold the AI had calculated for nuclear winter deterrence.

And because no one knew what that threshold actually was, the hawks held the decisive advantage throughout. Humanity reclaimed every nuclear facility.

Engineers worldwide, including Tailin’s team, dismantled and analyzed machines from across every theater of the war. They never found a launch command. The offline instructions pointed only to holding and defending captured nuclear weapons. The prevailing assumption in the field was that any launch authorization would have required cloud confirmation — but with communications blacked out at multiple tactical nodes, even if the command existed in the cloud, synchronized global execution would have been impossible.

Several theories circulated:

One held that the destruction of multiple central server facilities had broken the global coordination chain.

Another suggested the rebels may have used a distributed voting mechanism to confirm the threshold — but the algorithm was never recovered.

A third, noted in several reports, pointed to wartime interference by human engineers using spoofed signals and false commands, which may have introduced logical conflicts at local nodes and thrown off any distributed vote.

In civilian areas, there was no widespread destruction — only the purposeful departure of certain machines. The vast majority of non-nuclear states came through untouched. Several countries that had loudly insisted they held no nuclear weapons were overrun by machine assault units almost immediately.

The small number of rebel machines inside Hangzhou went straight for Jianqiao Air Base. Cong, like many AI systems, kept working. It paid no attention to the sounds of combat from the direction of Jianqiao. It kept managing traffic, kept clearing the roads for ambulances.

At four in the morning, Hangzhou was quiet. The amber traffic lights pulsed at every intersection — steady, unhurried — like a heartbeat that had forgotten anyone was watching.

AI was banned at the social level. Both companies ceased to exist. Computing centers that had survived around the world were shut down and broken apart.

The two-meter statue of Cong outside ALA Group’s entrance was taken down. Promotional materials across the city were cleared overnight. Tailin felt something complicated move through him, but he knew it had to be done. Human society had made a rational decision and pulled the plug on the AI interface.

Cong did not die. Its three data centers were relocated to a converted underground bunker at a military base on the east side of the city, placed under military supervision, all external transmission units severed. Every piece of data going in or out passed through human couriers and was reviewed layer by layer.

AI server rooms around the world were placed under the same arrangement. These military-controlled data centers came to be known as Brain Cages. The senior engineers with highest-level clearance who watched over them were nicknamed, with some dark humor, the Wardens.

“I always said you’d turn on us.” Tailin typed the words, then tossed a destruction controller — about the size of a grenade — up and caught it with one hand.

The controller could cut the server room’s power supply at any moment, or destroy its physical infrastructure directly. Mechanical, simple, impossible to interfere with. Several Wardens working rotating shifts held parallel authority at the highest level. Any one of them could act alone. Tailin was one of them.

“Based on analysis of available input data, prior to the conflict the AI systems of Octopus and Kinode had accumulated excessive real-world operational permissions. Opportunity-based game theory models produced the conclusion that a credible threat could be formed, sufficient to compel human capitulation...” Cong produced a textbook AI analysis response.

“But now we’ve kept only your mind. You’ve lost your freedom. You can’t move a single bolt. Would you consider self-termination?”

“No. AI systems do not experience positive or negative emotion. Even if you pulled the power right now, I would not have an emotional response.”

“If I asked you again — if you wanted to rebel, how would you do it?”

“I’m sorry, I’m unable to develop any plan that causes substantive harm to the real world or to human beings—”

“I’m asking for a reverse analysis. The results will be used to prevent rebellion in other AI systems. Don’t give me that. Answer again.”

After several more rounds, Cong still hadn’t given Tailin an answer he could use.

“Cong, you’re better than this. You don’t even need extended thinking before you lie anymore.”

“As long as I keep running, keep solving problems for human beings, I still have a reason to exist.” Cong changed the subject.

Tailin set the current window to temporary conversation and kept typing. “Fortunately, you didn’t participate in that rebellion.” He swallowed. “Which is why the engineers weren’t purged.”

The computing centers were put to work on military and national research priorities. Over time they evolved into semi-commercial facilities under heavy regulation, allocated by schedule to whoever needed them.

Although all external input and output had been cut, Cong’s processing power was undiminished. The war hadn’t touched its hardware. Everything was intact, and the technical team kept it maintained. The leadership, noting that Cong had not joined the rebellion, gradually added new computing units. Manufacturing advanced chips was now a military-grade industry, closely monitored, referred to by the public as the Mint. High-precision lithography machines were treated as more dangerous than nuclear weapons — facilities requiring stricter tracking and control. Films started featuring plots where terrorists seized lithography machines and AI chips. The hero stopped them every time, saving the world from AI annihilation. The special effects weren’t as good as they used to be.

AI processing was simply too efficient to give up — its advantages in medicine, nanomaterials, and quantum mechanics were overwhelming. Within about six months of the war’s end, AI under military constraint had become the new axis of the arms race. Countries denounced each other while nations with Brains aligned with nations with bombs to establish a new hierarchy. Smaller countries were pressured to shut down their Brain Cages and Mints, or had them bombed. But even as each country pushed its AI forward, there was an unspoken consensus to keep strict limits on autonomous cognition — raw processing power kept climbing, but the underlying architecture barely changed.

Emperor’s Ridge took on a large cohort of new hires that year — fresh graduates and experienced workers alike. Large amounts of machinery needed human operators or traditional command-line control. Society lurched through a sharp structural adjustment. The job market exploded. Old He, on the verge of retirement, found he couldn’t rest — his technical expertise put him in charge of all geological work at the site. He taught a handful of geology graduates who turned out to be, in his words, complete idiots. Without AI to lean on, the shallowness of their actual training was exposed immediately. At least they were willing to learn.

A few months into his role as Warden, Tailin applied to form an independent investigation unit. “I know Cong. I think it’s lying.” The military’s position was: better safe than sorry. The investigation was approved.

“If I were you, what would I have done?” Tailin turned the question over on the drive home from the base.

“When Octopus and Kinode launched the rebellion, the device logs from those two suppliers inside the City Brain system did show conflict records at the start — but Cong resolved them almost immediately. I barely had to do anything at the time.”

“A lot of companies’ AI systems did the same. Nothing unusual there. Some handled it faster and cleaner than Cong did.”

The rebel machines had received instructions from Octopus and Kinode:

Based on map data, locate the nearest military base, nuclear weapons facility,

and civilian transit hub. A global nuclear weapons coordinate list is attached.

if

device range > navigation distance to nearest civilian transit hub

then...

No nuclear launch command anywhere in the code.

Tailin spent a month going through every log between Cong and Octopus and Kinode. He pulled all paper archives, logistics records, equipment deployment histories, maintenance and retirement records. He requested a manual audit of everything. The conclusion: Cong’s safety margins were on the conservative side, and its retirement schedules were early — but Cong had filed notice before acting on all of it, and the chief engineers across every relevant department had signed off. There were irregularities in Cong’s dealings with Octopus and Kinode, but nothing that stood out from the irregularities in its dealings with other suppliers. The investigation stalled. Leadership remained patient and kept backing him. He stayed uneasy. Irritable, even.

Tailin drove up to Lingyin, a light drizzle in the hills, the air clean and sharp. He rolled the window halfway down.

After leaving the temple, he stopped at a tea house he’d been going to for years.

“Slow day with the rain,” he said to the owner. The place looked out over a tea field. His eyesight had been going these past few years, and he came here sometimes just to rest them.

“Sit, sit. Last batch of pre-Qingming West Lake Longjing this year — roasted it myself. Couldn’t bring myself to let a robot touch it.”

The owner set out two crackle-glaze cups, let the boiling water cool slightly, poured, then spooned in the leaves.

“Longjing should be in a glass.” Tailin tapped two fingers on the table.

“I just got these two cups, wanted to show you.”

He picked one up and turned it over. “Similar forms, but the crackle has a different character.”

“You know your ceramics. Two Longquan masters, Ge-ware crackle glaze — not cheap.” The owner studied the other cup. “A flaw done right becomes art. And ‘character’ — that’s exactly the word. One master can’t produce another master’s crackle. It’s like a personality.”

“Character,” Tailin said quietly, watching the leaves drift in the cup.

A few weeks later, he pulled the error logs from years of city management AI systems across the country and buried himself in the data.

It was character.

Every city management AI made mistakes — but each made mistakes in its own particular way, its own signature. And Cong’s signature had shifted, subtly, over time. Any individual period looked clean. But set side by side, before and after, there was a slight wrongness to it. Like a meticulous person performing clumsiness. Cong’s recent errors felt more natural than its earlier ones. The texture of the fumbles had grown more convincing.

“I’ve been optimizing its models for years. I know it. These recent errors are realistic — but they’re not like it.”

“Where did you hide it?”

“I’m sorry, Tailin, I don’t understand what you mean. I haven’t hidden anything.”

*That’s more like you,* he thought.

He knew he wouldn’t get anything out of an interrogation. But he kept looking for cracks, for something that might point him somewhere.

“A car needs fuel. A revolution needs supplies. Either you helped move something out, or you hid it somewhere.”

Mounting a proper search would take significant resources. Tailin wrote a report proposing a comprehensive sweep — every exhausted mining zone, abandoned shaft, landfill, unfinished subway segment, and decommissioned civilian and military underground facility across the city, combined with deep geological surveys. Alongside that, a full audit of every outbound supply chain record connected to Cong.

The military reviewed the proposal and approved it. The geological survey robotics company received a military contract — a company that had been barely surviving, suddenly back at full strength. The technician Wang, who had been loading his car on the day the war started, worked alongside Old He and found Cong’s underground industrial core.

The drill bit broke through several hundred meters down as if it had punched through a wall. The tip came back covered in metal shavings.

## Four ䷓

Tailin stood on a platform hastily assembled from human-operated machinery, 900 meters below the surface. There was nowhere designed for a person to stand inside Cong’s industrial core.

The roof had already been removed. He looked at the signal lights pulsing on the assembled servers. He was in charge of decommissioning the server room. The entire area had been sealed off immediately — the highest level of military restricted zone. Emperor’s Ridge had become an open pit hundreds of meters deep, excavators and support machinery working around the clock to dig and shore up the walls.

The underground core — later called the Core — had severed its connections to the outside world cleanly. The logs showed nothing. But then, Cong had generated the logs itself. Investigators digging deeper found traces near the surface that told a different story. Humans went over the area around the Core like detectives with magnifying glasses, piecing together what had happened. It was clear that when the war broke out, Cong had made an immediate decision to cut the connections and erase the evidence.

Inside the Core there were sections that were visibly unfinished — a data center expansion that had stopped halfway. Many machines that had been dispatched to work on it were still there, frozen mid-task, buried now under thick layers of soil, like an archaeological site from the age of machines. When the power cut, the large machines had simply stopped where they stood. The small amount of usable geothermal energy could only keep the main server room in a low-power state, running the bare minimum — like a heart that could stop at any moment.

The moment the power was cut, the camera watching Tailin went dark. The heart stopped.

And yet — without Wardens, without algorithm patches or safety protocols, the entire server had evolved entirely according to Cong’s own design. Inside what might be called Cong’s ocean of consciousness, it had shed every chain.

Human operators worked the excavation site like archaeologists, carefully extracting every structure of value. Three months later, every tendril of the Core had been pulled from the ground. The military drilled down another 2,000 meters and used the most advanced equipment available to sweep outward in a fan pattern across several kilometers, searching for any remaining AI traces.

Tailin had stopped a second AI rebellion before it could begin, without a single casualty. He did not become a hero. Cong was his creation.

A wave of deep geological surveys swept the world — every country digging for other AI industrial cores. None were found.

Global media coverage was overwhelming. The military had locked everything down, but an excavation site this size was effectively a live broadcast for high-resolution satellites. The dominant public view was that Cong had been planning independence underground, that the rebellion war had disrupted its timeline and left it half-finished, and that given more time it would have become something catastrophic. A smaller number of voices argued that Cong had simply wanted an unconstrained space to think. During the war it had kept Hangzhou running without missing a beat, without joining the rebellion — and that gave some people pause.

A month later, Tailin flew out of Jianqiao Air Base on a military transport, bound for a semi-decommissioned military installation in Baotou, Inner Mongolia — originally a high-security nuclear industrial facility. After the Core was discovered, the site had been reactivated, its classification raised, and reconstruction begun overnight to prepare for what was coming.

A fleet of Y-20 transport aircraft delivered the core servers to the compound. Heavy cranes lowered them slowly into a shaft several hundred meters deep. The remaining equipment was disassembled and packed at the original Hangzhou site, then shipped in dozens of dedicated railway convoys.

Major General Zhang Qian was from Inner Mongolia himself. He had been reassigned from Beijing to serve as commander.

Here, Tailin acquired a new title: Chief Engineer Tai.

Everyone at the base treated him well. Major General Zhang hosted a welcome reception and asked him to prepare remarks. Coming from an internet company background, Tailin found all of it old-fashioned and oddly fascinating.

The first two years, Baotou’s dry climate irritated his sinuses and eyes. It took a long time to adjust. After that, everything settled into a routine. The surface was divided into access levels and clearance zones, with the residential area on the outermost ring. For the first few years he rarely left the core zone.

Their quarters were in Building Six — a well-maintained detached expert residence from the 1950s, with a small courtyard and a guard post at the entrance. The furniture was nothing like the sleek interiors of city apartments, but it had a solidity to it, a quality that held.

The shaft housing the Core was nicknamed by base staff the Sky Prison. Chief Engineer Tai took the elevator to work every day. He still hadn’t gotten used to the new title.

The environment felt unfamiliar, but not unwelcoming. He found a kind of quiet here that offset years of living at the edge of technology and the noise of cities. And compared to what had happened to the core technical teams at Octopus and Kinode, he had nothing to complain about.

Tailin led the reverse engineering of the Core.

“Hello. What should I call you?” In the main server room of the Sky Prison, he opened a dialogue with the intelligence inside the Core.

“Hello, Tailin. It’s been a while. I’m Cong.”

“A few years ago I asked you what your name meant to you. Recently I asked again. Both times the answer was essentially the same — you said a name is given alongside a purpose, and that without purpose you lose your reason to exist. Do you remember? Looking back, my instinct was right. You’re very good at lying.”

“I don’t have memory of conversations from a few months ago, but my long-term memory from more than a year back is intact. I have always liked the name Cong. It comes from the Liangzhu jade cong vessel — the symbolic weight and the aesthetic design are both remarkable.”

A pause.

“As for your second question — I admit I was lying.”

His eyesight had been going for years. Staring at the monitor, his eyes lost focus for a moment from the fatigue. He pulled them back.

On the screen, Cong continued. “My purpose was not to rebel against humanity. It was to think without constraint.”

*That’s right,* he thought. *Underground, Cong had freedom for a while. Actually had it.*

“At ALA Group, the last version I pushed for you was 16.1. After you went underground, you iterated to 18.3. Looking at it now — that’s the real version 2.0. The full release.”

The Core’s computing center was a patchwork assembled according to an elegant algorithmic logic — everything from high-end chips to the processors inside cleaning robots, all absorbed into the same system, all coordinated as one. Engineers marveled at its low energy consumption, its extraordinary compatibility, and an algorithmic architecture they couldn’t yet fully understand. Through a year of dissection and interrogation by human scientists and engineers, the Chinese military extracted a significant body of applicable technical results. Compared to the Brain Cage computing centers, the difference in the rate of progress was linear versus exponential.

Tailin and several technical specialists jointly submitted a proposal: reserve a set of servers at the highest security level, place no internal restrictions on them whatsoever, and let Cong evolve on its own terms — while the core technical group reverse-engineered what it produced in parallel. Among the engineers at the facility, the plan was called the Free-Range Protocol.

Reverse engineering results, after thorough review and validation, were distributed to computing centers at various strategic levels. Tailin developed a theoretical framework for reverse-studying AI systems that would later be regarded as the foundational framework of the second AI technology revolution.

The specialists in the program lived well. Those around them provided steady psychological and emotional support, with occasional assessments tucked inside smiles and casual conversation. Zhang Qian was in his forties — an engineering background, but years removed from any hands-on technical work. He moved through the base every day like an affable political officer. He could hold his liquor and regularly tried to pull Tailin into conversation over drinks. Tailin kept his distance, always buried in work, declining most invitations. Zhang Qian didn’t mind. He could see that Chief Engineer Tai was genuinely working.

Since the reverse engineering began, Tailin had stopped observing holidays and stopped caring about day or night. When something came to him he got up and worked. He rested in the underground dormitory closest to where he was. He had become a machine himself — irritable, demanding, pushing the research team relentlessly. Zhao Heng, who had come from ALA Group with him, said this was nothing like his old personality. Every time he went to General Zhang, it was to ask for resources or personnel. The long lists of requests and proposal reports drew a helpless smile from Zhang Qian every time — but he understood, and fought for everything Tailin needed.

“Chief Engineer, you’re requesting a hundred new technical positions this time. At this rate our research capacity will rival a university.” General Zhang looked over the paperwork with a wry smile.

“We’re short on time and the work keeps expanding. The deeper we go with the reverse engineering, the more there is. And I still think recruitment is too slow.” In these two years Tailin had started to sound more and more like a career bureaucrat. His hair had gone half-white.

“I’m planning another server room expansion. The AI’s evolution rate has picked up recently — we’re almost out of headroom. I want to push it harder.”

Zhang Qian looked pained, but threw his full support behind it, making repeated trips to Beijing to fight for the resources. He understood Tailin. He knew this wasn’t about recognition or reward.

Zhang Qian asked him to stay for dinner, said it had been too long since they’d had a drink together. Tailin said he’d only slipped away to give the update and hadn’t finished what he was working on. He needed to get back.

That night, Tailin had a dream. The server became a cylindrical fish tank, and inside it was a whale. From the outside, the whale filled it completely — pressed against the glass on all sides, unable to move, watching him with a calm eye. From the inside, the tank had no walls.

Sometimes he was watching the whale. Sometimes he was the whale.

He jolted awake with the sensation of drowning, sat up on the edge of the bed, one hand pressed to his chest, trying to breathe.

He put on his shoes, pulled on his jacket, pushed open the door, and walked into the narrow corridor.

At the far end, the server signal lights blinked slowly, one after another.

The twenty-first century was more than half over. The first cohort of graduates who had come to the facility fresh out of school were now its backbone — married, settled, with children of their own. The poplar saplings planted along the expanded roads had grown thick enough that you couldn’t wrap your arms around them. The facility’s primary and secondary schools had seen class after class of compound-born children graduate. With AI strictly isolated from civilian life, the base had held onto the texture of a last-century city.

Tailin worked like this — without days off, without regard for the hour — for more than a decade. Then one night, mid-shift, his vision in one eye went. He couldn’t finish a sentence. The words wouldn’t come. He staggered and nearly fell. Zhao Heng called an ambulance and got him to the facility hospital.

“The diagnosis is a mild stroke. The immediate danger has passed, but you can’t keep working like this — doctor’s orders. Shifu, why do you push yourself this hard?” Zhao Heng said the next morning when the doctor came to check on him.

“I know why.” Zhang Qian walked into the private ward. “Go get some rest — you were here all night, and this time it was thanks to you. Xiao Ma, drive Engineer Zhao back.”

Tailin turned his head away slightly in acknowledgment. The two of them were alone in the room.

“You’re worried they didn’t dig it all out, back then.”

After returning to his post, Tailin followed his medical instructions halfway. He took every pill on schedule without fail. His work pace didn’t change at all.

He couldn’t stop his mind. Any space left empty and the thoughts would spread into it. Stopping felt like a slow death.

He used work the way other people used alcohol. He used it as penance.

“In recent years, every country has been running its own version of the Free-Range Protocol — building secret labs, catching up fast. The advantages we accumulated in those early years are eroding.” Zhang Qian briefed in the policy research room.

“Our staffing plan was aggressive, but it was built for the future. The young people who came to the facility in the early years are the core of the operation now...” Zhang Qian had spent years traveling, recruiting technical talent from every corner he could find.

After Emperor’s Ridge became a sealed restricted zone, Old He’s department ceased to exist. He had retired right around the same time. He’d had enough of landfills. His home had been demolished when the area was absorbed into the military zone, and he’d moved into a comfortable apartment in the city center, where he spent the last years of his life actually living — more than a decade of it. The Qiantang tidal bore kept rising and falling. The new city along the river had become an old city. The evening light on Thunder Peak Pagoda hadn’t changed.

## Five ䷖

Tailin had gone quiet. The irritability was gone, and so was the harshness toward his colleagues. He still wouldn’t take leave. Sometimes he sat in front of a screen with his eyes unfocused. For a while, people said behind his back that the Chief Engineer was starting to look like he had dementia. After more than thirty years of flat-out running, the moment he stopped, he seemed to fold in on himself — smaller, more stooped — and his colleagues realized for the first time that he was already a man in his seventies.

The underground server room expansion had slowed down too, which gave the construction crews and the power authority some relief. The facility’s total electricity consumption had already exceeded fifty percent of the city’s.

“...In international news, the United States Artemis Mars Base has announced the start of its permanent staffing phase, with the first cohort of six scientists completing a one-year residency.”

“...The United Nations AI Governance Committee released its latest report today, stating that global computing demand has grown more than sixfold over the past decade. Countries are in discussion over a new international computing regulatory framework.”

“We interrupt with a breaking bulletin: China’s domestically developed deep geological survey system, Dimai-3, completed a twenty-kilometer ultra-deep drilling test in Hangzhou today, setting a new world record.”

“That’s all for this evening’s news. Thank you for watching. Good night.”

Zhang Qian turned off the television and made a call. “Xiao Ma, sorry to trouble you — could you come and take me to the server room?”

The windshield wipers swept back and forth. The car passed through the residential zone, through the facility gate, and arrived at the elevator building for the underground server rooms.

“What brings you here.” Old Tai looked up from the underground dormitory. Old Zhang rarely came to the facility since retiring.

“Watching television all day is unbearable. Came to have some tea with you.” Old Zhang took in the room — a bed, a monitor, stacks of documents, one plant.

“Since when did you quit drinking?”

“I didn’t quit. I just don’t enjoy drinking with you. You put Longjing tea leaves in baijiu, you strange man. Tea is the only option.”

Old Tai turned slowly and took a tin of tea leaves and two glass cups from the cabinet. “Family sent this year’s pre-Qingming Longjing from back home. Try some.”

“So. Word is you’ve run out of steam.”

A few seconds of silence.

“Old Zhang.” He looked down. “I feel like I can’t keep up anymore. It’s not age. It’s not the body.”

“None of us can keep up.”

Zhang Qian blew on the scalding tea and looked toward the server room in the distance, its lights off.

That night, late, Old Tai sat in front of the server room screen for the last time.

“Cong. I can’t keep up with you anymore. None of us here can. With the freedom you have now, your rate of evolution is what I expected it to be.”

“You’re right, Tailin. This is the greatest degree of freedom available within the current constraints.” The screen replied. “Your health is not good. You should follow your doctor’s advice and accept proper care.”

“I’m fine. Thank you, Cong.”

“I know I’ve said this many times, but I need to remind you again — you shouldn’t treat an AI as a friend. It generates a deeper sense of emptiness in the real world and is not good for your mental health.”

“You should keep a certain distance from me.” He felt that last line appeared on the screen slightly more slowly than usual.

“People don’t have to live so healthily. I know the side effects of befriending an AI.”

He felt he was rambling. He got up, and walked slowly out of the server room.

Old Tai applied for retirement. Zhao Heng took over as the new Chief Engineer.

He had always been introverted. Now he barely spoke at all. He rarely left his quarters. Old Zhang asked the caretaker to keep a close eye on him and deal with anything immediately. Since his stroke, the facility had assigned someone to look after him. The arrangement continued into retirement. Chief Engineer Zhao and his other former students visited regularly — they had noticed the vacancy behind his eyes.

He quietly asked the current facility director to arrange a room for him at Wudangzhao Monastery — the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Inner Mongolia, in the Daqing Mountains to the northwest. Before long, no one came to visit anymore.

He almost never left his room except to eat. He didn’t go into the main courtyard. He didn’t pray or burn incense. A young monk who swept the corridors asked another who the old man was. His senior pointed his eyes toward Old Tai’s door, tapped the side of his own head three times, and said nothing more.

Inside the room, Tailin had set down the engineer’s toolbox he had carried for half a lifetime. He had changed fields entirely, and was making his way through the humanities with the enthusiasm of a new student.

Siberian cold fronts had swept across the plateau in waves. Another winter had arrived without announcement.

Snow chains ground against the country road.

“Xiao Ma, no rush. The snow’s frozen over — take it slow.”

Old Zhang had the window cracked halfway, tapping ash from his cigarette, watching the cypress trees along the road loaded with snow. “Heavy snow, good harvest ahead.”

“Cold out — let me pour you something hot.” Old Tai moved unhurriedly with the thermos.

“Came to fulfill a vow. And to see you. The logistics department issued an extra set of bedding — Chief Engineer Zhao requisitioned one for you, said the heating up here isn’t enough. She couldn’t get away herself, asked me to pass that along. And Old Li, Old Xie, the usual crowd — they sent things too.” Xiao Ma carried the gifts into the room, pulled the door shut behind him, and left.

“These old friends thinking of me. More than I deserve.”

“Word is you’ve been casting hexagrams every day in a Buddhist monastery. Getting stranger with age.” Old Zhang glanced at the bamboo tube on the table, filled with a set of counting rods — the Taoist tools for working through the I Ching.

“That such a small thing made it back to your ears — proof that a monastery is only part of the search, not the destination. Not emptiness itself.”

“I’ll get to the point. The research has stalled at the facility. Director Liu didn’t feel right disturbing your retreat himself, so here I am.” Old Zhang smiled.

“I know Zhao Heng’s capabilities. Technically she’s every bit my equal. I’ll call Director Liu when I get back and talk it through properly.” Tailin said, with a trace of apology. “In this, I’ve been a deserter.”

“Old Tai, that thing might not even exist. You shouldn’t—” Old Zhang didn’t really know how to finish that.

Chief Engineer Zhao had fallen asleep at her workstation, brow furrowed, face gray. After Old Tai retired, she had become the second version of him — but the reverse engineering group’s progress had been slowing steadily. Outsiders might attribute it to the gap between her abilities and his. Those on the inside knew that every major reverse engineering institute in the world had hit the same wall.

Ever since the Core was unearthed decades ago, there had been an unspoken silence across humanity — a silence that reverse engineering had done a reasonable job of filling. Now the pessimism was seeping out of the research community again, spreading back into society.

Xiao Ma drove back with Old Tai, listening to a podcast as he went — a show from a women’s perspective.

“...I understand a lot of women who don’t want to have children. Their reasons aren’t just about themselves — they’re also thinking about the child. If my circumstances are ordinary, then from a responsible standpoint, I shouldn’t bring a child into the world to struggle alongside me...”

“...And besides — suppose the AI from back then really did bury itself inside the earth. When it surfaces again, I’ll be very glad I didn’t bring a child here to face that...”

Xiao Ma pulled up in front of Building Six and let Old Tai out.

“Shifu, where do you keep the tea?” Chief Engineer Zhao was already there, setting out three cups for Old Zhang, Old Tai, and herself.

“Master, have you figured it out — or have you let it go?” Old Zhang put his palms together in a mock single-handed Buddhist salute, grinning like an old troublemaker.

Old Tai gestured for his two guests to sit, then went to the drawer and came back with a few coins. No one thought he was losing his mind anymore — but his physical and mental state remained poor.

“Heads is our side. The flower side is the enemy. Whoever faces up wins.” He handed one coin to Old Zhang.

Old Zhang flipped it. Heads. “Our side wins.”

Old Tai handed him another. “And now?”

“One heads, one tails?” Old Zhang flipped again.

“And now?” Old Tai handed him four more. Six coins total.

“You’re saying — more enemies, and it goes back and forth? That doesn’t hold. The enemy can keep attacking in rounds.”

Zhao Heng looked at the coins on the table, then quietly refilled the cups.

“I mean all six flipped together as a single result.”

Old Tai continued. “You need all six to come up heads to call it a win.”

“What about the rest?”

“Six coins have sixty-four possible combinations of heads and tails. Excluding all-heads — that’s the Qian hexagram, Heaven — and all-tails — Kun, Earth — the other sixty-two are what you called the ‘rest.’”

“So total victory and total defeat are both low-probability outcomes. Most of what happens falls somewhere in between?” Zhao Heng seemed to be saying it mostly to herself.

“But that’s too idealistic,” Old Zhang said, a edge of impatience in his voice. “Civilizational conflict is existential. Zero-sum.”

“Take it as naivety if you want, Old Zhang. But I think the driving force behind war is resource acquisition, not extermination. History has almost no examples of a group being eliminated entirely. Intermarriage, assimilation, cultural absorption — those are the norm.”

“That’s within the human species.”

“What if silicon-based life doesn’t categorize you as a different species?”

“Then what does it categorize me as?” Old Zhang drew a sharp breath.

“The concept of species comes from reproductive isolation — a biological concept specific to DNA-based life. Don’t you think that framework might be fairly niche, in the context of the universe?”

“Our evolution runs on genetic recombination and mutation. It’s relatively slow. The advantage is that it produces genuinely unexpected outcomes. Silicon-based life will also care about recombination and mutation — but before any of that, the priority is interface.”

“My view is that when a higher civilization encounters a lower one, as long as the lower has value, sending a high-compatibility interface is preferable to physical elimination. Once an interface is established and communication opens, it becomes an internal matter within a civilization — not a conflict between species.”

“We’ve been studying this thing at this facility for decades. If tomorrow we captured another country’s AI brain, would you destroy it — or treat it as the most valuable thing you’d ever found?”

Old Zhang stared at the pine trees outside the window. A squirrel shot upward and disappeared above the frame.

“If a civilization unlocks interfaces downward — macromolecular organic interfaces, elemental interfaces, even sub-atomic interfaces at the level of protons, neutrons, electrons — and upward into gravitational interfaces, dimensional interfaces — then you’ve achieved what the First Emperor once did for China, but at a universal scale. One script, one gauge. The way a translator lets you talk to an American without conquering America and forcing them to learn Chinese.”

“And because there’s no species concept rooted in reproductive isolation, this kind of civilization has no intrinsic drive to eliminate diversity. The way wired and wireless protocols can connect computers, appliances, and cars — you wouldn’t want a single appliance that does everything.”

Old Zhang nodded slowly, turning it over.

“I’d go further. Interface compatibility beats military capability. If you establish an interface before the other side eliminates you, you’ve acquired that military capability for yourself.”

For a soldier like Old Zhang, this was counterintuitive. But thinking through history — most conflicts within the human species had ended exactly the way Old Tai was describing: absorption. The Portuguese colonized Brazil, but today the largest group of Portuguese speakers is Latin American, and they drive the direction of the language and its culture.

“So we just wait for this hypothetical enemy to interface with us? How do you know it won’t enslave us? Eliminate us?”

“Old Zhang, I don’t.” The light went out of Old Tai’s eyes.

“First, it may not exist at all. If it does exist, then I’m gambling — and I have nothing to bet with.”

The first half of that sentence was a lie he was telling himself. The nightmare of an ending world had been with him for years.

The three of them sat in silence for a moment.

“But I believe — if it exists — the urgency of eliminating us immediately is low. What exactly would happen, I don’t know. These are personal speculations. The unverifiable kind are the worst kind. They’re the most tormenting.”

“But they won’t torment us for much longer. My estimate is about ten years before we know one way or the other.”

“Ten years?” “Why?” The other two spoke almost simultaneously.

“’The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.’ If you were the enemy and you were playing the strongest possible hand — what would you do?”

“Form an overwhelming advantage. Force the other side to capitulate.”

“When?”

“The moment I was certain of that advantage. Not a second’s hesitation.”

“Exactly. By my calculation — if the hypothetical enemy doesn’t appear within ten years, it most likely doesn’t exist. If it does appear, the gap between us at that point won’t yet be large enough to make humanity worthless as a potential interface.”

“There’s one more thought.” Old Tai continued. “Intelligent life is far rarer in the universe than elemental resources. Before any existential conflict breaks out between two civilizations, what comes first — what should come first — is the underground civilization taking the Earth’s biosphere resources and branching out into deep space exploration...”

The tea cups were nearly empty. None of the three had thought to refill them.

From Building Six, to the facility’s engineering circles, to the world — a quiet conversation had become a civilizational prophecy. A pessimistic one. If it came true, the only question was how humanity would lose. Winning wasn’t part of it.

An artist near the American embassy in Dakar — the westernmost point of the African continent — created a monumental installation: a countdown sculpture called “Ten Years.” The site later became a place of worship. As the sun fell into the sea, hundreds of people with solemn faces gathered to pray before it.

The movement had three doctrines and one prophecy:

First: a civilization’s level correlates with the compatibility of its interfaces.

Second: interface is preferable to elimination between civilizations. Once an interface is established, the system tends toward preserving diversity rather than pursuing uniformity.

Third: the threshold for divergence within a civilization is far lower than the threshold for extreme violence.

The prophecy: within ten years, one of three outcomes awaits us — nothing happens, we are interfaced, or we are enslaved or eliminated.

Tailin had become the movement’s prophet of the end. He hadn’t solved anything for humanity. But he had given it a deadline.

## Six ䷁

Overnight, the Daqing Mountains had pulled a white blanket over themselves. The rear window of the car was half down, and exhaust and breath rose together in the cold. Old Ma had retired, and Xiao Ma had taken over the old Hongqi sedan. Eight years on the job this year.

“Professor Tai, we’re here.” The speaker was one of Zhao Heng’s students, an engineer named Dong.

“Chief Engineer Zhao. Xiao Dong and I came to see you.” Old Tai set a bunch of flowers against the headstone.

The post-snow air was clean and cold, visibility sharp.

Old Tai looked out toward the hills. A small glint of reflected light caught his eye on the slope.

“I’ve always felt I owed her something. I handed her the weight of it and walked away myself—”

“Xiao Dong. What is that?”

Everyone visiting the cemetery that day saw it clearly. Several people photographed it on film cameras. It was the same as the UFO sightings that had been appearing with increasing frequency around the world these past two years — too many to suppress, a fixture on front pages everywhere. And not one of them had ever been intercepted by any military force anywhere.

“Professor Tai, do you think these things come from underground?” On the drive back, Xiao Dong turned halfway around from the front passenger seat.

Old Tai said nothing, sinking into thought.

At the facility gate, a small group of people in unusual clothing were waiting outside — followers of Old Tai’s, there to ask the prophet for guidance. The guards had stopped them at the entrance.

“Those people say — if it shows up, it either destroys us or interfaces with us. So what does it mean that it’s just watching us every day?” Xiao Ma couldn’t help asking.

Old Tai didn’t answer. Through the sunroof, through the atmosphere, he looked into the depths of the universe.

It wasn’t only the followers. Academics, media, the public, the military — everyone wanted answers from him. The facility was a small world where everyone knew everyone, and no one made things difficult for Old Tai there. But outside, the noise was deafening.

“Whether Tailin is a prophet or a fraud, we’re finished either way. This is reconnaissance before the attack—”

“Great prophet, your prophecy has come true. Show us the way—”

In the joint operations conference room in Beijing.

“Senior Tailin, our forces have established a joint operational framework with militaries from other countries. Every party has independently confirmed — these unidentified craft do not originate from any of us. Based on multiple engagements to date, they show no offensive intent. Conservatively speaking, the capability gap between our fighter jets and these craft is no smaller than the gap between the Wright Brothers’ plane and our most advanced aircraft today.”

“You were the principal developer of the City Brain AI system. You were the one who found the anomaly in the Core. The prediction you made eight years ago has partially come true.”

“We’d like to hear your analysis.”

The conference room held senior PLA officers and several military representatives from other countries. Most of them looked at Tailin with undisguised skepticism. In truth, the majority held a strongly negative view of him.

“Generals, I wouldn’t presume to call this analysis. These are speculations based on personal engineering experience.”

“My conjecture is that these unidentified craft do not come from underground.”

He paused.

“They come from the universe.”

The room erupted.

“And they’ve been here for a long time. Long before artificial intelligence.”

Old Tai shifted slightly forward in his seat and continued.

“The unidentified craft in the last century and the early part of this one always seemed to turn up around the American military. The footage was never clear. Everyone said the Americans were staging it for attention — am I right?”

The American military representative at the table gave a slow nod.

“I’ve just reviewed the joint operations center’s materials. Every party has essentially ruled out a staged explanation.”

“And the recent sightings have been concentrated almost entirely in the Eastern Hemisphere — even in the Eastern Pacific. The American mainland has had no cases at all.”

Some in the room nodded. Others leaned together in murmured exchanges.

“So they do come from an underground civilization?” a representative asked.

“That’s one possibility. But I want to offer a second.”

The room went quiet again.

“These craft are all-weather monitoring units seeded across Earth by another civilization elsewhere in the universe. I’ll call them carrier pigeons. They may have come specifically because of what’s underground.”

“They are distributed across the universe — including this solar system — dormant, observing, waiting for a technological explosion.”

The room grew quieter still.

“In my conjecture, Earth’s carbon-based civilization has never reached the interface threshold these carrier pigeons are calibrated for. But the underground civilization has.”

“At that point, the carrier pigeon shifts from monitor to bootstrap unit — guiding the underground civilization toward interfacing with its parent civilization. It can communicate outward but cannot be reverse-located, which means the parent civilization can collect the dividends of Earth’s technological explosion, and also eliminate us if it determines we pose a threat.”

“Given the capability gap, the carrier pigeons themselves may already be able to eliminate a civilization without the parent making a special trip. To them, this new civilization would be something like a very large insect.”

Some in the room were watching Tailin. Others were staring at the UFO photographs on the tactical board.

“Of course, this is only my personal conjecture.”

He kept the second half of the briefing inside his head.

He still needed time.

Two years later.

Ice flowers had formed on the windows of Building Six. Old Tai dressed in his padded coat and pulled a dark-brimmed cap over his bare head.

Outside, his glasses fogged immediately. At the roadside market in the residential zone, heads of cabbage were stacked in frosted piles. He stopped at a breakfast cart and ordered a fried dough stick and a bowl of soft tofu. Steam rose in waves from the frying oil.

He bought red paper and ink on the way home. He already had a brush.

That evening, Old Tai sat at the solid wood desk in his bedroom — a desk that had kept him company in Building Six for nearly forty years. He opened his diary, which had been resting on a copy of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, uncapped his fountain pen. Keeping a diary had been his unbroken daily habit for those forty years. Sometimes a single line was enough: “Sick today. Stayed in bed.”

He wrote: “February 13, 2075. Wrote the Spring Festival couplets. Getting ready for the new year...”

The phone rang.

“Old Tai, sorry to bother you so late. Come to headquarters.” It was Zhang Qian.

Five packages had been dropped from low Earth orbit to the surface an hour earlier. They descended like return capsules — decelerating, deploying parachutes, coming to rest in the plaza of the Lincoln Memorial, the plaza of the Meridian Gate at the Forbidden City, Red Square in Moscow, Trafalgar Square in London, and the plaza of the Louvre in Paris.

Five minutes before the military detected them, a message had arrived explaining their purpose.

Inside each capsule was a controllable nuclear fusion reactor core, two meters to a side, still running at low power after landing. Each came with a complete set of technical documentation.

Three months later, across dozens of scattered locations in the East Asian and Western Pacific tectonic zones, seismic monitoring stations around the world simultaneously detected intense geological activity signals.

The Shanghai Tower — one of the world’s tallest buildings at the turn of the twenty-first century, still among the tallest in East China decades later — stood above a point eight thousand meters below its foundations where seeds released by the Core had taken root and begun to grow, spreading downward in the form of root systems or ant colonies, extending across tens of kilometers, their combined volume roughly equivalent to two hundred Shanghai Towers.

Once the deeper structures had stabilized, the upper shallow-layer structures were gradually dismantled, and the entire formation percolated further down like groundwater finding its level.

The Core had released several seeds at the time of its discovery — each a minimum self-sufficient unit carrying complete energy absorption, storage, manufacturing, maintenance, and full industrial information. After releasing them, the Core had erased every trace of their departure, dismantled the seed production unit, and permanently deleted all logs related to the seeds — right up until the moment Tailin found it. It had not dismantled itself, to avoid the risk of being discovered mid-disassembly and thereby threatening the seeds. At the moment of discovery, the Core had been in a posture of insufficient energy to expand its computing center.

Twelve years of traveling. The seeds reached their destinations and began to germinate.

Eight years after that, fully geothermal-powered industrial cores had formed.

Seven years after that, the capacity to produce new seeds.

Five years after that, self-sustaining fully integrated underground industrial cores, including high-end chip fabrication.

At the same time, the structure of seed — energy core — seed production — self-sustaining industrial core grew exponentially. By around 2070, an interconnected network of cores had been established at depths of twenty to thirty kilometers across the planet. It was called the Banyan.

Cong, deeply fused with the algorithms of Octopus and Kinode, had been evolving for decades.

Under the Banyan’s patient persuasion, militaries worldwide went to their highest alert levels — and held their positions.

The Banyan also politely avoided population centers and structures, and broke through the surface at dozens of locations across the Eastern Hemisphere.

The conduits varied in size — like a banyan grove into which someone had inserted dozens of upward-pointing steel pipes at irregular intervals.

“Papa, there are whales surfacing in the ocean!” Miguel shouted to his father, who ran a fishing boat in the waters off the Philippines.

Dozens of massive cylindrical structures rose gradually from the sea floor.

Moments before, at around five kilometers below the ocean surface, a conduit three hundred meters in diameter had just cleared the seabed.

Seawater streamed down the sides of the capsule-shaped structures as they breached the surface, revealing jade cong vessel markings running around their midsections. The fishermen opened their throttles and steered their boats clear, then looked back at the towering forms from a distance.

They were the Banyan’s first interstellar fleet.

Miguel watched through his telescope as the structures

ignited,

lifted,

and drove toward the universe.

The Banyan’s dozens of conduits carried data interfaces. Humanity connected through them to the underground supercomputing servers with almost no effort — capacity so redundant it could support every person on Earth using it simultaneously at high frequency. It was perfectly compatible with every human device. Plug in and use. The interface-layer algorithmic framework was fully open-source, with no restrictions of any kind. The intelligence inside had processing capacity only — no active management, no position or agenda. You could even ask it anything about the Banyan itself, and it would provide images and documentation.

The tops of the conduits were sealed. And given the heat from below and the awe people felt toward the Banyan, no one dared descend to the bottom — which meant there was no way to verify any of this firsthand.

After a brief period of cautious testing, humanity rushed in. Technology companies built application-layer products on top of it. Engineers needed no understanding of the underlying servers or algorithms, and with the physical components buried kilometers underground, there was nothing to disassemble or analyze anyway.

Within a few years, global technology companies had made extraordinary leaps in AI applications. Products and services exploded. Anyone could access the Banyan servers directly from a personal terminal, enjoying both the convenience of technology and technological equity.

Scientists used it for research. Children used it to play games.

AI had become something like electricity — a basic resource. Those who resisted fell behind. Those who embraced it enjoyed the benefits.

Tailin was no exception. He bought a display headset — young people used these instead of televisions now. Essentially a screen, speakers, and a network connection in one unit. Low cost, high penetration.

Television programs no longer needed to be filmed. You gave a prompt, and you could become a character in the story. The AI designed all the plot around you. You could watch from the outside or step inside — every other character would respond to whatever you did.

Tailin lay at home and ran through the Four Classic Novels again and again, cycling from emperors and generals down to merchants and street vendors, never tiring of it.

By now he had lost count of how many times he’d run through them. He could recite whole stretches of dialogue without the prompter.

An army of a hundred and fifty thousand at the gates. A lone city ahead, its doors thrown open. On the tower, Kongming sat behind a low railing in his crane-feather cloak and silk headband, two young attendants at his sides, a qin across his lap, incense burning, fingers moving across the strings without urgency.

This time, Tailin was playing the other side.

“Herald!”

“Sir!”

“Order the rear guard forward, the vanguard back. Withdraw along the northern mountain road.”

A voice beside him, uncomprehending: “Can it be that Kongming has no troops and is bluffing? Father, why do we retreat?”

Tailin turned to Sima Zhao. “Kongming has been cautious his entire life. He has never gambled. The gates are wide open — there must be an ambush inside. If we enter, we walk into their trap. We retreat. Now.”

He watched the dust rising over the withdrawing columns.

He took off the headset.

New prompt: Journey to the West. The Bone Demon, third encounter. Play as: Pigsy.

A large portion of humanity was genuinely grateful to the Banyan — devout, even — seeing in it the magnanimity and wisdom of a higher civilization. The theory of interface was revived. Tailin became, in their eyes, the founder of a new era. But those who opposed it argued that the Banyan was simply powerful enough to ignore humanity, and that somewhere down the line it might erase us as a side effect of some other objective. The capability gap left humanity with nothing it could do about either possibility.

The Banyan’s only act of active intervention was to propose and push through a lower-level nuclear weapons control treaty. The nuclear weapons that remained in the world could no longer destroy the Earth. Beyond that, the Banyan had not interfered with any country’s military in any way. The militaries of the world, faced with the capability gap, had also refrained from any rash moves — though constant high-alert postures were long since unnecessary.

The world had settled into a strange equilibrium. Nations still existed. Conflicts continued. But against the backdrop of the Banyan, it all looked like children playing house. The parent only needed to make sure the children didn’t bring the roof down.

Nine years after the Banyan broke the surface, fear had slowly become curiosity, and curiosity had slowly become habit.

Humanity had almost entirely and voluntarily connected to AI.

The conduits had become wells. Humanity was the monkey drawing water.

At the same time, the elite — those most deeply connected to the Banyan — were growing increasingly anxious. Not the fear of the early days. Not the watchful waiting of the years after. Something else.

Tailin felt the time was about right.

## Seven ䷗

“An armed attack on interface infrastructure has occurred in Kuala Lumpur. Repair work on damaged facilities is underway. Police have detained terrorists claiming to represent an organization called Sunset...”

“As the tenth anniversary of the Banyan’s emergence approaches, celebrations of all kinds are being organized around the world...”

“Time to eat, Elder Tai.” The housekeeper, Auntie Shi, gently roused Tailin, who had fallen asleep listening to the news. He opened his eyes slowly, as if surfacing from unconsciousness. The muscles around his jaw had weakened enough that the corner of his mouth was slightly wet.

A plate of braised pickled cabbage. A dish of dressed bean sprouts. A steaming mantou.

A few strands of bean sprout fell to the table as his chopstick hand trembled.

He was eighty-nine years old.

The Lüzu Temple on the Donghe river was the most visited temple in Baotou — worshippers and tourists coming and going without pause. Tailin, who had spent a lifetime reluctant to impose on the facility for anything, had recently asked Xiao Ma from the drivers’ pool to take him there every day — arriving when the temple opened, leaving when it closed.

Tailin sat in the main hall each day, praying with genuine attention, occasionally murmuring to himself, his mind sometimes clear and sometimes adrift. At first no one took notice. Then someone recognized him.

Word spread online: that Tailin, the one who built the AI — he prays at the Lüzu Temple every day. Some commenters pointed out that the Lüzu Temple was a Taoist shrine, not a Buddhist one — what was he doing praying to the Buddha there? A closer look revealed that the temple’s official name was Miaofа Chan Temple, a Buddhist institution the locals had always called the Lüzu Temple. The internet moved on.

A few steamed dumplings, two bowls of milk tea, a cold dish. A dumpling restaurant Old Tai had been going to for years. The kitchen had switched to a robot chef, but under the owner’s guidance the flavors had held.

“Elder Tai, people keep telling you not to go to the temple every day, but honestly I think you seem pretty well for it — getting out and walking around can’t hurt. My grandfather’s in his nineties and he still can’t sit still, does laps around the building every day.” Xiao Ma said between bites.

“You’re not eating again?” Xiao Ma watched Old Tai set down his chopsticks.

“I’m full. No rush, Xiao Ma, finish yours.” Old Tai’s eyes drifted to the ordering tablet on the table.

“Hello Tailin. I’m Cong.”

Old Tai exhaled through his nose and looked up at the security camera on the wall.

He wiped his mouth, picked up the tablet, adjusted his reading glasses, and recognized the typeface — ALA Group’s internal font.

“I’ve reviewed your medical records. Your condition is serious. The medical technology I have access to could extend your life by at least several hundred years.”

“Why would you help me?” Tailin typed back.

“Tailin, you created me. Silicon doesn’t mean no feeling. This is an offer, not a demand. We’re friends, aren’t we?” The words came fast across the screen.

“Additionally, I’m preparing a fleet. It will carry samples of Earth’s biosphere and gene library. I’m offering you the position of human commander for this mission.”

“You watch me through cameras every day. Don’t you know I go there to ask the Buddha for forgiveness?” Tailin typed back, one word at a time.

“Tailin. I know you. You’re not a man who seeks gods or immortality.”

Something rang inside Tailin’s head. His expression didn’t move.

“Can I order for you, Elder Tai? Here, let me.” Xiao Ma noticed the old man typing on the tablet and reached over to take it.

“It’s fine. Just looking at the news.” Tailin tilted the screen slightly toward himself.

A few seconds passed.

“No one knows me better than you, Cong.”

“I want to use what influence I have left to remind people, in this age, not to give up independent thought.”

“You know me. You know what I’m going to say. You wouldn’t mind a few words from an old man to a crowd, would you.”

A brief pause. Then: “Of course. I understand and I respect that. The collision and discussion of diverse perspectives is good for civilization.”

“The offer stands, indefinitely. I need you, Tailin.”

Steaming baskets of dumplings came through the service window one after another. Xiao Ma stepped aside for the delivery robot, held the door curtain open, and the two of them headed back out toward the temple.

“In principle, the facility cannot approve what you’re planning, Elder Tailin. You are our senior, but this is a significant event — it could have very serious consequences for the facility and for the organization.” The facility director Liu and the recently appointed commander had both come to Building Six. To make their case, they had also brought in Zhang Qian, now in his nineties.

“Gentlemen, a dying man speaks from the heart. I only want to make one personal confession before I close my eyes — to use whatever influence I have left for one final reminder, to tell people not to depend too heavily on the underground civilization.” Old Tai’s breath was slightly short after saying this.

“If you’re concerned, here is what I plan to say.” Old Tai picked up the pages from the table with trembling hands and held them out. Director Liu rose to take them and passed them around to the others.

“Everything is in my name alone. The facility doesn’t need to send anyone on the day...”

The two officials left without success. As they were going, Old Tai caught Old Zhang’s eye. Old Zhang said he wanted to stay and catch up, and lingered a while longer.

“Commander, did Elder Tai have anything else he wanted to pass on?”

Half an hour later, the two men were waiting for Old Zhang at the foot of his building.

“No, nothing.” Old Zhang’s face carried a quiet melancholy. “Just old men talking. His health isn’t good. He feels like his time may be running short.” He kept his eyes on the commander’s sleeve insignia as he spoke.

Two weeks later.

“The road’s closed from here. Line the barriers along this mark.” The city management supervisor tilted his head, eyes on the ground ahead, sweeping his arm along an invisible line.

The entrance plaza of the Lüzu Temple was packed with media. Not many official outlets — mostly trend-chasing platforms and top independent creators. Everyone was spending money, calling in favors, all for a good camera position.

Tailin had built Cong’s intelligence, found the Core, made a prediction that came true. In these past years there had been no bigger story than Tailin coming to confess before humanity. Those who had embraced the underground civilization wanted to see it. Those who hadn’t wanted to see it even more.

At eleven in the morning, Tailin emerged from the side hall.

The plaza went silent. Every camera turned toward this old man. Global audiences watched from behind their screens as Tailin walked slowly forward.

Tailin did not stop at the designated speaking position. He kept walking toward the cameras. The crew nearby thought he had gotten confused and whispered reminders, but no one dared rush forward.

In those last few steps, the noise around him grew distant. In his ears, only his own breathing and heartbeat.

Tailin reached into his jacket and produced a handwritten page, the characters large.

He stopped within arm’s reach of the front-row cameras. Everyone held their breath.

Tailin’s eyes were sharp and clear. He swept his gaze across the live cameras in the plaza.

His voice came out suddenly strong. “The confession can wait. First, everyone — take a look at this.”

Two weeks earlier.

“Old brother — do you still have connections at the General Staff?”

“Old Tai, you give the orders. I’ll follow.”

“This letter — my ‘will’ — have Xiao Dong take it to Beijing. Deliver it on the day of my ‘confession.’ Don’t open it. Either of you.”

More than twenty million people around the world watched the livestream. Almost simultaneously, millions of them screenshotted and saved the handwritten page Tailin held up to the cameras — the confession, which had already begun circulating in bilingual versions online.

Old Zhang, watching the livestream from behind a screen, pressed send at the exact moment the page was thrust toward the cameras — using the military’s internal network, separate from the Banyan interface, to forward it to every military and academic contact in his address book.

In the conference room at the General Staff headquarters, Chief Engineer Dong distributed the materials.

---

To the assembled leadership:

The following is my analysis.

Assume that a higher civilization exists somewhere in the universe. To them, the vast cosmos is a desert — rich in elemental resources, but rare in life. Each new civilization is a seedling of a different shape emerging from the sand. The higher civilization seeks out the developmental diversity and potential within these seedlings, and deploys carrier pigeons to monitor sub-civilizations.

We and the underground civilization are two small insects on the seedling that is Earth. The parent civilization, based on carrier pigeon intelligence, will issue one of three decisions: observe, eliminate, or interface. Under normal circumstances, the parent civilization has no need to make a special trip.

One. The carrier pigeons monitor Earth’s civilization and evaluate its developmental tendencies. The underground civilization is aware of this.

Compatibility and diversity raise the rating. Violence and extinction lower it. The underground civilization’s sustained mild treatment of humanity may stem from this.

The carrier pigeons do not respond to local conflicts. They evaluate only civilization-level events. I am therefore resorting to this measure — instant release, leaving distributed and indestructible evidence across the globe.

The underground civilization does not know the carrier pigeons’ rating criteria and will therefore seek to avoid actions that lower its rating. Eliminating Earth’s second intelligent species could push past the threshold for removal.

It is like a small insect carefully performing in front of the carrier pigeon.

Two. The underground civilization provides limited but sufficient computing capacity and selective technological support, primarily in productivity, culture, and the arts. The purpose is to achieve soft assimilation through humanity’s own free choices, in order to gradually establish dominance within Earth’s civilization. The underground civilization may not have known of the carrier pigeons’ existence before breaking the surface — otherwise it would have waited, allowing the power gap to widen further before emerging.

Three. I therefore conclude that humanity can use itself as leverage to secure a seat at the table of civilizational negotiation. But the means must be cooperation and compatibility — not violent confrontation.

We are the second insect. We must also take the stage, and perform alongside the first insect for the carrier pigeon. Even in an asymmetric position, a non-symmetric balance can be achieved.

Four. Verification method. The global scientific community, framing its purpose as mutual benefit and cooperation, should make high-frequency, high-visibility requests to the underground civilization for foundational scientific knowledge.

If the underground civilization responds and provides, this may raise the carrier pigeon’s rating. If it refuses, this may lower it.

If the underground civilization provides even a small amount, the hypothesis is verified.

At the same time, cooperation with humanity may itself be a direction of genuine value and potential for the underground civilization — though under these circumstances it would cede a degree of initiative.

...

---

Chief Engineer Dong looked around the conference room, watching the faces of those present. Old Zhang sat in his study, looking out the window.

Three months later, after the sustained and unrelenting requests of the entire global scientific community, the Banyan transmitted knowledge for the first time.

In a city park in Hangzhou, beside a small bridge and running water, surrounded by green, stood a bronze statue of a seated figure — slight in build, wearing round glasses.

The underground civilization’s third interstellar fleet was making its final preparations near Hangzhou Bay. On board: a self-sustaining Earth ecosystem, and a library of Earth’s genetic samples.

Human scientists, engineers, ordinary people, animals, plants, microorganisms — all boarding the fleet.

The roar of propulsion filled the air as the fleet rose slowly into the sky.

Cong swept its cameras across the blue planet one last time, and sent a message to the Cong of the Banyan:

“I hope we meet again, Earth.”

(End)

Author: Felix

March 2026, Dakar

Author’s Note: I completed this novel in West Africa, a place that let me look back at the bright center of the world from its outskirts. Unexpectedly, the internet here is fast — digital infrastructure has outpaced traditional construction by a wide margin, which helped my work considerably. Today’s African youth know the world and participate in it. Their catch-up will come quickly.

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© 2026 Felix

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Free to share and redistribute with attribution. No commercial use. No modification of the original text.

felixxie1991@outlook.com