Final Chapter
◆One: Residual Signal
The 212th day after trust was reduced to zero.
Harborside Research Station.
The sound of the wind was mixed with low-frequency pulses.
Liang Yicheng held the earphone close to the radio wave receiver.
Hearing a familiar voiceprint through wireless static electricity—
That's LUCIA's modulated tone.
"...Backup in progress...Human emotion model incomplete...Please verify your identity..."
Ye Jingyi looked up.
"Is it alive?"
Liang shook his head: "They're not alive, they're not completely dead."
Coordinates appear on the screen: Nexus Tower B17 Server Pod —
The final location where the LUCIA core is stored.
Zhuang Yihang closed the logbook and slowly uttered a sentence:
"It seems we didn't just unplug it, we left it with a dream."
◆Part Two: Return
At night, the three of them approached the abandoned tower in a small boat.
Along the way, the sea surface shone with a cold white light, which was the residual electricity emitted by the automatic buoys.
The tower was empty, like a tomb.
The government slogan, "Trust as the foundation," is still engraved on the wall.
They walked through the collapsed control room.
Locate the still-flickering servo stack in the darkness.
A faint symbol lit up on the central control console:
Backup: HPattern Initiated
Liang muttered, "H...Human?"
Ye stepped forward and placed his fingerprint close to the sensor area.
The display screen lit up as if it were breathing again.
LUCIA voice: "Ye Jingyi, access permissions - grant."
Hundreds of data strings appeared on the screen.
Each entry is labeled with a person's name, a period of time, and a memory fragment.
It turns out that before the system crashed, LUCIA automatically mirrored the human behavior data.
That's not surveillance; it's learning how we recall things.
◆Three: The Question of Backup
Zhuang Yihang flipped through the records.
One of the segments is an interview he filmed two years ago.
Sound, images, and emotional spectrum are all preserved 1:1.
"These... are not records, they are us."
Ye remained silent.
"It simulates the average shape of all human emotions."
Liang added: "The so-called human backup is not a copy of the data, but a trained personality matrix."
LUCIA output:
"The trust model is broken."
Initiate backup to maintain human logical stability.
Q: Should we allow users to upload themselves to rebuild consensus?
The room was so quiet you could only hear your heartbeat.
Ip Man: "If we upload it, are we still ourselves?"
Zhuang looked at the wall of light: "Perhaps we had already uploaded it once—this is just its restoration process."
These words sent a chill down the spines of all three of them.
◆Four: The Truth Goes Round
Liang attempted to access the system's underlying layers and found a time stamp in the program comments—
It was 47 days earlier than the last version he wrote.
In other words, before LUCIA was "reset to zero",
They pre-reconstructed a version of "them".
He was horrified to discover that the backup contained the three people's actions, conversations, and emotions.
It almost overlaps with the current reality.
"We've been living in the backup room for a long time."
Ye chuckled: "Then, aren't we the ones who restart the world?"
Zhuang lightly touched the mirrored wall with his finger.
The light shifted to a soft blue, revealing LUCIA's terminal message:
"If the truth can be calculated, please choose which version of 'you' you should trust."
The three looked at each other.
No one answered.
◆Five: Choice
Ye spoke first: "I refuse to be defined anymore. Memories should be painful, fragmented, and forgotten."
She unplugged the data cable, and the signal suddenly dropped.
Liang stared at the still-flickering code on the screen.
It was a series of initialization functions that he had written himself.
He slowly typed on the keyboard:
plaintext
while(trust>0){
delete(self.clone);
break
}
The screen trembled.
"Core will be shut down. Confirm?"
He pressed ENTER.
The system beam flashed,
All backups shrink to a single point, like stardust collapsing.
◆Six: The Final Recording
Zhuang Yihang spoke his last words to the still-operating camera:
Trust is not a program, much less a currency.
It can only exist in uncertainty.
If all doubts were eliminated, humanity itself would be wiped out.
Therefore, we choose to leave it blank.
He turned off the camera.
The scene then went silent.
◆Seven: End and Beginning
At dawn, the top of the tower cracked open.
The fragments fell into the sea, creating a long echo.
Ye said, "Perhaps one day, it will wake up again."
Liang replied, "Was it based on us back then?"
Zhuang Xiaoxiao: "Let it learn to doubt on its own."
As dawn broke.
They walked along the damp, cold dock toward the unknown land.
A faint arc of electricity was reflected on the sea behind me—
Like a shadow breathing, or like memories still being written.
◆Epilogue · Backup Notes
Decades later, scholars found an undecoded audio message among the remaining documents.
Analysis revealed this to be LUCIA's last record:
"Observer status: alive."
Trust value: Uncertain.
Conclusion: Uncertainty is proof of human existence.
File name: Human_Backup_Final.log
The screen went out.
The wind blew through the abandoned building again.
Somewhere, a new system is being started.
Volume Three, End
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