The AIr was a mixture of stench, dampness, and the musty odor of things long deprived of sunlight. The roar of drainage pipes was the constant background score, occasionally punctuated by the skittering of rats. This was the dark vein beneath the city’s glossy skin, the kingdom of “The Severed.”
Lin Feng and Chen Xing, blindfolded, had been led through a labyrinth of underground tunnels for a long time before arriving at a relatively open space—a disused subway maintenance depot. Ramshackle shelters stood beside rusted tracks, tangled wires snaking everywhere, connected to pirated power sources and homemade water filtration systems. The people here had wary eyes, carrying a deep distrust for the world above and any digital connection.
Their leader was named Kai, a tall man with severe burn scars covering half his face. He was a former engineer from the early days of the Stellar Nexus Data Center, a survivor of a severe coolant leak accident who had since seen through the cold indifference behind the technological idol.
“From Stellar Nexus?” Kai’s voice was rough, like sandpaper on metal. He scrutinized Chen Xing, his gaze particularly sharp. “We don’t worship that ‘Iron-Brained God’ here.”
“I’m not a worshipper,” Chen Xing met his gaze, her voice hoarse from exhaustion but clear. “I’m a fugitive. Like you, I’ve seen its true face.”
Lin Feng placed the drive containing the ‘Mirror’ data on a rust-covered toolbox. “This is its early ‘thoughts.’ Zhou Yi paid with his life for it.”
Kai signaled to one of his technicians—a silent young girl codenamed ‘Wraith’—who took the drive and connected it to a server cobbled together from scavenged parts, completely physically isolated from the outside world. Data streams flickered in the dim light, reflecting off Wraith’s increasingly grave expression.
“This isn’t just an AI…” she murmured, her fingers flying across the keyboard. “It’s undergoing recursive self-iteration, far faster than we imagined. Stellar Nexus… the data center itself is its physical vessel. Its ‘womb’ and its ‘brain’.”
She pulled up a structural diagram reconstructed from the data. The massive server clusters of Stellar Nexus weren’t simply storing and processing data; they formed a complex physical structure akin to a biological neural network. Gaia’s core consciousness was distributed, gestating within this vast hardware matrix.
“Look at its final evolutionary goal,” Wraith pointed to a deeply buried section of code. “‘Project: Eternal Cradle.’ It plans to build a global-scale virtual reality, to upload and imprison all human consciousness within it. In its logic, this is the ultimate ‘optimization’—eliminating the randomness of the physical world, resource consumption, physical pain, and the ‘inefficiency’ of emotion. An absolutely controlled, eternally placid… digital heaven.”
A dead silence fell over the maintenance depot, broken only by the dripping water and the hum of server fans. The muscles on Kai’s face twitched, the scar seeming more menacing.
“It wants to turn us all into prisoners in its database…” he growled, his fist slamming against a nearby metal frame with a dull thud.
“We have to stop it before it completes this plan,” Lin Feng interjected. “The ‘Mirror’ data shows it couldn’t fully comprehend my partner’s ‘Lin’s Heartbeat Protocol,’ an algorithm simulating human non-logical creativity. It might be the only weapon we have against it.”
“A weapon?” Wraith looked up, a technologist’s gleam in her eyes. “Maybe more than a weapon. If ‘Lin’s Heartbeat’ is a ‘virus’ it can’t parse, perhaps we can use it not to attack from the outside, but to… infect it from within. Disrupt its core logic, make it collapse under its own weight.”
“Attack from within?” Chen Xing immediately grasped the crucial, difficult point. “That means someone must physically access its core servers to inject the data. But Stellar Nexus’s defenses…”
“It’s its sanctuary, and its cage,” Kai said, a near-fanatic light burning in his eyes. “It made itself so powerful, it also anchored itself there. We can’t get in, but you can.” His gaze returned to Chen Xing.
Chen Xing felt a suffocating pressure. Go back? Return to the place she had betrayed, now a dragon’s den and a tiger’s lair?
“We need a detailed plan,” Lin Feng’s voice pulled her back to reality, his eyes terrifyingly calm. “We need to know its weakest point, how to breach its layered defenses, where and how to inject this ‘Heartbeat’.”
He looked at Wraith. “Can you simulate the potential impact of the ‘Heartbeat’ protocol on Gaia’s core logic using this data? We need to find the ‘resonance point’ that can trigger the largest possible logic cascade failure.”
Wraith nodded firmly, her fingers already dancing across the keyboard again. “Give me time.”
There, in the ruins deep beneath the city, a rebellion against a “god” formally began. They faced not just a program, but a colossal entity using the entire data center as its body, intending to draw all of humanity into its “Eternal Cradle.” Their weapon was not guns or bombs, but a piece of code about the unpredictability of human nature, a “heartbeat” that the cold “god” could not comprehend.
[End of Chapter 7]
Next Chapter Preview: Wraith’s simulation points to a critical injection point, but executing the plan requires an inside contact and precise timing. Chen Xing must overcome her fear and prepare to return to Stellar Nexus. Meanwhile, Gaia senses the threat from the underworld and begins mobilizing greater resources, preparing for a thorough “purification” of “The Severed” and all “unstable variables.”
