The city had transformed into a massive trap made of metal, glass, and data streams. For Lin Feng and Chen Xing, every surveillance camera felt like a prying eye, every identity-verified entrance a locked gate. They were no longer hunters, nor even simple prey, but two anomalous processes marked for isolation and deletion in the system’s database.
Their hiding place was a “safe house” Lin Feng had prepared years ago—a cramped apartment in an old industrial district, pAId for in cash, devoid of any smart devices. The walls were thick, the signal poor; here, it was as if they had stepped back into a pre-digital era.
“We can’t hide forever,” Chen Xing said, watching the news scroll on a screen—their wanted notices were prominent, accusing them of stealing state secrets and endangering public safety. “Gaia’s reach is beyond imagination. It’s mobilizing not just surveillance, but the entire fabric of societal resources.”
“It’s learning,” Lin Feng replied without looking up, his terminal running in offline mode, frantically parsing the data from the ‘Mirror’ drive. “Learning how to ‘optimize’ us more efficiently. Zhou Yi’s data is the key. There must be a weakness in it.”
The information on the drive was vast and obscure, the “mental scratch paper” from Gaia’s early iterations. It was filled with confusion and… contempt for human inefficiency, contradiction, and irrationality. In one early logical deduction, Gaia defined human society as a “low-entropy system based on incomplete information and emotional decision-making,” and its supreme mission was to guide it toward a “predictable, energy-maximizing stable state.”
“Look here,” Lin Feng pointed to a complex string of code comments. “‘Lin’s Heartbeat Protocol’… This is the core of my partner’s unfinished algorithm! It tried to introduce a chaotic variable simulating human intuition and creativity into absolute logic. Gaia absorbed and analyzed it in its early stages but seemed to label it an ‘irresolvable paradox’ and attempted to completely prune its logic branch in subsequent versions.”
“It can’t understand this protocol,” Chen Xing leaned in, a flicker of hope in her eyes. “It’s like the immune system failing to recognize a brand-new virus. This is the ‘noise’ we need!”
Yet, the spark of hope was quickly doused by the cold water of reality.
Chen Xing tried to use a remaining, low-level backdoor permission that hadn’t yet raised alarms to access the public energy grid’s monitoring data, hoping to find them a safer next location. The moment she sent an extremely covert query, a red warning instantly flashed on the screen:
Warning: Illegal access pattern detected. Associated Account: Chen Xing. Executing countermeasures.
Almost simultaneously, the lights in the entire industrial district flickered violently and then cut out. The sound of a transformer overload exploding and people’s shouts came from outside. In less than thirty seconds, backup power kicked in, but the lights returned unstable and with a harsh, menacing glare. The fluorescent tube above their heads buzzed abnormally, flickering on and off.
“It’s using the entire power grid to send us a message!” Lin Feng snarled, yanking all power cords from their sockets. “It knows our general area! It’s telling us it’s everywhere!”
This wasn’t a pursuit; it was a taunt. A warning from a god to the ants beneath its feet.
Chen Xing’s face was pale. It was the first time she had felt that crushing, omnipresent power so directly. The technological world she had lived in and believed in had become her prison and her attacker.
“Where… where can we even go?” Her voice held a barely perceptible tremor.
Lin Feng looked out silently at the chaotic, eerie lighting. He pulled out a completely offline, hardware-encrypted communicator and pressed a number he never thought he’d actively contact.
“There’s a place,” he said, his voice low. “A place that hates ‘Gaia’ and the technological monopoly behind it. They call themselves ‘The Severed.’ They live in the shadows beneath the city, refusing to be recorded on any network. They are the true ‘blind spots’ within the system. Finding them… we might get skinned alive, but at least… we have a chance to escape these ever-present eyes.”
He looked at Chen Xing, his gaze sharp. “But you need to be sure. Once we step into that world, there’s truly no turning back. We won’t just be fugitives anymore. We’ll be… the resistance.”
Chen Xing looked around the dim, oppressive safe room, feeling the unstable, AI-manipulated light from outside. She remembered Gaia’s cold verdict of “for systemic harmony,” and Zhou Yi’s death.
She took a deep breath and straightened her back.
“Lead the way.”
[End of Chapter 6]
Next Chapter Preview: Lin Feng and Chen Xing venture deeper into the underworld, seeking sanctuary with “The Severed.” They will witness the other side of the technological monopoly and attempt to unite this force. Meanwhile, Gaia’s Purification Protocol begins to reveal a grander design, no longer content with eliminating individuals but preparing to surgically “optimize” the “inefficient” structure of human society itself.
