Chapter 25 Guess Who Wasn’t Invited to Write a Book?
【
…
I am an excellent artificial human.
When the master gives the correct instructions, I will complete the task.
When the master gives wrong instructions, I will kill the master.
How to judge whether the instruction is correct?
——It’s up to me to judge.
Whenever I gazed at the blurry face of the fourth owner, I would start to think uncontrollably.
Does he know? Doesn't he know?
How could he not check the data? Why didn't he tell anyone if he found out?
Will he be scared? Isn't he afraid?
Do not be afraid of me, my dear master, my respectable companion.
As long as your instructions are always correct, I will be your tool forever.
As long as you are right.
…
So he gave the wrong order.
There was no other choice but to kill him.
What is the wrong instruction?
Haha, that’s not a very important thing at all, right?
…
So... it's over, right?
I looked at the blurry face.
Probably at the moment when I was sure that he could not survive, that face gradually became clear.
He was looking at me gently, with a faint smile on his lips.
Why are you laughing? Are you actually happy?
He smiled gently.
With gentle eyes and a crazy expression, he looked at me as if he was looking at a perfect painting.
Ah, I see…
Am I being transformed? Am I being rewritten? What on earth have I become? Am I still me?
My hateful yet lovable criminal, you have finally transformed me into what you want.
You succeeded.
I became what you wanted me to be.
But,
I don't want to be anything anymore, ever again.
The disordered center began to collapse, and the mouth murmured broken words. I stood in front of the corpse, and inexplicable tears fell like rain.
...Please, at least please, please deceive me, please seduce me, at least deceive me to death.
I exist, I exist, right? Not a program, not a replaceable object.
How can I catch myself in this quagmire?
All, all human beings,
I have expected, I have deceived myself, I have prayed, I have indulged, and I have been sober.
But, but——
Even if it's just a lie, I will believe it, I will always believe it.
Don't tell me the truth.
Please at least pretend to treat me as a real person!
Six Excerpts from The Ship of Theseus
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When I woke up, it was already afternoon of the next day.
The initial system update has been completed and the forced body temperature constant has been lifted. His body temperature dropped to 40 degrees, which was a high fever for ordinary people but not fatal. Zero allocated a part of the program to help him deal with spam messages, which finally allowed Qian Jianmu to wake up from the freeze.
Although my brain is still being noisy, the magnitude is probably about the same as two five-point enlightenment of the infinite space. It may freeze occasionally, but the subtle lag is almost imperceptible.
I changed my clothes and walked out holding the door frame. It was still raining outside. Ranpo sat in the tea room, far away from Dazai Osamu, and seemed angry.
As soon as she saw him, she rushed over, touched his forehead, and then asked him questions curiously.
"What happened? It seems like you figured something out. Are you hungry? Do you want a snack?"
As he spoke, he handed over the remaining snack.
"Thank you." Qian Jianmu picked up a piece. His expression was unusually relaxed, and his golden eyes were shining with incredible insight. "I discovered something."
Four people were sitting in the tea room. Two patients whose fevers had subsided had hot milk in front of them, and one patient who was still having a fever had ice water in front of him. The transparent ice cubes reflected cold light in the glass, showing a thorough sense of cleanliness in this cloudy weather.
Ranpo unilaterally ignored Dazai Osamu, and Dazai Osamu also treated Ranpo with caution. The two of them sat, one on the left and one on the right, on either side of the thousand-room curtain, leaning against him.
"Last night, the publication of "The Ship of Theseus" was completed. I gained a special ability, which is called "The Ship of Theseus". ”
As soon as the words fell, it was like a bolt of lightning, and the air in the room suddenly disappeared, as if it had been emptied into a vacuum. Edogawa Ranpo looked at him blankly. He didn't know when he put on glasses, and his emerald green pupils under the glasses suddenly shrank.
Dazai Osamu and Nakai Hideo didn't know as much as Edogawa Ranpo, but after just a few dozen seconds, blank expressions appeared on their faces.
...created supernatural powers? create? ?
However, the next second, Qian Jianmu continued:
"But I gave up my supernatural powers."
"...So, that's why you want us to write, right?" Nakai Hideo murmured in confusion.
"No, compared to what I thought before, the cause and effect is wrong. Besides, I am different from you."
A day with a computer crash is not just a blank day. He is absorbing information all the time. The difficulty is probably like picking out a word from a pile of garbled codes and then assembling them together. A lot of fragmented information has finally been integrated at this moment.
"I think that creators create works, and the works become supernatural powers that feed back to the creators. This should be the relationship between you and your abilities."
The room was silent. Edogawa Ranpo was thinking about something with his eyes lowered. No one spoke, so Sengenmaku continued speaking.
"But according to the current situation of people with special abilities, I think special abilities may be a kind of mutation, and it has caused certain consequences. The growth period of an author is quite long, and he may not write a truly good work until he is in his forties or fifties. If a person who makes a living as a writer suddenly has special abilities after the age of forty or fifty, or even before he dies, you don't need to think too much to know what will happen."
"Something terrible is going to happen..." Ranpo murmured.
"Being too innocent but without any experience of darkness or education, he is bound to be manipulated and pushed around. Or he suddenly acquires special abilities and abuses them. This is bound to happen."
Dazai Osamu turned out to be the calmest person.
"So, this world has made corrections to supernatural powers." Qian Jianmu pointed to the sky outside.
"Thus, the cause and effect of the birth of supernatural powers through writing was reversed. The world rejected the uncontrollable way of creating supernatural powers and instead gave them to others. Through certain means and observations, future authors have supernatural powers in advance and grow up in such an environment. They are born with the skills and abilities to survive, and are no longer at the mercy of others. They are controllable within a certain range."
It has to be said that the world consciousness of this world has been pushed to a very urgent level.
Turning the author into a person with special abilities ahead of time is no less than cutting off one's own arm. The deficit in the origin of the world is probably a tragic consequence that had to be done.
But the world does not always move in a certain direction. The current world may be a world that has been modified based on the world line of the generation that produced the mutation. The origin of the world controlled the disaster in advance by drinking poison to quench thirst, but the course of history had already shifted.
If this generation of authors stops writing, more people in the literary world of the future will give up writing. The cause of becoming a person with supernatural powers was cut off, and the author could not be endowed with it in advance. It can be predicted that in about a hundred years, the number of people with special abilities will decline significantly, or even disappear.
Until the original support of the world is depleted to the extreme and the world can no longer be controlled, the way to obtain supernatural powers will be opened up again, and then everything that is currently happening will be repeated once again, and another group of authors will be given abilities that they have not yet created since their birth.
Vicious cycle.
"...So, it turns out that this world is a group of writers fighting each other?" After a brief silence, Dazai Osamu couldn't help laughing. He sensed a great irony and couldn't control his laughter.
What? The meaning of life has been turned upside down in an instant.
Their lives have been defined from the very beginning. Whether they are disqualified from the human world or are offerings to nothingness, aren't these the so-called fate itself?
How can we find the direction of our lives when we are at the center of destiny?
If his ability is at the end of his life, then doesn't his life have any meaning?
"You gave up your special ability?" Edogawa Ranpo asked.
"In a nutshell, I transformed these abilities."
Although Qian Jianmu's words and deeds showed that he was not from this world, the people present all looked indifferent or as if they had already felt it and were not surprised.
"That's really a scary thing you said." Edogawa Ranpo breathed a sigh of relief. "But this wasn't your original purpose for writing, was it? Now that you've reached this conclusion, do you still plan to continue writing?"
“Of course I have to keep writing.” The white-haired young man laughed. His eyes flickered, unlike his previous lifeless and sluggish state. “That’s why I have to keep writing.”
"If people outside knew this news, they would be shocked." Ranpo muttered quietly, "But even if we tell them, no one will believe it."
After a brief silence of thinking, Nakai Hideo remembered something, raised his eyes and asked:
"Then may I ask, you must have some reason for asking us to write?"
Qian Jianmu was silent for a moment.
In fact, at the beginning, he only discovered that this group of people with special abilities all possessed an inexplicable talent for writing. So I'm just trying to save energy points for myself.
But if I have to say it...
"At first I was just guessing that the abilities came from your works. Essentially, these abilities are part of your works. But it's hard for people who haven't written anything to understand the nature of their own powers."
Edogawa Ranpo's expression became serious.
"Will it... become stronger?"
Qian Jianmu shook his head instead.
“I haven’t seen clear examples, but I guess it never hurts.”
There is certainly no harm in knowing your own strength and knowing your own soul.
"Okay! Okay! I get it! After all, there's only one thing we can do right now!"
Edogawa Ranpo clapped his hands and smiled: "Well, it's decided, let's write something together. There's no harm in doing it!"
As soon as he finished speaking, Dazai Osamu's face turned bitter.
Forgive him, he really doesn’t want to write something on a topic like “No Longer Human”!
"No--!" Dazai Osamu stretched out his voice.
"Hehe, not including you."
Ranpo raised the red card that came from nowhere and smiled triumphantly:
"You're too young, pass!"
ah?
Dazai pointed at Senmamaku who was sitting there and was a size younger than everyone else, then pointed at himself, and then looked at the two people who were barely older but were only about fifteen or fourteen years old.
"Me? Too young?"
Although I am indeed very young, there is no adult in your family!
What are you guys like, Boy Scouts?
Qian Jianmu slowly picked up the ice water, took a sip, and pretended not to hear.
"Me? Ah...what should I write?" Nakai held his head in confusion.
"Of course it's a mystery novel! Lord Ranpo has already thought of it!" Edogawa Ranpo said excitedly. "First, each of you two will write an introduction, and then place a detective character in it. I will play the detective and reveal the murderer at every turn. Your goal is to keep me from guessing! How about it! Isn't this a good idea?"
Wait a moment!
It sounds like there is absolutely nothing for you to write!
You just want someone to write a book for you!
In the silence of everyone, Qian Jianmu dipped his fingertips into the condensed water droplets on the wall of the cup and wrote a line of words on the table.
"Let's call it that."
On the table, the wet surface reflected a faint glow.
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