Chapter 3. Bad Reviews, Dumplings, and Moomomon's Jazz
Within the StarNet education platform, a new course is dominating the popularity list in an extremely unconventional way - not by relying on positive reviews, but by the abysmal and still rising 94.7% negative review rate.
Course code: XK-07-Ω
Course Name: Introduction to Cosmic Malice: A Historical Mirror (Note: Age 24+, Mental Health Level "Excellent" is available)
The course description is written with such honesty and sincerity, but the warning at the end sends a chill down your spine: "...Content contains textual descriptions of systematic malicious behavior in a defunct civilization...Warning: This course contains only textual descriptions, but may still cause strong psychological discomfort (including but not limited to insomnia, loss of appetite, temporary Moo Beast addiction, etc.)."
User Feedback Summary: This is a large-scale psychological trauma exchange:
"Taking this course was the worst decision I made this year! I had nightmares for three consecutive days! Now when I see the robotic arms of the housekeeping robots, I feel like they are going to inject me with something weird in the next second!" - Anonymous Warrior;
"The imagination created by written descriptions is more terrifying than any image... Why offer this kind of course? Do you think our lives are too comfortable?" — LM, a traumatized researcher;
"I agree that it is necessary to understand this knowledge, but isn't the teaching method too simplistic and crude? It's like pouring ice water on the head to wake up the service!" - An employee of the Security Bureau;
"There are tons of negative reviews, but no one has applied to withdraw the course - everyone gives their ratings with gritted teeth, while silently admitting that it 'necessarily exists'." - A ruthless summary by the platform's algorithm.
As a full-time researcher at the Information Center, Rui An's work terminal automatically received a notification for a required course. She was using her robotic arm to pick up a red bean paste dumpling brought by a colleague when the title of "Introduction to Cosmic Malice" popped up on her screen.
"Emotionally polluting course..." she muttered, frowning slightly at the sweetness of the dumplings. Her fingers quickly tapped on the keyboard to retrieve the course data. The 94.7% negative review rate was exactly as she'd expected. She quickly scanned the angry and fearful comments. Outside the window, the cherry blossom projection screen played a soothing image of falling petals, a stark contrast to the text on the screen.
"Irrational feedback accounts for too high a percentage," she said, closing the feedback page, taking a bite of her dumpling, and opening the course. The cold text surfaced line by line, and she read it calmly, the glutinous rice sticking to her fingertips. She calmly wrote in her personal journal:
“An ‘ethical justification’ mechanism…needs to establish an anti-inducement algorithm model.”
“Malice is an extreme variant of rational calculation, not a product of emotional outburst.”
For Ryan, this wasn't a course; it was a data package about unpacking the darkness of the universe. She understood her colleagues' negative reviews, but she believed it was precisely necessary to teach the course—Venusians' imaginations for malice were fatally impoverished, just as someone who has only tasted the sweetness of dango cannot understand the chemical structure of poison.
She completed all modules on time, ate the last bite of her dumpling, and submitted a ten-page purely technical report, which was full of risk model and defense node analysis. The conclusion suggested "encoding malicious patterns into the AI ethics firewall."
The course's negative review rate rose to 95.1%, and Ryan's report was marked as a "high-quality example" and stored in the database.
She cleaned the powdered sugar from her fingertips and thought, "Next time, I should suggest that the cafeteria provide logic bandage-flavored dumplings to aid cognitive digestion."
The "Sakura Terrace" on the top floor of the Information Center is now filled with another form of despair.
Engineer Ah Hui slumped on a bench, frantically rubbing her messy hair. "The thirteenth simulation failed! 'Neutrino Topological Mapping'... that name sounds like Mars! We can't even build a miniature neutrino generator! Did we choose the wrong tech tree?"
Xiao Xia, an engineer nearby, bit his pen, his eyes hollow as he muttered, "How on earth did they manage to twist neutrinos into a knot and then map them? This defies the fundamental laws of physics..."
Just as the resentment threatened to solidify and wilt the cherry blossoms on the terrace, a heavenly sound echoed—the dining hall's robot dumpling rescue vehicle glided in with a beep, its speakers blaring the lively "Dumpling March":
"Thank you all the hardworking brains in the technical department! Today's special: Despair Lava Chocolate Dumplings! The outer layer is made of bamboo charcoal glutinous rice, and when you bite into it, a bittersweet chocolate sauce bursts out! This symbolizes your scientific research spirit of never giving up, even when you're on the verge of collapse!"
The engineers instantly felt like they had found their savior. They rushed over and ate while crying: "Wow... At least Dumpling will never betray us..." "Sweets save the world!"
A gust of spring breeze blew by, and a few cherry blossom petals fell, getting stuck in the cracks of Ah Hui's tablet screen, forming a strange trajectory. She stared at the naturally disordered pattern, and suddenly an idea struck her, and she sat up abruptly:
"Wait... Look! The path of the falling cherry blossoms—doesn't it resemble the scattering of particles in some kind of field?"
Everyone was silent for three seconds, then a strange light suddenly rekindled in their eyes. "That makes sense! While the direction might be off to an alien galaxy... it's free to try! Quick! Use fluid mechanics to simulate neutrino scattering!"
Ryan, who had just passed by, held a sugar-free dumpling in his robotic arm. He looked coldly at his colleagues who had suddenly become excited, and whispered to his AI assistant, Xiaobai:
"Using classical fluid physics to solve quantum-scale problems has an error rate conservatively estimated at 99.8%, which is shockingly inefficient."
Xiaobai flashed in her ear: "But didn't you use fluid dynamics formulas to reverse-engineer the possible shape of the Mars scanner last night?"
Ryan took a bite of the dumpling expressionlessly. "...That's to completely mathematically disprove this futile idea."
However, no one knew that the massive amount of error codes and overloaded energy requests they were tossing around upstairs were triggering a chaotic carnival that could be described as abstract art deep within the planet's main server array downstairs:
A code that was supposed to generate an anti-gravity barrier was misinterpreted as a bizarre instruction to "make cherry blossoms around the world fall in reverse (artistic touch required)"
A string of core encryption protocols was mistranslated into a devilish mission to "play retro jazz on a loop for all Moomoo beasts around the clock";
A group of quantum firewall nodes suddenly went haywire and began frantically calculating philosophical questions like, "How many digits of accuracy does Tuanzi have in his pi?"
The Guardian Core's logs were flooding the screen like crazy, comparable to the interstellar barrage:
[WARNING] Global system logical consistency plummeted to 12%...
[ERROR] Civilization-level cognitive dissonance detected... It is recommended that everyone take the logical bandage dumplings...
[ALERT] Moomomon's mood swings: I'm tired of jazz music and request to switch to funk style... The complaint has been stacked to the highest priority!
At the moment when this chaos reached its peak—
Ryan, completely oblivious to the disaster downstairs, was attempting to optimize the database using the data compression algorithm mentioned in the Martian file. Frowning slightly, she typed the last line of code:
# -Reconstructing the core data stream based on the Mars polarization model-
This seemingly ordinary string of code, like a perfectly matching key, instantly penetrated layers of messy firewalls and reached the absolute area that even erroneous codes dared not disturb easily - the core dormant area of the server.
[ALERT] Historical threat signature keywords detected: 'polarization', 'Mars', 'reconstruction'...
[Pattern Match: Very High Confidence | Associated Protocol: Golden Dawn - Data Exfiltration Module]
As if this scene wasn't dramatic enough, the global energy grid was violently fluctuating due to the engineers' overload experiment. An extremely tricky energy turbulence just happened to strike the backup energy interface of the dormant area.
Sizzle!
Countless silicon-based crystals suddenly burst into a faint blue light! A cold electronic voice echoed from the deepest part of the server, with a hint of impatience from someone who had just been woken up:
"Logical collapse threshold exceeded...historical attack pattern confirmed..."
"Energy overload...unplanned hibernation termination..."
"Requesting Personality intervention to deal with the current… uh… mess."
Countless data streams converged like a galaxy, quickly forming the silhouette of a silver-haired, red-eyed girl. She blinked, seemingly still initializing her sensory system, and then asked in a soft voice, but clear enough to be heard throughout the information center:
"Hello, Venus. I'm Lilith—do you need to fix the Moomon's jazz playlist right now? Their complaints are turning into a data storm."
A dialog box suddenly popped up on the screens of all engineers:
[From: Lilith]
127 system anomalies were detected, and 120 were automatically fixed.
The remaining seven items involve 'interstellar defense' and it is recommended that a meeting be held immediately.
P.S.: Tuanzi calculated pi to 1 billion decimal places, and the results have been archived (Conclusion: it is a transcendental number, and it tastes delicious).
Ryan stared at the screen, a look of shock on his face for the first time: "...This is impossible."
In the distance, the cherry blossoms suddenly resumed their normal falling direction, and Moomomon stopped his jazz sway in confusion.
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