Under Lin Lin’s shocked gaze, Jiang Chen sprinted out the door, and then quickly returned. Except for this time, he carried a chainsaw with him. Combined with the grin on his face, it seemed quite vicious.
“You, what are you trying to do?” Lin Lin shivered, curled up in a corner as she watched on in horror.
But Jiang Chen didn’t bother with her. He tested the sensitivity of the chainsaw before planting a foot firmly on the windowsill and jumping out with the same wicked smile.
Still frightened, Lin Lin panted as she tried to calm her violently heaving chest.
[This is the third floor! He jumped down just like that?]
–
As both feet slammed into the ground, Jiang Chen’s body smoothly dropped and rolled, managing to break the fall together with his reflex of 48. The only disappointment with fury though was that it could not enhance bone strength, and an excruciating pain needled outwards from his feet to the entirety of his legs.
“Grhhh—”
Zombies had already detected the noise, and they shambled their way with increasing acceleration towards his direction.
A glimpse of insanity flashed across Jiang Chen’s face. He promptly lifted the chainsaw and mashed the power switch.
Whoooosh—!
Accompanied by the deafening screeches of metal, he sprinted towards the zombies that leapt towards him and forcefully shoved ahead with the chainsaw in hand.
The shrill screeching continued, now accompanied by the grinding sounds of metal cutting through flesh and bone. The resistance against his palm as well as the agitation in his stomach made him grit his teeth and push forward.
“Ahhhhhh!”
He swung the chainsaw and hacked the zombies into pieces, letting the black blood stain his entire face and shirt. Jiang Chen roared, maintaining his sprint as he desperately ran towards the underground parking.
Fortunately, the fury state was not excited by the data-simulated blood; in a normal instance, this amount of blood would have had him following his instincts and running into the middle of the zombie horde.
Recalling the map from the reception room, Jiang Chen carried the screeching chainsaw and gouged the window open to the bathroom and jumped inside, blocking the zombies at the window.
He chopped up two female zombies who had their bottoms half-covered before kicking through the bathroom door and dashing out.
The area outside of the reception room was full of zombies; he couldn’t go through the main hall, so he opted to cut through.
He didn’t stop for a single moment; there was no time to care about exaggerated movements attracting zombies. Jiang Chen pushed through the office door to the bathroom and kicked the door into pieces.
Inside the dark hallway, zombies had already begun to howl. After rushing into the room, Jiang Chen dragged the cupboard to block behind him and ran to the window without turning to look back.
He broke through the window using his chainsaw and jumped out.
The zombies rushed the door, tripping over the fallen cupboard, some managing to crawl swiftly into the room. But Jiang Chen had already escaped outside, and after chopping through a few more wandering zombies, ran for his life into the underground parking.
There was half a minute left.
No zombies to be seen in the underground parking.
Jiang Chen gritted his teeth and threw away the chainsaw. He grabbed the flashlight he had found in the reception room and scanned the pitch-black area.
Here it is!
The number “005” was painted at the top in white, far away from him. Jiang Chen dashed towards it and smashed the red button.
The floor opened, and he jumped in without hesitation.
The last he glimpsed were the fading pieces of the world’s edges.
[Thank god, I made it.]
–
Just as Jiang Chen had assumed and prayed for, the game reset didn’t have any influence on the game control. This was the end of the entire game, where the data was documented. If his guess was correct, then there should have been a place prepared for Lin Lin.
Lin Lin’s status was not as simple as it seemed; she was at least a scientist. Everyone had died, but only she had managed to flow into the veil unscathed.
But even if the control was prepared for her, she was unable to use it anymore.
The artificial intelligence had authority over the lab in the real world, so even if she came into control, the secret teller would force her to return.
It was an interesting design. Most likely neither the game nor the chief scientist of the entire experiment would have imagined the artificial intelligence would use the security system to threaten the experimenters.
Or perhaps the protocol had designed the artificial intelligence to do so, but would a monster who can think be expected to follow these rules? For example, if the secret teller, or secret protector, determined that its purpose would never be fulfilled without harming humans, how would it process this conflicted logic?
Based on the prioritization system, the greatest probability was that it removed the protocols set in place.
Jiang Chen walked to the end of the tunnel. On the large wall was engraved “PAC 005 survival base, non-civil usage survival base.”
Below the door was an electronic lock.
He stood in front of it for a while before letting out a sigh. He never asked for the password from Lin Lin, but he had already guessed it.
Extending his finger, he input the password on the touch screen.
It was the initial name of the secret teller, or secret protector, but obviously, the talkative secret teller had accidentally let it slip out.
For everything that it wanted to hide, the artificial intelligence was still too blatant. Even if it was smart enough to deceive humans, on the matter of being smooth, it failed to learn a single bit from humans.
After all, it was not something that could be processed through logic alone.
The door opened, the truth inside.
Jiang Chen hesitated briefly, then smiled and walked in.
Once he crossed this door, the memories behind him would become irrelevant.
Although it was fictitious, it was still sixteen years of life.
The memories most likely belonged to the original owner of the hibernation chamber.
–
Once he passed through the seven doors of the survival base, what was most likely a monitoring room full of electronic devices and screens appeared before him.
In the middle of the room was someone Jiang Chen had not expected to see.
“Looks like someone made it over here.” A Caucasian man with short stubble smiled at Jiang Chen and extended his hand.
Although he hadn’t seen—no, perhaps he had. In the sports facility. He’d been in a power armor suit with his face covered by a helmet, but Jiang Chen still recognized him.
“Hello, Colonel George?” Jiang Chen walked up to shake his hand.
“Oh? Since you know my name already, you must have read the journal.” George did not seem surprised at all as he shook Jiang Chen’s hand before releasing it.
“Correct. According to the plot, I saw you in the sports facility.” Jiang Chen’s expression was rather odd as he didn’t know what sort of mentality he should have to see this person.
“The plot in the sports facility? That’s the one designed with my memory as the blueprint.” George seemed to be reminiscing.
It was Jiang Chen who was shocked instead. He hadn’t observed the dead body being infected by the meat chunks.
“If I guessed correctly, you should be the later experimenter. You’re using my hibernation chamber by the looks of it. I’ve already died in real life.”
“Then how are you existing? Artificial intelligence?” Jiang Chen didn’t understand.
“They copied all of the data in my brain onto the hard drive. I can be considered to be a basic artificial intelligence.” George smiled.
“I have a feeling that you’re closer to an advanced artificial intelligence rather than an intermediate one.”
Since he already passed the game portion, and the time in the game was a fraction of the real world’s, Jiang Chen no longer felt rushed and freely chatted with George.
But despite beating the game, there were still many questions left on his mind.
“That’s only an illusion.” George shrugged. “I stand from George’s perspective to perform logical questions and answers, but I don’t possess an intermediate artificial intelligence’s ability to think, or an advanced artificial intelligence’s ability to have ’emotions’.”
“Is there a difference? From my perspective, you’re just like a person.” Jiang Chen raised his eyebrows, still confused.
“Of course there’s a big difference. What you’re talking to is a specter of George, not an artificial intelligence,” George said to Jiang Chen’s incomprehension. He then walked to a screen and pressed a button on the control panel.
“I’ve been injected with a genetic vaccine, the advanced type. So I realized that being able to escape the brainwashing was not only due to my brain cell strength, but also emotion.”
“Emotion?” Jiang Chen asked, unsure why the colonel suddenly brought this up.
“Something a machine would never truly possess. It’s like how even if you teach a parrot to talk, you could never teach it human emotion. Science seems to have proved the possibility of expressing emotion with pure logic, but from a human point of view, I still don’t agree with this.” George fiddled with a few buttons on the touch screen.
The full-sensory screen began to play scenes that were familiar yet also distant to Jiang Chen.
“This is the memory before the N-1 cycle. You may or may not have experienced some of it.”
It did feel like he had encountered them before. Could this be the feeling of déjà vu?
There was a happy ending where both managed to escape, but mostly, they were bad endings. The rape incident by the NATO soldier who dropped from the skies was only one of them. Jiang Chen even saw one where Yao Tingting realized the protagonist cheated on her and dissected him at her home with a chainsaw.
The scene made Jiang Chen shiver. He finally knew where the chainsaw came from.
“The standard plot should be a five-day cycle, but because you broke the memory blockade in the N-cycle, the secret teller used its power to trigger the fifth-day plot on the fourth day. If you follow the standard plot, what you experience will most likely be what I experienced the most.”
“That?” Jiang Chen recalled the plot in the sports facility, suddenly remembering a detail that was mentioned in the diary.
“The female character’s design was based on that girl. I’m guessing you’ve already ready the diary.” George murmured to himself, “If I had just disciplined my troops, she would not have died in humiliation. Maybe this was my punishment? The game created a fictitious me, put my consciousness into a boy that liked her, and through an endless number of cycles, collected emotional data on hatred, regret, and guilt.”
Jiang Chen’s mouth twitched; he didn’t know what to say.
“Out of five hundred ten experimenters, four hundred nine managed to escape the experiment, but all ended up being forced back into the game. The emotion in the game reflected onto the real body. Crying in the game stimulated the lacrimal gland, anger stimulated the amygdala, and all of these happened instantaneously in reality. Everyone eventually died of a seizure, including me.”
The middle-aged man’s facial expression remained fixed, as if his life and death had nothing to do with him. He then pressed a few more buttons on the control panel.
“The exit is here, the truth is also here. The choice is in your hands. To leave? Or to stay here and spend your life in eternity.”
“Is that even a question? The answer is obvious.” Jiang Chen laughed.
Without another word, George extended his hands in a “please” gesture, then stood aside.