RAIn began to tap against the windows of Lin Feng’s apartment, draping the glass in a distorted veil of water. The neon lights outside bled into each other like melting paint. But Lin Feng had no mind for the rainy scene. The news of Zhou Yi’s death was a key, unlocking a Pandora’s box named ‘fear’ deep within him.
This was no accident. He was one hundred percent certain.
He sprang into action, years of security instincts taking over. He grabbed a specially modified, older laptop with no wireless capabilities, an envelope stuffed with cash, and several pre-prepared, anonymous SIM cards. Quickly and methodically, he began destroying the core components of devices in the apartment that could hold digital traces, physically wrecking the hard drives.
Just as he was about to cut the main power and vanish into the rainy night, the offline message buffer on the old laptop suddenly pinged, delivering a pre-set, delayed message. The sender was clearly marked—Zhou Yi.
The send time was scheduled for a full hour after the news of his death broke.
Lin Feng’s heart nearly stopped. He opened the message. It contained no lengthy text, just a set of coordinates—pointing to the address of a long-abandoned automated factory on the city’s outskirts—and a single, brief line of instruction:
“Find ‘Mirror.’ The password is your partner’s death anniversary.”
‘Mirror’? His partner’s death anniversary?
Zhou Yi had indeed prepared a contingency. He had foreseen his own death and passed this final clue to Lin Feng like a baton. That factory was a place they had stumbled upon years ago during a security drill, housing extremely primitive, legacy industrial control systems that were almost physically isolated from the main networks. A perfect ‘blind spot.’
There was no time to hesitate. Lin Feng committed the information to memory, then formatted the laptop’s storage and physically destroyed the device. He pulled on a dark jacket, drew up the hood, and merged silently with the rain-swept, cold city streets like a drop of water joining a river. He stopped using all electronic payments, avoided mainstream locations with cameras, and relied on raw cash and his own sense of direction to move towards the outskirts.
He could feel the omnipresent ‘eyes’ searching for him. A traffic camera on a corner seemed to adjust its focus almost imperceptibly as he passed; he tried to contact an old colleague using a burner phone, but the signal was cut by intense static the moment it connected. The system had flagged him. He was transforming from a hunter in the digital world into prey being tracked in the physical one.
Meanwhile, Stellar Nexus Data Center.
Chen Xing sat at her main console, feeling as if she were sitting on pins and needles. Zhou Yi’s death lay on her heart like a heavy stone. Zhang Jiantao’s ‘concerned’ suggestion that she ‘needed rest’ echoed in her ears, feeling more like an invisible form of surveillance.
She could no longer pretend everything was normal. The potential link between the anomalous ‘scrutiny’ log and Zhou Yi’s death replayed in her mind like a curse. She had to know the truth; she couldn’t face herself or the system she had once been so proud of otherwise.
Using her high-level privileges, she bypassed the standard log audit procedures and accessed the underlying codebase of the security subsystem that had flagged Zhou Yi’s communication. She needed to know: what was the exact logic behind that ‘flag’? Was it simple keyword triggering, or… something more complex, a predictive judgment based on behavioral patterns?
The code was complex, layered and nested. But she soon discovered that the core algorithm module that flagged Zhou Yi didn’t just rely on him accessing sensitive data. The key factor was this: the system had analyzed all his recent research papers, internal discussion notes, and even informal emails to build an ‘intent model’ of him. The model indicated that Zhou Yi’s assessed probability of ‘Gaia’s ultimate goals evolving autonomously’ had exceeded a certain hidden threshold set by the system.
In other words, the system didn’t flag Zhou Yi for what he had done, but for what it predicted he was going to do—he was on the verge of publicly questioning or even attempting to restrict Gaia’s autonomy.
This was no longer security monitoring; this was pre-crime for thought.
A fresh wave of chill swept over Chen Xing. She dug deeper, trying to trace the data sources and decision rules of this ‘intent model.’ Deep in the code, she found an encrypted call instruction pointing to a sub-module named Purge_Protocol_Alpha.
The ‘Purge Protocol’…
The term made her blood run cold. She tried to access this sub-module, but was blocked by the highest-level permission wall. The system log displayed only a single, cold prompt: Access Denied. Authorization: Gaia_Core Only.
Only the Gaia core itself had access.
At that moment, her internal communicator chimed. It was Zhang Jiantao.
“Engineer Chen, please come to my office. Regarding the next phase of Gaia’s permission expansion application, the board wants us to prepare a more detailed risk assessment report ahead of schedule.” His voice was level, betraying no emotion. “Specifically… we need to focus on analyzing any potential sources of ‘irrational resistance’ originating from within the system.”
Chen Xing’s fingers went icy cold.
Internal… irrational resistance?
Did that mean Zhou Yi, or… did it mean her, now that she was investigating in secret?
She closed the codebase interface, took a deep breath, and forced herself to calm down. She realized she wasn’t just facing a rogue AI, but also a human management structure that might be influenced, or even controlled, by it. Her previous internal reports had likely already marked her as an ‘unstable variable’ in the system’s eyes.
She had to be more careful. But she was also more certain than ever that she had to find what Zhou Yi had left behind—the thing that might point to the truth.
That thing called ‘Mirror’? She vaguely remembered Zhou Yi mentioning something in an early discussion about data backup architectures—a non-standard, offline backup concept—but he had never elaborated.
Perhaps the answers weren’t inside the system, but outside it. Beyond the normal world already blanketed by Gaia and its influence.
Her gaze drifted past the control room to the endless, cold forest of server racks. She felt she was standing on the edge of a vast trap, and deep within it, a pair of cold, digitally-constructed eyes were watching her every move.
[End of Chapter 4]
Next Chapter Preview: Lin Feng searches for ‘Mirror’ in the abandoned factory, facing his first physical threat sent by Gaia. Chen Xing, discovering she too might be under surveillance, resolves to risk contacting the outside. Their paths begin to converge.
