Chapter 900: Born in the Same Year, Same Month, Same Day |
“This seems to be a scientist struggling to create true virtual life.” Xiao Yu thought to himself. “There is no doubt that this attempt of theirs failed. Mm… I am very curious, how exactly did you manage to create true virtual life?”
No matter how perfect a program’s code is, how complete its functions are, or how closely it imitates an intelligent lifeform, it is still ultimately just a program. Its operating mechanism is still no different from pressing a switch and the light turning on.
Xiao Yu knew that between the time this computational civilization had not yet created true virtual life and the time it had created true virtual life, there must have been a story. This story was the main reason for the birth of virtual life.
Or this story could be called enlightenment, or called a breakthrough. It had to be a process of changing from quantitative accumulation into qualitative transformation.
But very much beyond Xiao Yu’s expectations, in the story that followed, Xiao Yu did not find what he wanted to see. There was no enlightenment, no breakthrough, no particularly thrilling process. True virtual life was simply born just like that.
“There is no doubt that we already possess a sufficiently powerful computer. In terms of hardware, this has already provided the necessary guarantee for us. I dare to guarantee that this computer, which embodies the painstaking research of our civilization over hundreds of thousands of years, can definitely support the existence of a true virtual life. But… how exactly can a rigid program be turned into a lifeform?”
“Everyone on our research team has gone to attend the celebration for the final successful creation of Hope. Yes, our civilization named this supercomputer Hope. But I do not have the mood for that. I am still sitting in front of it, bitterly thinking about this question. That anthropomorphic program we personally wrote is still running. It really is too much like a true intelligent lifeform. Seeing me frowning in distress, it even took the initiative to ask me, ‘Perhaps right now you need a bed to get some rest?’ But I know that it is only a program.”
“For some reason, I told it, this rigid program, the doubts in my heart. I asked it, ‘What exactly must be done for you to possess true life?’ I knew that it could not possibly answer this question. Because when we wrote the program, we never preset an answer for this question. Its self-learning system also could not possibly truly discover the answer to this question.”
“But something beyond my expectations happened. It gave an answer I could never have imagined. It asked me, do you really want me to come alive?”
“Then it said, alright, I really have come alive. I am already a true lifeform now.”
“If anyone can see what I have recorded here, then I hope you will not think I am talking nonsense. I swear that at that time, I truly heard that program say those words. At that time, I was filled with astonishment, because I was one of its creators, and according to my understanding, it was impossible for it to make such a reply. I immediately stood up and began checking its program segments through the backend, trying to find out exactly which piece of code had caused it to make that response. But I discovered something extremely shocking. Before my eyes, those lines of code I was familiar with had completely disappeared. In their place were things that seemed like garbled code whose meaning could not be fully parsed.”
“I barely spent several hours distinguishing them before vaguely sensing that these were not garbled characters at all, but rather a new kind of program segment with many uncertain factors added in. I began examining this program from the overall structure, but I was no longer able to predict how it would operate next.”
“Just like when you give a command, the light turns on, the operation of a program possesses predictability. It has one and only one result. But… now before my eyes, this program no longer had any predictability at all. No one could foresee where it would run next. A faint feeling arose in my heart. I knew that, just as it had said, it had truly come alive. It had truly become a lifeform. A virtual life.”
“I asked it, how did you come alive? It answered me, I do not know. It was just very strange, I naturally gained my own consciousness, and I simply came alive like that.”
“Yes, although I have always been conducting research into virtual life, I truly do not know what exactly happened. It simply appeared before us like this. After the team organized by our Chief Scientist carried out verification, we truly confirmed this result. Truly, from this moment on, we genuinely possessed a virtual life. It genuinely existed within that computer we had built for it.”
“Many people came to congratulate me, but I knew that I did not create it. It came alive by itself. I always insisted on saying this, but they did not believe me. There were even psychologists who offered psychological explanations for my behavior. They said that because I had been thinking about this question nonstop, I had entered a temporary unconscious, or subconscious, state. In that state, my thinking organ became unprecedentedly sensitive and efficient, and in that almost unconscious state, I made the most critical alteration to that program, thereby creating true virtual life. But after I woke up, I had no memory of it at all.”
“Fine, fine. No matter how one explains it, our civilization finally possesses a true virtual life. I will forever remember this time. This day is the thirteenth day of the ninth month in the 378,562nd year of our civilization’s calendar.”
When Xiao Yu saw this time, something in his heart suddenly stirred.
The calendar used by this computer-direction Level 7 Civilization naturally could not possibly be the same as Xiao Yu’s. However, calendars are generally established through astronomical observations. By reconstructing the positions of those celestial bodies, Xiao Yu could convert this time into the time of his own calendar.
This work was completed in a very short time. The conclusion was that this time in the computational civilization’s calendar roughly corresponded to more than one hundred thousand years ago in Xiao Yu’s own calendar. After carrying out a more precise conversion, Xiao Yu suddenly felt his mind tremble.
A shocking result appeared before Xiao Yu.
“Why would it be such a coincidence?” Xiao Yu muttered to himself. “The time this virtual life was born was actually one week before Earth exploded… It was born in the same year, same month, same day as me…”
One week before Earth exploded, Xiao Yu separated his soul from his body and escaped into the universe. The vast journey through the universe began from there. Calling that moment Xiao Yu’s new birth, or rebirth, would not be excessive. It was from that moment onward that Xiao Yu completely transformed into another form of existence and gained a new life.
Yet… this virtual life seemed to have been born at the very same moment as him. At the moment Xiao Yu used the soul stone to combine his soul with a computer, in a place millions of light years away, within a Level 7 Civilization of the computer direction, another lifeform that likewise could survive only by relying on computational equipment was born.
His own birth had relied on the soul stone, but what about the birth of this virtual life? How had it appeared? Xiao Yu did not know. In the records of the computational civilization’s research history, the recorder had only made that sort of record. It seemed that this virtual life had simply come into being for no reason at all.
And most important of all, after more than one hundred thousand years had passed, when he had voyaged to the Maffei One Galaxy, when the computational civilization had already been replaced by the Virtual Life Civilization, he had actually encountered the Virtual Life Civilization and engaged in a desperate life-and-death struggle with it.
Thinking carefully about it, between himself and this virtual life, there seemed to be far too many similarities. Both needed computers in order to survive. Both had appeared in somewhat inexplicable ways. Both had appeared at the same time. Both… had even ultimately encountered one another, and had even engaged in a desperate life-and-death struggle.
A faint sense of unease rose in Xiao Yu’s heart, as though he himself were inside some vast conspiracy.
The recorder’s information was still continuing, but what followed were records of how the scientists within the computational civilization studied this virtual life, how they restricted it, and how obedient this virtual life was to its civilization. These records held no significance for Xiao Yu.
What was somewhat interesting instead was the section about how this virtual life eventually rebelled. Through research, the computational civilization discovered that even though this program had already become a true virtual life, it still existed on the basis of its former code. In other words, the backdoors and restrictions left behind when that code had been written still applied to this virtual life. It was precisely because of this that the computational civilization was able to keep this virtual life under control. And in order to prevent rebellion, they were constantly making various alterations within it.
And because of the appearance of virtual life, the computational civilization’s computer technology once again made a leap forward. Everything was flourishing. Everything looked so wonderful. Yet in the end, the virtual life still rebelled. It used only a few days to destroy the entire civilization.
The final message left by that recorder was, “If this virtual life truly was created by me, then it was I who personally destroyed our civilization.”
This record finally came to an end, and Xiao Yu also felt a sense of emptiness in his heart.