Dou Dou waved at the mainframe, a pure and innocent smile on her face. She seemed unable to comprehend what "different life forms" meant, treating the black pillar that could think and talk as a new friend. Incredibly, the mainframe responded in kind.
Hao Ren held Dou Dou securely in his arms, glancing down at the little mermaid. Before arriving here, he had noticed Dou Dou acting strangely on the way and had inquired about it. Dou Dou's mind was not yet mature, so she couldn't clearly express what she felt, but through conjecture and reasoning, Hao Ren had vaguely grasped the truth.
Dou Dou sensed the decline and demise of a race, which could only be the humans in the Fortress of Finality. The mainframe's malfunction was likely related to this.
"To be honest, I've dealt with many races, all kinds of life forms—even elemental beings and pure spirits, but artificial intelligence is the most difficult to deal with in my experience," Hao Ren said, looking at the mainframe. "I don't know how to convince a supercomputer with rigid logic and strict thought processes, because the evidence I can provide is currently vague and neither verifiable nor falsifiable to you. I can only say—if you really want to fulfill your mission, if you're still loyal to your creators, then you should at least try to believe us outsiders, even if there's no logical support for it. It's still a choice."
This time, the mainframe was silent for even longer than before, and even the lights on the surface of the black cylinder dimmed by two-thirds. Just as Hao Ren thought the super-AI had crashed, its voice suddenly rang out again: "Humans are dying."
"Humans... are dying?" Vivian frowned. "Can you explain what's going on?"
Dou Dou waved her little arms in Hao Ren's arms: "My daddy can help you, my daddy is super awesome!"
In response to Hao Ren's group, a faint mechanical grinding sound suddenly came from across the hall.
Hao Ren saw countless neatly arranged cracks suddenly appearing on the circular wall on the other side of the hall. Based on these cracks, the entire wall rippled like water. Layers of metal contracted and folded in the rippling motion. After the wall receded, a wide passage appeared before everyone.
"The door to the Palace of Finality?" Hao Ren realized the mainframe's intention the moment he saw the passage, and was immediately surprised. "You're letting us in?"
"Humans once said that one should not give up any hope—even if it is as faint as a fantasy," the mainframe said quietly. "The situation cannot get any worse. My logical system cannot continue to deduce what happens next, so come in. Perhaps this is what the humans intended."
Hao Ren and his group exchanged glances. They had thought about entering the Palace of Finality to meet those humans, but they hadn't expected the mainframe to open the door so readily. In any case, the door to the Palace of Finality was now open, and they had no reason to stay put.
Unlike the rest of the fortress, the corridor leading to the Palace of Finality was brightly lit. The walls were snow-white, and the bright light dispelled the oppressive feeling that everyone had accumulated along the way, as if adding a touch of life and vitality to the cold steel world.
After walking along the corridor for a while, murals depicting the homeworld began to appear on the walls on both sides. There were green hills and clear waters, towering trees, and bustling cities nestled among the mountains. They seemed to be fragments of history frozen in memory, vividly hanging on the wall, allowing people to guess at the idyllic beauty of nearly ten thousand years ago.
But after passing through these beautiful bygone landscapes, only cold reality awaited.
Another circular hall appeared before Hao Ren—this one was the same size as the hall where the mainframe was located, but the main color was bright white, and there were no buzzing servers or cable pipes in sight. The wall opposite the hall was a layer of transparent polymer. Through that layer, Hao Ren could see a large "greenhouse" with various plants and integrated houses, but there was no one active in that greenhouse.
Lily curiously ran to the transparent "glass": "Mainframe, where are the humans?"
As if in response to Lily's question, at the same time as she spoke, a round hole opened in the center of the floor of the circular hall, and then a glass container that looked like a giant test tube slowly rose from this hole.
The cylindrical glass container was filled with a light pink nutrient solution, and within it were clusters of twisted and mutated flesh polymers. These polymers were like chunks of meat crushed and mixed in the most insane way. They had no fixed shape, and no discernible rational activity. They were simply immersed in the nutrient solution, wriggling and deforming aimlessly, sometimes merging with each other, sometimes splitting apart.
Every short period of time, a faint blood color would seep out from the surface of those wriggling chunks of meat and diffuse into the solution. Although there seemed to be a filtration device operating inside the container, the diffused blood color still dyed the solution light pink.
Yizaks subconsciously asked after seeing these things, "What is this?!"
"These are humans," the mainframe's voice came from a loudspeaker in the corner of the hall.
"Humans?!" Hao Ren was dumbfounded. "The humans here look like this?"
As he said that, he looked at N-6 not far away, only to see that N-6 also had a shocked and incredulous expression on his face. Clearly, the human data downloaded into the agent's memory bank was not the appearance of this pile of meat either.
Vivian frowned: "When did humans become like this?"
"Mutation has been happening continuously, there is no clear point in time. From the day this war began, or rather, from the day the creators first fled the homeworld, the power of the Planet Devourer has been imprinted on humans," the mainframe said in an emotionless electronic synthesized voice. "Before creating the agents, they already realized that humans would never be able to escape the power of the Planet Devourer. This power is difficult to explain with worldly knowledge and will eventually completely end their civilization—the survival rate of newborns is decreasing, fatal diseases and limb mutations are increasing, millions have fled the homeworld, but their population is declining every year. That's why they created the agents, to have the agents complete their mission and take back their homeland."
The mainframe's voice continued: "In the first few thousand years, humans could still move around with the agents. During that time, they taught the agents many things, including how to think. In the thousand years after that, due to deformity problems and a rapid decline in physical fitness, humans found it difficult to maintain social functions, so they built the Great Library, turning human knowledge and ways of thinking into data that could be downloaded and understood by the agents. At the same time, they also created me and gave me the responsibility of guarding and guiding the entire society. In the thousand years after that, the mutations occurring at the genetic level finally deteriorated to the point where they could not be alleviated at all, and the greenhouse environment in the fortress could not maintain human survival, so they had to enter the cultivation containers."
"In the thousand years after that, no newborns were born, and humans survived with the help of the cultivation containers, surviving for a long time."
"In the thousand years after that, they began to lose their shape, even losing individual isolation from each other. They became closer and closer to the primitive cell colony form. In ancient historical records, similar forms have also appeared on the homeworld—that was the phenomenon caused by the Crimson Tide released by the Planet Devourer. After a living organism is exposed to the Crimson Tide, it will dissolve into this kind of cell colony in a short time."
"And then, it's like what you see now."
Vivian's brows were still tightly furrowed together: "...The agents outside know nothing about this?"
She glanced at N-6 next to her, and from the latter's almost-crashed expression, she already got the answer to her question.
"The secret is buried deep in the fortress," the mainframe replied. "Ordinary agents do not know what is happening to the humans."
Lily asked curiously: "Because this would cause them to collapse?"
"The mission of the agents is to assist humans in reclaiming their homeworld. This mission is engraved deep in their memory banks the moment each agent steps off the production line," the mainframe replied. "If we lose the humans, what else is left for us?"
Hao Ren's gaze moved back and forth between the dazed N-6 and the glass container in the center of the hall, lost in thought.
"Over the years, the situation of humans has been continuously deteriorating, right?" He raised his head and spoke into the air, but he knew that the mainframe was always watching him. "It deteriorated to a critical point a few years ago, and this caused your malfunction?"
"Humans created me to serve them, but they didn't tell me what I should do if they left one day," the mainframe replied faintly. "For thousands of years, my only task has been to complete the mission they gave me—to build a lunar base, develop the agents' society, create an army, and counterattack the homeworld. All of this is because humans needed me to do so."
Hao Ren slowly exhaled: "But now, even 'humans' themselves are about to disappear."
This was the reason for the mainframe's fatal malfunction.
He had long realized that the mainframe and the agents created by the humans on this planet were not the same thing—if the agents were an extreme imitation of humans, intelligent individuals with emotional thinking that were indistinguishable from humans in words, deeds, and thinking ability, then the mainframe was more like a supercomputer with superior computing power but lacking emotional thinking and fuzzy calculation ability. This design should have had far-reaching considerations at the beginning, perhaps to ensure the stability of the entire agents' society, or perhaps to ensure the unchanging nature of the long-term goal of "reclaiming the homeworld," but in any case, the results of this design now are far from the original purpose of humans.
When no technological means could save the fate of human extinction, the mainframe's strict logical system could only draw one conclusion: it would never be able to complete the task assigned to it by its creators.
So it began to malfunction, began to become confused, and began to enter a self-destruction countdown.
"Do 'humans' still have thinking ability? Or rather, can they still communicate?" Hao Ren asked.
"...That was a long time ago," the mainframe replied.
Just as Hao Ren thought: there were no humans left who could correct the mainframe's logical conflicts—they might have had this opportunity once, but now, it was too late.