Chapter 343 Extra Chapter: A Thousand Years Later (1)
In 2025 AD, the Third World War, which lasted for more than forty years, finally came to an end, and the world ushered in a new reconstruction.
Human civilization suffered nearly 90% loss in this catastrophe, and the old international order, national boundaries, and ideologies were completely wiped out in this great war.
The surviving humans, on the devastated ruins, established a completely new and unified global governance model—a "social system" equipped with a super artificial intelligence hub, which coordinates and allocates global resources, plans production and distribution, and manages the operation of society.
At this point, all labels that define humanity, such as nation and race, have become history. The gap between rich and poor and class privileges have completely disappeared. Everyone has absolute fairness: a fair starting point in life, fair allocation of resources, fair educational opportunities, fair job assignments, and even a fair arrangement for the end of life.
In this era of highly advanced gene editing and biomedicine, the average human lifespan has been steadily extended to two hundred years.
All new life no longer originates from natural sexual union, but is born in standardized life-nurturing centers by a "social system" that selects the optimal combination from a vast gene pool.
These newborns are raised and educated by the "social system" from the moment they leave the incubation chamber until they reach the legal age of twenty.
Upon reaching adulthood, the "social system" matches each individual with the most suitable social roles and professional positions based on their genetic potential and psychological traits, ensuring a perfect match between individual value and social needs.
From age twenty to one hundred and fifty, it is everyone's "social service period".
During this long period of youth, everyone will be part of the intricate gears of the "social system," performing their respective duties and continuously participating in the maintenance and development of civilization.
When individuals enter the last fifty years of their lives, they will no longer need to engage in any social labor. Instead, they will all enter a retirement community with a constant temperature and humidity, real-time online medical care, and comprehensive entertainment facilities to spend the rest of their lives.
The advanced technology has completely liberated human labor.
Today, machines and artificial intelligence account for more than 99% of material production and basic labor.
From grain cultivation and industrial manufacturing to logistics and public services, everything is completed automatically by intelligent equipment.
Humanity has been freed from repetitive physical and mental labor, and has instead taken on the responsibility of maintaining and upgrading these machines and artificial intelligence systems themselves, or has devoted itself to spiritual creation fields such as culture, art, and philosophy, which machines cannot yet fully replace, in order to sustain the progress of civilization.
Thanks to the ultimate liberation of productivity, people's "work" has been redefined.
Current social rules stipulate that each person only needs to work 60 working days per year, and each working day only requires four hours of work.
The remaining time is entirely at the individual's disposal.
However, this society with a total population of less than 100 million has created far more wealth than any other period in history combined.
Therefore, everyone is born with an inexhaustible wealth that can satisfy their material, entertainment, and spiritual needs instantly and easily.
Today, gender still exists as a biological characteristic, but the traditional gender division of labor has long since disappeared.
Because the traditional core functions of the family, such as childbirth, raising children, and caring for the elderly, have been completely taken over by the "social system," concepts such as love, marriage, and family have gradually become dispensable under the new social structure.
Even the concepts of "beauty and ugliness" based on subjective aesthetics have become blurred and irrelevant due to genetic optimization and the trend of depersonalization.
As emotional connections between people gradually break down, various kinds of bionic robots have emerged to address the needs for emotional companionship in order to satisfy physiological desires.
Zero is one of the engineers responsible for designing these bionic robots.
She is 62 years old this year, in the prime of her life.
She is currently on a three-month leave of absence.
As usual, she was supposed to go to a picturesque, fully automated resort island near the equator with constant temperature and humidity to enjoy the "winter" sunshine, or head to a smart ice and snow resort in Siberia to watch the aurora borealis.
This time, however, Zero rejected all the system's recommended itineraries and stayed alone in her suspended apartment high above the city.
In a society where all needs can be met instantly and all desires can be easily fulfilled, Zero often feels that his own needs and desires have completely degenerated, and his life has fallen into a period of confusion and emptiness.
Sometimes, after completing another round of optimization of the bionic robot's emotional feedback algorithm, she would even feel confused: Is she a human being with flesh and blood, or a biological robot that has been implanted with "human consciousness" and designed and made by "her" own hands?
Until one day, she received a package that had traveled across the ocean.
The sender information section of the package simply lists a name and a set of identification codes.
A name that exists in her genetic profile, her biological "mother".
The package contained only an old-fashioned solid-state drive that had been discontinued for many years.
This type of storage medium was rendered obsolete by quantum storage technology fifty years ago and now exists only in display cases in museums of civilization.
Attached is an electronic document: "The attached document is the information carrier designated by the sender, which is hereby transferred to you in accordance with Article 9 of the Information Inheritance Law. Access to the information carrier has been activated. Please check your inbox."
In this highly ordered era, after an individual passes away, all valuable material wealth under their name will be uniformly collected and redistributed by the social system.
Only information assets can be designated by the parties involved to be inherited by a specific person.
Zero imports the contents of the hard drive into the virtual display screen.
It turns out that these were archaeological research materials from her "mother," a historian and archaeologist.
The subject of her research was none other than the first female emperor in ancient Chinese history, Emperor Zhaosheng, Li Yuanzhao, whom she had learned about in history books.
The "mother" wrote in the document that, according to genetic comparison, we and this Emperor Zhaosheng share a common maternal ancestor and are descendants of the same mother from more than a thousand years ago.
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