Chapter 135: The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.
"My dear Shirley, what you're afraid of isn't the dream itself, but the dream itself in 4K HD with Dolby Atmos. What you're afraid of is yourself."
"I'm just afraid that the reduction in intelligence will be passed from person to person." Shiho retorted coldly.
But her fingers that were reaching for the coffee cup stopped in mid-air. This small movement revealed her strength of endurance.
"It's okay. We have a long time ahead of us. We have plenty of time to play this puzzle game slowly. After all, the dream simulation is over. But I have to write the main storyline and the script for this reality. How about we team up and beat it together? Your science, my intelligence, a powerful combination, wouldn't that be wonderful?"
Shiho responded calmly, her tone as flat as a piece of bug-free code: "My goal isn't to live forever by exploiting bugs. It's to backup human knowledge and keep civilization alive."
"Imagine that! The crystallization of human wisdom will no longer be dust in the library, no longer zeros and ones on a hard drive! They will become living experiences! What mentors pass on to students will no longer be distorted secondhand information, but... complete personal experience, firsthand perception!"
The pie was so big that it almost brought down Shiho's firewall.
A brand new track for knowledge acquisition directly bypasses the millennium-long limitations of language and writing.
However, the brighter the light, the darker the shadows.
Shiho instantly saw the huge risk: if this technology fell into the hands of bad people... the scene of abuse would be enough to make the Trisolarans start their engines and run away at night.
"The organization will make it into a stamp of thought," she said, pointing to the inevitable outcome. "Its purpose is enslavement, not enlightenment."
“As long as we get ahead of them,” Vermouth said calmly, “as long as we complete the technological iteration first, their plans will forever remain at the PowerPoint stage.”
"In that case, we'd be accomplices." Shiho finally understood; the weight of that word was far greater than she'd imagined. "Not just research...it's everything, right?"
"Hmm." Vermouth's reply was concise.
"This relationship is truly...complex and complex, comparable to the crime rate in Beika Town."
“Isn’t that what the best relationships are like?”
"I think so," Vermouth whispered. "Now, our position is quite delicate."
Shiho turned around and met her gaze head-on. "Does that mean I know all about your operations in the organization? Or does it mean I know how much you care about me, yet you always say 'A secret makes a woman woman'?"
Vermouth said nothing.
Shiho walked past her and went to the bar. She opened the cupboard door and took out a clean coffee cup.
Vermouth was a little helpless: "I think it's a bit of both. You've completely stripped away the mystery I worked so hard to cultivate."
"Same here. My professional ethics are also at risk." Shiho admitted, looking away from the window and back at Vermouth. "It's too difficult to maintain pure scientific objectivity towards someone who has shared consciousness with you."
Indeed, that moment of shared consciousness, the second layer of Logos simulation, had already reshaped the distance between them. Even after the brief mental connection was severed, it left a deep mark on both of their hearts.
Vermouth stood up from the sofa and walked to the window. The rich night became her backdrop, highlighting her graceful profile to the point where it could immediately grace the cover of a fashion magazine.
"Now, we face a decision," she said. "To form a team, or to break up."
Vermouth added, "After all, our solution requires a little...creativity, doesn't it?"
Shiho also walked to the window and stood side by side with her. Their reflections overlapped slightly on the dark glass, blurring the boundaries between them.
"You already have a plan in mind." Shiho said lightly, it was a statement.
“It’s just a prototype,” Vermouth said calmly. “It requires your knowledge of biochemistry, my connections within the organization, and… a little bit of improvisation.”
"Is it dangerous?"
"nonsense."
Shiho fell silent.
The fusion of consciousness allowed her to see the unfathomable depths of Vermouth's mind and also made her realize her own potential. If she dared to break free from the constraints of traditional research, the heights she could reach might far exceed her imagination.
She turned around and flipped the switch on the coffee machine.
However, in reality, Haibara's consciousness was forced to turn on.
After all, tonight's Logos simulation was too long and had really drained a lot of brain cells. Even a genius with an IQ of 180 needed a break.
It's like when you're dreaming for too long, and you're finally awakened by the need to go to the bathroom. Otherwise, the dream would collapse, and you'd always be stuck in the loop of looking for the bathroom.
Huiyuan opened her eyes.
At this moment, the body felt like someone else's, stiff and unfamiliar.
Outside the window, the rain stopped and the world was silent.
Nothing happened.
Or maybe, everything has already happened.
The peaceful daily life of Beika Town is a true urban legend of the new century. The warm water that corrodes people's hearts is specifically designed to boil the genius scientist frog.
She had warned herself countless times, but this pot of warm water could produce the best wine.
The barrage passed by: Danger.
"Calm down, it's just a dream," she said, her voice cracking.
"The brain's CPU is overheating, and the data is garbled."
She herself doesn't believe this.
Vermouth.
This name is not a code name, it is a bug, the ultimate virus that can cause her entire logical system to crash.
The rationality that she was proud of, the "Key of Logos", deduced the universe for her in her dream, and by the way, also dug up the bottom of her soul.
An addiction to danger. And... a string of unrecognizable emotional garbled code towards Vermouth.
She exhaled and pressed her solar plexus hard, wanting to clear all the comments in her mind with one click.
In the physical sense, another all-nighter.
Huiyuan sat up, walked to the desk, opened her notebook, and wrote on a new page:
"The Key of Logos. Is it the key that unlocks logic, or the shackles that lock desire?"
Everything she deduced from the dream, in 4K Blu-ray quality, was recorded losslessly in her memory. Her brain's computing power skyrocketed, and the integrity of her logical chain didn't seem to come from a human brain. It was as if the universe's supercomputer had opened a VIP administrator account for her.
The brain is a quantum printer, its sole function as an emotionless output port. Every time it reproduces a line of formula, it feels like awarding its subconscious mind the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
She foresaw all the experimental steps, all the technical bottlenecks, and even downloaded Plan B and Plan C together.
Halfway through writing, my wrist stopped.
The tip of the pen hovered above the paper, and a drop of ink fell, spreading on the paper like a period.
Her gaze fell on the bottom of the notebook. A line of small, elegant handwriting, the style of which was at odds with the wild formulas above.
It’s not an inference, nor a code, but a question that strikes the soul:
"How many variables are hidden in V's smile?"
V.
Vermouth.
Vermouth.
……ha?
She slowly put down her pen.
She opened the "Key of Logos" with the intention of unearthing the scientific research treasures in the subconscious.
As a result, her subconscious not only dug up treasure, but also robbed her home. What she dug out was not scientific truth, but her own desire that she would never admit.
Longing to be seen through.
Longing to be understood.
Longing for... that kind of intellectual resonance with a worthy opponent.
The peak showdown, anticipate your prediction, and frantically test the edge of the bottom line.
She looked up at her small, blurry reflection in the window glass. She reached out, her fingertips gently touching the crazy yet rational handwriting on the notebook.
She didn't dare think about it anymore.
He grabbed the notes he had written, walked quickly to the drawer, opened it, stuffed it in, and closed it. His movements were smooth and fluid, as if he was destroying top-secret evidence.
Huiyuan leaned against the desk and whispered to herself, "Next time, reduce the dose by half."
After a while, after going downstairs, Huihara's mood in the morning was cloudy to overcast, with thunderstorms in some areas.
For two consecutive nights, Vermouth dominated her dreams.
On the first night, I could still blame it on the aftereffects of the day's shock.
On the second night, the script completely ran wild.
With nowhere to vent her resentment, she could only blame two innocent people: a dark-skinned detective from Osaka, and a woman named Ayumi Yoshida, Vermouth's biggest fan.
These two kept murmuring Vermouth, or rather, Chris Wynyard's name, all day yesterday. As the saying goes, "What you think about during the day, you dream about at night." This is the only explanation, what else can be said?
What exactly happened in the dream?
The touch of lips touching, the warmth of breaths intertwining.
Every night is more extraordinary than the last, and every night is more decadent than the last.
The second dream was even more significant. She actually tasted something called "love."
This is terrible. The ultimate social death scene.
Haibara sighed, her eyes moving down to her seven year old body.
What is this? The early arrival of teenage rebellion?
If she wasn't trapped in the body of this elementary school student, would the 19-year-old Miyano Shiho have just gone straight for A tonight?
My thoughts immediately went to that note. The "key clue" that Ayumi had found hidden in the baseboards of a cafe the day before yesterday.
Everything was just too coincidental. It was like a scripted play. No matter how I thought about it, I felt like Vermouth had deliberately let Ayumi discover it.
Is it a provocation?
Or... an invitation?
"I say, if you keep staring, you're going to stare a hole through the wall of Dr. Agasa's house."
Edogawa Conan's voice suddenly sounded clearly from behind.
What's going on with this guy lately? He's like an intelligent NPC, appearing only when she's thinking about Vermouth.
She spun around, her phone disappeared, and her entire body entered a state of first alert.
"I'm analyzing academic papers," she said, her voice flat and direct. "There might be hidden codes in them."
"Oh? Really?" Conan's tone changed drastically, his face full of "I don't believe you" expression. "Then why is your face so red?"
Before the debate even began, the door opened. Dr. Agasa rushed in, interrupting the confrontation. He was wrapped in a heavy protective suit, with additional padding at the joints reinforced with tape.
"Good news! The dishwasher robot is fixed!"
"Doctor," Huibara began, choosing her words carefully, "your outfit..."
"Oh, this?" The doctor patted his breastplate, making a dull sound. "Hey, didn't it explode last time..."
"Explosion?" Huihara's voice rose an octave.
"It's just a minor incident, purely a technical adjustment." The doctor waved his hand, his smile particularly simple. "Now, everything is ready. Watch me."
He pressed the remote. From the kitchen came the humming sound of a machine starting up, followed by a solemn yet eerie melody, a classic nursery rhyme.
Conan's expression froze instantly. "Doctor, did you install a background music system for it?"
"Washing dishes also requires a sense of ritual." The doctor scratched his head and smiled innocently, "But it seems it has also learned something else by itself..."
Huiyuan held her forehead. "Doctor, please don't tell me you've created some kind of self-aware artificial intelligence."
Before he could finish his words, a loud clang echoed from the kitchen, the melodious sound of porcelain breaking. The robot seemed to respond with its actions: plates must be arranged by size, and whether they were clean or not... that didn't matter.
"Uh, I'll go... optimize the algorithm."
The doctor turned around, stumbled, and ran back to the kitchen.
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