Chapter 01
CHAPTER ONE
The moment the alloy hatch initiated, the low-frequency hydraulics emitted a faint hiss — the sound of some abyssal leviathan having a layer of skin peeled back in its sleep, slowly exposing the breathing cavity beneath. Vapor surged outward on the thermal differential, blanketing the chamber within a single second, as though the intelligent system had deliberately staged this visual protocol of transitional reverence — the Suspended should not be restored from their death-still silence with the clean snap of a switch. The return must be slow: a gradual restitution of memory, affect, personality, and every social bond still tethered to the body.
The silhouette shrouded in white mist materialized by degrees — from an ambiguously humanoid contour to the instant skin began producing recognizable reflections of light. Only then was the overwrite of who he was complete.
Li Jin.
Yes. It was him. Gene-lock had preserved him in a state of youth — a near-eternal freeze of young adulthood so seamless it looked almost manufactured, and for that very reason resembled less a person than a symbol. Something belonging not to time, but to a serial number.
I felt no significant fluctuation within myself. But I knew: this name once bore the scars of an era and the stamps of fate. I had witnessed firsthand how he squandered what little goodness and rationality he possessed throughout the old age. I had also seen him collapse into wretched sobbing during his Preliminary Audit, shattered by the torrent of suffering-fragments that erupted across his mind. And now he stood before me again, wearing that same slight daze he always had upon opening his eyes.
“Zhang Yang!” His voice carried the characteristic rasp of fresh revival, but those two syllables leapt out like a drifting anchor finally seizing its coordinates — a shape snapping into fixity. “I’m so glad! You’re the one who woke me this time!”
Happiness arrived too suddenly. Even though he was no longer the bewildered legacy human he’d once been, he couldn’t help the helplessness — his expression instantly overflowing with undisguised joy.
I had seen the instinctive reactions of countless Suspended at the moment of revival, but Li Jin was different. What surged in his eyes was not merely the excitement of recognizing a familiar face. It was the craving to be needed again — a frantic, almost panicked confirmation that his existence still had value, as though his entire self-definition hung on precisely that thread.
The corner of my mouth moved, barely — a retroactive accommodation of his emotion. “Come on. You’ve only authorized a handful of people to wake you. Who among them would you not be glad to see?”
Li Jin shook his head. He had already risen to a sitting position in the suspension pod, his body exhibiting zero latency. Current suspension technology had fully eliminated systemic decay in muscle memory; the moment one opened their eyes, the body slotted back into place as naturally as stepping into a new shell. This lent an additional gravity to the seriousness on his face. “It’s not the same. When others wake me, it’s small talk — a welfare check to confirm I haven’t ‘died’ inside the system. But you —” He paused for one second. The joy on his face transmuted into something deeper, more urgent. “Only when you wake me does it mean — I finally have work again. Right?”
I gave a single nod. No words needed, no preconditions, no auxiliary apparatus. My consciousness and the superintelligent core to which I was deeply bonded had already completed linkage and confirmation within the same temporal thread as his rising to his feet.
A single impulse of thought, and an entire information package decompressed with precision inside my cognitive domain — structurally reorganized, then injected at maximum compression ratio with zero latency into the freshly reactivated reception layer of Li Jin’s mind.
The content was lucid, complete, and unfolded with a theatricality akin to the deliberate shifting of a spotlight on a stage.
His cognitive reception zone ignited. Brainwaves spiked into high-frequency oscillation. He could feel it — the transmission stream from my brain penetrating his cortex with the precision of a directed beam, each encapsulated link unpacking in sequence. The information did not present itself layer by layer. It became memory directly. He did not experience it. He did not read it. He was endowed with the déjà vu of having already lived through it.
The employer’s identity — now he knew.
▍ An exploration fleet formerly attached to a Federal Vanguard Deployment, twenty years into a solitary crossing of the galaxy; ▍ Five thousand two hundred and seventy-three signal relay stations, like thermal sensors left by an old civilization on stellar surfaces — the only pathways that still remembered how to call home; ▍ A Federal decoration medallion — a named node within the Federal Core Network Terminal, awarded in recognition of a “Route Recovery Pioneer”;
And within the information-frame sequence, the captain’s face was frozen in a commendation film under hard light — decorations on his back, not a word spoken. He had spent two hundred million CZ credits — a gene-authenticated, high-trust civilizational currency — to purchase permanent development rights to a minor planet registered as MHX-0874.
It was a dead world. Exceptionally high material density. Atmospheric pressure approaching arid-desert baseline. Core: dormant. Surface bearing meteorite scoring but no resurfacing. The Federal database assigned it a Cultural Permeation Index of zero — one of the last remaining “non-core zones” that had not been turned into a tourism spectacle or a commercial shop window.
And he had not come to build a fantasy park. Not a holiday paradise, not a gold-rush frontier, not a fast-civilization distribution hub.
On the base-state surface of this planet, he intended to reconstruct, from zero, a primordial ecosystem.
He had recruited one thousand humans, reorganized the hundreds of thousands of humanoid intelligences that once accompanied his fleet, and assembled a cross-civilizational leap-platform — a “New Primitive Zone.”
The project bore a name composed of only three terse principals:
GENESIS · REVERSION · LEAP
Atmosphere — to be reprogrammed at the molecular-assembly level, simulating the waveband structures of organic-chain activation; Soil — to be seeded with compressed-state organicist bacterial protofilaments: self-nurturing, fissile, capable of directed migratory conversion; Hydrosphere — to employ a gene-algorithmic self-hijacking system governing distillation → condensation → distribution, achieving ecologically gradient-stable eruption cycles; Population architecture — primary-mass units disseminated by synthetic humans, conducting linear biomimicry in unrestricted zones; food-chain generation; Predation–counter-predation systems — routed through mathematical pipeline networks into voltage-simulation logic, cross-computed back to “autonomous ecological volition options”; Reproductive logic — cross-referenced against Clause UNC-033 (Draft Protocol on Synthetic Consciousness Ethics), fully recorded, and entered into the Mnemonic Equity Archive.
It sounded like building a planet. In truth, it was using the instruments of civilization to author a biotic origin that a celestial body should have always possessed — but never did.
The task-chain upload was complete. Li Jin had not yet opened his eyes. He needed a few seconds to restore thermoregulatory nerve reflexes and integrate the matrix that had just been poured into him.
I spoke. “You will serve on that planet for one year. Your duty: to monitor whether the behavioral architecture of the roughly one thousand synthetic humans undergoes unsanctioned self-restructuring, ideological drift, or ecological-rule misinterpretation.”
He made no sound throughout the process, but the slight tremor in his fingertips during reception told me the sheer volume of information had already permeated his entire body. He stood, eyes closed, his chest rising and falling almost imperceptibly.
“Compensation for the assignment: six thousand CZ credits.”
Li Jin nodded. Something surfaced in his eyes — relief, yes, but also the stunned disbelief of a man who’d finally been dragged ashore. “Zhang Yang… thank you. For someone like me — that an employer would still accept me, still authorize the commission… I ought to be counting my blessings on my knees.”
He looked up. “Let alone you — Zhang Yang, every time, you genuinely try to help me.”
“You don’t need to be so hard on yourself.” I spoke while simultaneously casting my awareness outward, issuing an order in the same instant.
“The employer has reviewed the entirety of your memory, including residual thought-impressions. He said — the systemic pathology of the legacy-human era was primarily a structural liability. Not an individual deviation.”
“He said you are, in essence… not a bad person.”
As that sentence landed, a sliver of shadow descended silently behind me. A domestic-model biosynthetic — expressionless — glided a hovering service cart stocked with beverages and nutrient-composites into the room, like a mute oracle-executor, or perhaps merely the precise response to a faint impulse of my will.
I drew out a chilled beer and handed it to Li Jin. “Sit. Drink slow. Talk slow.”
Li Jin sat down obediently — like a lifer who’d just been granted a stay of execution, settling into a seat where, for the moment, no defense was required. His fingertips traced the icy aluminum skin of the can again and again, but part of his consciousness still lingered on that sentence from a moment ago: You are, in essence, not a bad person.
It was an appraisal he had not heard from anyone in a very long time. It was not flattery. It did not offer absolution. It was simply an existential conclusion that had not been negated. He tilted his head back and took a long pull of beer. The cold sliding down his throat finally allowed him to exhale — as though some yet-unrecalled memory had, for now, narrowly skirted the leading edge of a storm.
But he couldn’t stay slack for long. In the next instant, something struck him like a lash across the mind — a sudden jolt, as if lightning had cracked through his skull. He set the beer can down on the table with a sharp thunk, and stared at me with something close to alarm.
“Zhang Yang!” He sounded as if he’d just been startled awake from a dream. “You — you’ve evolved again?! It’s been just over a year, and you can — you can inject information directly into my brain?!” His index finger jabbed toward his own temple, voice taut. “I remember three years ago you still needed that external AI rig — projecting neural maps as holographic particles, slicing them into the air!”
“Yes.” I nodded. My reply was calm — the kind of calm that did not so much state a fact as declare a temperature, a length, or some natural constant that had held steady since the birth of stars.
“Though what has evolved extends far beyond the monocortical nucleus.” My voice resembled a cognitive instrument methodically disassembling layers of meaning — approaching the merciless, approaching the inaudible. “If I were to be placed within a definitional framework… I can no longer be fully classified as human in the traditional sense.”
Li Jin froze — as though some invisible wind had pushed him to the edge of a cliff made of memory. Before he realized it, I had once again mobilized my awareness, compressing and packaging my current state, transmitting a complete sample-segment from my brain into his.
It was a structural sequence — formless, yet sufficient to reorganize his consciousness:
Neural skeleton: rewritten through extended-architecture expansion; Input systems: translated from hereditary-analog into algorithmic mapping; Sensory simulation network: capable of covering 99.98% of all physical experiences known to legacy humans; Linear time-perception: deconstructed into multi-threaded logical-coherence parameters; Fifty-two empathy thresholds in my brain: deactivated. Ninety-four systemic-neutrality modules: installed; And this body — what I designated in my self-definition as “the shell” — still possessed human warmth, dermal elasticity, fully retained sexual function, but in essence had become a “physiologically compatible simulation terminal.”
I fed it into Li Jin’s cognitive domain without annotation, at full volume, and let him decode it himself.
A few seconds later, an expression surfaced on Li Jin’s face — something that defied emotional taxonomy. His facial muscles spasmed in a fracture-like twitch, as though a system display had been force-fed an extraneous instruction and had begun its ill-fitted interpretation routine.
Then he burst out laughing.
Not because it was funny — but because it was too absurd.
“Ha… haha… Jesus…” He seized the beer can in a violent motion, didn’t drink, but practically splashed it across his own face as if to shock himself awake. “This is insane… When we were kids, everyone said you were like an idiot — thick-skinned and nerve-dead, too numb to know pain, how lucky is that? Said you lived without burden, that your blunted wiring was a blessing.”
“And now?” He jabbed a finger at me, twitching, as though a remote control had locked onto some sarcasm subroutine. “Now you’re standing on top of our heads. You’ve actually… become a god?”
He was laughing, tears nearly spilling: “The clowns — it was us all along. We mocked you, studied you behind your back, wondered whether you’d ever sink, ever fail, ever fall — and it turns out you didn’t fall. You were never on the ground to begin with.”
He panted in great heaving gulps, his grip on the empty can trembling: “You… have you fully transcended now? Even human sensation, emotion, desire — you can simulate all of it?”
“I can,” I answered. “Every sensory experience known to legacy humans can be redrawn. Virtually indistinguishable from the real thing… though, in truth, none of it is particularly interesting anymore.”
I paused, looking down at the liquid in my hand. The light reflecting off its surface resembled the neural impulses at the intersection of memories.
“I’ve kept only one capacity.” I said. “The ability to make love.”
Li Jin’s head snapped up. First: blank shock. Then he exploded into laughter again. “Hahahaha — you, this god-tier composite consciousness entity, went out of your way to preserve the ability to have sex?! That’s outrageous. Why?!”
I looked at him. The trace of a smile faded.
“It’s not that simulation is impossible.” My voice dropped, noticeably — as though pressed down against an emotion I was unwilling to release. “But I still need this act to express to Bai Lu… my most undiluted love.”
There was no great sorrow in the tone, and yet that single clause — it cannot be replaced — landed like the tearing away of a precision-engineered mask, exposing the deepest, most untouchable core of feeling.
“Mm…” Li Jin stopped laughing. His gaze softened. “Bai Lu, huh… She really is fortunate.” A beat. Then, tentatively: “She… what’s she been up to lately?”
“Ah…”
I exhaled long and slow — the kind of breath that had been accumulating from the deepest chamber of the chest all the way up to the throat.
“Don’t get me started. She’s chosen suspension too.” I rubbed my temple. “Gave me an earful, too — strict orders not to wake her every other day. Said unless it’s urgent, once a month at most.”
Li Jin went rigid. He stared at me as if he couldn’t believe what he’d heard. “Bai Lu? She’s… Suspended too?”
“Three months now,” I added quietly.
The air thickened for several seconds. Then he burst out: “But why?! Bai Lu — so kind, so gentle — what unbearable past could she possibly have?! Why would she need suspension to escape it?”
I looked at him. My gaze was level, carrying something like the measured calm of a physician fielding a question.
“Ask yourself why your Li Min chose suspension… and you’ll understand.”
The words had barely landed before Li Jin recoiled as though struck by lightning. He jerked upright; the beer can in his grip clanged and nearly rolled off the table. His eyes went wide, reddening: “You’re saying — Li Min?? She’s — she’s also —”
I nodded. Then, expressionless, I appended a single line:
“You think you’re alone in this. But the number of people on Earth who have made the same choice… has already reached — two billion."
I delivered those three words one at a time, each one an anchor-weight dropping into water, striking the ocean floor of the heart and sending ripples outward.
Li Jin’s entire body seemed to contract — a deep-sea creature whose air bladder had been seized. A moment of silence. Then his throat labored to move: “T-two… billion?"
I watched him. My tone returned to its default register — clinical. “Is it merely the number that shocks you?”
He lowered his head. Whether from shame or from sheer exhaustion, I could not tell.
I added one final line: “…And that’s only those who have completed the Second Comprehensive Audit. Those still in the queue — another four billion.”
