Hao Ren's thoughts went back to the moment before Zorm reached its critical point and completely collapsed.
Nolan, the only NPC in the Dream Ark, her special "soul" code prevented her from being transmitted to CARS through the drone link, and there was not enough time to establish a new broadcast protocol in the drone link. In a seemingly desperate situation, the only thing Hao Ren could think of was to do everything possible to preserve Nolan's soul. Since he could not transmit it out, he would find a place nearby to save it.
Since the compatibility problem was only within the drone link, the Petrachelys' data processing ability was enough to cope with this level of incompatibility. So Hao Ren's last attempt was possible: he downloaded Nolan into the onboard host of the Petrachelys.
Of course, the download in a hurry was still not satisfactory. Nolan's soul was inevitably damaged after downloading to the host, mainly due to compatibility. So until now, the spacecraft had been busy processing Nolan's data, and the MDT stayed here for this. But in any case, the good news was that her memory and emotions were not seriously affected. Nolan herself was an NPC, and her data itself had a high self-reorganization function. After some recovery and debugging, she finally recovered.
Looking at the gray-haired girl pacing restlessly on the holographic image, Hao Ren scratched his face and did not know where to start to explain. He could only introduce the place first. "This is my spacecraft, the Petrachelys."
"Your … spacecraft?" Nolan's memory was still stuck before the destruction of Zorm, and the last stage of her memory was completely muddled, so she could hardly figure out the current situation. "Why suddenly there is a spacecraft … Ah! I remember, the whole world … What happened to Zorm? "
"Ahem," Hao Ren coughed twice. "Before that, let me confirm your state first. How do you feel now? Are you in a trance or have you lost your memory? And how is the environment around you? "
"Me?" Nolan looked down at herself. "I seem to be all right, but I don't know where this place is. There is nothing here, I only see a lot of streamers floating around. Other than that, humans, houses, the sky, and the earth, these things are all gone … "
As Nolan spoke, a trace of panic suddenly appeared in her eyes. "Could it be that … the world is finally going to end?"
"Zorm in the real world has been swallowed by the sun. It happened seven hours ago." Hao Ren switched the window and transmitted a video to Nolan. As a program, the latter did not need to use her "eyes" to browse the image, but in order to maintain the personality of "Nolan," the ship's mainframe simulated her human functions, so Nolan still retained the common sense and senses of a human. Hao Ren saw a group of smaller holographic images appeared in the holographic image. Nolan looked at those images, and her eyes gradually widened. "This is the image of its last moments."
Nolan looked at a huge, indescribable bio-mechanical hybrid burning in the sun, and the whole planet falling apart and falling into the sun. She was shocked and exclaimed, "Then now I …"
"Don't worry, I found a way to save everyone's soul at the last moment," Hao Ren coughed softly. "Ahem, I have a perfect soul transmission technology here, more advanced than the technology used by Zorm's ark. It can extract the soul from the material like extracting a liquid, so the planet that fell into the sun was actually empty. You are now on the planet Tannagost, ten billion light-years away from Zorm, near a space station called CARS. This is my research facility. "
Hao Ren played down the large-scale soul data link project in one sentence, but Nolan was not stupid after all. She could still hear that something amazing and beyond the understanding of ordinary people had probably happened at that time. She had no idea what the principle behind this event was, so she could only accept it. "That is to say … before the previous memory was burned, you transferred the entire virtual world data to another memory?"
Hao Ren nodded. "That's what happened."
"Is this new memory safe?"
"It's definitely safer than Zorm. CARS can operate normally even if it falls into a black hole."
At this time, Nolan finally realized something was wrong. She looked around blankly. "But … where are the others? Why am I the only one here? "
Hao Ren folded his hands on the console and leaned forward slightly. "Nolan, you … do you know what's different about you and the others?"
"Different?" Nolan frowned. "You mean you can retain the memory of reincarnation? Can't you do it too? "
"Retaining the memory of reincarnation is just a facade. What I'm going to say next may not be easy to accept, but you must listen —"
As Hao Ren said, he paused for a moment before his face turned serious. "If I tell you, in fact, you are not human …"
He told everything in as calm a tone as possible, including the structure of the entire Zorm ark and the cause and effect of humans hiding in the virtual world ten thousand years ago. Because only in this way, Nolan could better understand this huge, ancient, and magnificent plan, and what role she originally played in this plan. When she heard that the virtual world was built in the dream of an ancient primitive creature, Nolan could not help but exclaim, and when she heard that she was actually a series of mechanical monitoring programs used to maintain the dream, she remained in a state of stunned silence for a long time.
In just half an hour, the number of times she lost her composure was even more than the number of times in the past hundreds of years in the reincarnation.
After Hao Ren finished, Nolan still did not come back to her senses. He could only wake her up. "Nolan, Nolan, I'm done."
Nolan looked dazed for a moment. She took a breath, bit her lip and looked at Hao Ren on the other side of the screen. She finally realized what the window in front of her meant: this was the boundary between the real world and the virtual world. The man on the other side of the screen was sitting in front of a device in the real world, and she … was still a string of data trapped in the virtual world, and this time, this string of data was not even human.
"What you said is true?" Nolan's voice sounded unusually calm.
Hao Ren spread out his hands. "I have no need to lie to you."
"I'm actually just a … program?" Nolan bit her lip. "A program made up to monitor the equipment?"
Hao Ren was speechless for a moment.
"So I actually have no parents, no family, no past, even in the real world," Nolan suddenly thought of a lot of things. "So my memory has been virtual from the beginning …"
Nolan's reaction was reasonable. Anyone who suddenly knew that they were not human at all, but just a piece of code running in a machine, and that all their emotional experiences, preferences, and memories since birth were actually a string of characters typed by a certain or a certain group of programmers would not feel much better. Nolan's sigh was already a sign of her strong will.
"In fact, as far as I'm concerned, AI is no different from human beings." Hao Ren knew that he should say something in this situation. He talked about his worldview, which was broadened after he became an inspector and saw countless kinds of strange civilizations and life forms. "Can be aware of themselves, have their own feelings. Under this premise, life with spiritual consciousness is actually the same, whether they live in a carbon-based body or a machine. There is no difference at the level of the soul."
"Thank you for your comfort," Nolan said with a stiff smile. "But … it's hard to accept after all, isn't it?"
Hao Ren sighed. "Yes, it's hard to accept."
Nolan saw Hao Ren's embarrassed look and took the initiative to change the topic. "Then let's not talk about this. You just mentioned that you are starting to reshape an ecosystem? If I understand correctly … you are like the creator, with this kind of power? "
"Ahem," Hao Ren almost coughed out his bronchus on the spot. "You are exaggerating. My model is far from the creator, and the reshaping of the ecosystem is not my own doing. At best, I am an investor this time: the kind who is only responsible for providing raw materials and sites."
"Sorry, this is a little beyond my imagination. It's not easy to understand." Nolan smiled slightly, and then her face became gloomy again. "Feelings are really strange things. I should be happier, but after knowing that I am just a program used to monitor the system, reshaping the ecosystem seems to have nothing to do with me."
In the face of Nolan's bitter smile, Hao Ren could only look at Lily helplessly and sigh.
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