Chapter 62 chapter eight

The submarine was dark, dank and cold, and beaded with condensation from abandonment; the teleporter was specially designed for the military department, and I had never seen it.I finally breathed a sigh of relief when I stepped onto the sun-drenched city street and Johnny was waiting for me. I told him about the braids, walking down the empty avenue and past the old buildings.The pale blue sky is changing towards night.There was no one around. "Hey," I said with a sudden step, "where the hell are we?" This world, with its uncanny terrestrial qualities, but the sky, gravity, and surface features of the place are unlike any world I've ever been to. alike.

Johnny smiled. "Guess. Come on, let's go shopping." We walked along the broad street, and on the left, there was a ruined wall.I stopped and stared. "This is the Colosseum," I said, "the Colosseum in the Old Ground." I looked around, at the ancient buildings, at the cobbled streets, at the trees swaying slightly in the breeze. "This is a reconstruction, a reconstruction of the old Rome," I said, and Dutu suppressed the surprise in my voice, "is it the new land?" But I knew right away it wasn't.I have been to Xindi several times, and the color of the sky there, the smell, and the gravity are very different from those here.

Johnny shook his head. "This isn't a place in the Ring." I stop. "Impossible. By definition, any world that can be reached via a teleporter is part of the Ring." "But it's not part of the Ring." "Where is that?" "Old land." We keep walking.Johnny pointed to another pile of ruins. "That's the Plaza de la Congrès," he said, as we descended the long steps. "Ahead is the Plaza de España, and we'll spend the night there." "Old Earth," I said, my first comment in twenty minutes, "are we time traveling?"

"Impossible, Ms. Lamia." "Then, is this a theme park?" Johnny laughed.The laughter is nice, natural, and laid-back. "Maybe. I have absolutely no idea what it's purpose is, what it does. It's a...sim planet." "Planet Sim," I squinted at the red sunset, now that the sun hadn't faded down the narrow street, "this looks like a hologram of Old Earth I've ever seen. Even if I haven't been there, it doesn't feel like it. wrong." "It's really similar." "And where is this? I mean, which star?"

"It's in the Hercules cluster," Johnny said. "I don't know the exact number." I didn't repeat what he said, but I stopped there and sat on the steps.Thanks to the Hawking drive, humans have explored and colonized worlds thousands of light-years apart, connecting them with teleporters.But no one has tried to explore exploding stars.We also barely climbed out of the cradle of a spiral arm.Hercules star cluster. "Why would the core build a replica of Rome in the Hercules cluster?" I asked. Johnny sat next to me.We looked up and watched a flock of pigeons roar by, circling the rooftops. "I don't know, Ms. Lamia. There are many things I don't know...at least in part, because I've never been interested in them before."

"Braun," I said. "what?" "Call me Braun." Johnny smiled, tilting his head. "Thanks, Braun. But one thing, I believe, isn't just Rome being copied. It's the whole of the Old Land." I sat there with my hands on the warm stones of the steps. "The whole Old Land?! All its...continents and cities?" "I think so. I haven't been out of Italy, or England, except for a boat trip between the two cities, but I believe this simulated planet is extremely complete." "For God's sake, why?" Johnny nodded slowly. "Maybe that's the truth. Why don't we go inside? Eat and talk. Maybe there's something about who killed me and why."

"Inside", is the suite in a large house at the bottom of the marble stairs.Outside the window was what Johnny called the "square". I could look along the stairs and see a huge tawny church above, and then my eyes swept to the square below, where the boat-shaped fountain sprayed water into the silent In the dark.Johnny said the guy who designed the fountain was named Bernini, but that name means nothing to me. The room is small, but the ceiling is high. There are some furniture in it. Although it is simple, it is extremely exquisitely carved. I have no way of verifying the age of these furniture.From the looks of it, there seemed to be no electricity or modern appliances.I have spoken to the house at the door and again upstairs in the suite, but the house has not responded.Dusk fell on the square, on the city beyond the high windows, the only light being from gas street lamps, or some more primitive combustible.

"It must be drawn from the history of the Old Lands," I said, stroking the thick pillow.Then, I looked up, and it dawned on me. "Kats died in Italy. Was it...19 or early 20th century. Now...is then." "Yes. Early nineteenth century: 1821, to be exact." "Is the whole world a museum?" "Oh, no. Different places are different times, I'm sure. It all depends on what they're doing these simulations for." "I don't understand." We went into another room where a bunch of furniture was jumbled together, and I sat by the window on a strangely carved couch.The golden twilight still adorns the tawny church steeple above the stairs.White doves hovering against the blue sky. "Are there millions of... um... Cyborgs living in this fake old land?"

"I don't think so," Johnny said, "the number of people living here is just the number necessary for this unique simulation plan." Seeing that I still don't understand, he took a deep breath and continued, "I That's when... that's where I woke up, and I was surrounded by simulated cybermen, Joseph Seven, Dr. Clark, the landlady's wife Ana Angeletti, young Lieutenant Elton, and several others, such as Small Italian businessman, owner of the restaurant across the square—he used to bring us food all the time, passers-by, like that kind of people. No more than twenty people at the most.”

"Then what happened to them?" "They're probably recycled. Like the guy with the braids." "Braids..." I immediately stared at Johnny, looking across the dark room, "Is he a Cyber?" "Without a doubt. I heard you speak of his self-destructing situations, and if I had to purge myself, I would do it that way." My mind was racing.I realized how stupid I was, how ignorant I was. "Then, it's other artificial intelligences that are going to kill you." "It seems so." "why?" Johnny gestured to me. "Probably to erase some of my memories and let it go to the west with my cyber body. Those memories should be something I only recently knew, this artificial intelligence...or these artificial intelligences understand that as long as my system is paralyzed , can destroy these things.”

I stood up, paced back and forth, and finally stopped by the window.Now, the darkness has really settled.There were lights in the room, but Johnny didn't light them up, and I, too, liked the hazy mood.With this obscurity, the unreal things I heard all over my ears seemed even more unreal.I look towards the bedroom.The west window received the last ray of light; the bedding gave off a pale light. "You just died here," I said. "It's him," Johnny said, "I'm not him." "But you have his memory." "It's a half-forgotten dream. There's still a difference." "But you know exactly how he feels." "I just remember how he felt in the designer's eyes." "Tell me about it." "What?" Johnny's skin was pale in the dimness.And his short curly hair looked very dark and dark. "What's it like to die. What's it like to be born again." Johnny began to tell me that his voice was like Wu Nong's soft language, which was really nice. Sometimes, he would accidentally leak a few old words, which were so old that I couldn't understand them, but compared to the miscellaneous things we say today Language, those words sound more beautiful. He told me what it's like to be a poet obsessed with perfectionism, who is harsher on his own output than the harshest criticism.These criticisms are vicious.His work was dismissed, ridiculed, described as derivative, stupid stuff.He was too poor, he had no money to marry the woman he loved deeply, and he lent the little money he had left to his younger brother in the United States, so he lost his last chance, and finally fell into poverty... Then, He finally emerges as a butterfly, showing his brilliant poetic talents, but it is too late, and he has fallen into the clutches of "consumptive disease", which has taken the lives of his mother and his brother Tom.He was uprooted and sent to Italy, it was said, "for the sake of his health," but he knew all along that this meant a lonely, painful early death at the age of twenty-six.He spoke of his pain when he saw Fanny's handwriting on the letter, which he was too distressed to open; he spoke of the loyalty of the young painter Joseph Seven, whom "friends "chosen as traveling companions of Keats, and these so-called "friends" deserted the poet at the last moment; he tells how Seven cared for the dying man, and how he he talked of coughing up blood that night, of Dr. Clarke bleeding him, and ordering "exercise and some fresh air"; The epitaph of the stele is inscribed as: "He who sleeps forever here is famous in the water." The only dim light came from below, forming the shape of a high window.Johnny's voice seemed to float in the air that smelled of night.He talked of waking from death, lying dead in bed with the faithful Doctors Seven and Clark still by his side, and how he remembered he was the poet John Keats, as if from a In his dream, he remembered his identity, and he always felt that he was something else! He talks about this persistent delusion, his return to England, his reunion with Fanny who is no longer Fanny, and the breakdown it caused him because of it.He talked about his loss of talent for poetry, about his growing distance from those Cybern impostors, about his escape, something akin to catatonic schizophrenia, mixed with "The Illusion," the "illusion" of his own true artificial intelligence, whose technical core was almost incomprehensible to a 19th-century poet, and who spoke of the eventual collapse of the illusion, and of the "Keats Project" finally being give up. "As a matter of fact," Leo said, "the whole wicked charade reminds me of a passage from a letter I wrote ... he wrote to his brother George before his illness. Keats wrote : "Is there any higher life that enjoys beauty? Just like I like to see the vigilance of ferrets and the restlessness of deer, although my thoughts are full of intuition. Although the quarrels on the street make me hate, the vigor that emerges is graceful. Yes. In the eyes of higher beings, our reasonings may be of the same color—false, but they are beautiful—and that is the special thing about poetry.” "You think...the Keats project...is evil?" I asked. "Anything that's deceiving is evil, I suppose." "Perhaps you still resemble John Keats, though you don't want to admit it." "No. The genius of the poet is gone, and I am not him, not even in the most detailed vision." I stared at the black silhouette in the dark room. "Does the AI ​​know we're here?" "Probably. Almost certainly. There's not a single place I've been that the tech core can't trace. But we're getting rid of the Ring and the rogues, aren't we?" "But you now know that it's some guy... um... some intelligence, the intelligence at the core of the technology that wants to attack you, not someone else." "Yes, but only on the Ring. Violence like this in the kernel will not be tolerated." There was something in the street.Pigeons, I thought, or maybe the wind was carrying the trash, blowing over the cobblestones.I said, "How will the technical core react to my involvement?" "I have no idea." "Of course, this plan should be a secret." "This is... something they feel has nothing to do with humans." I shook my head, this movement is really unnecessary in the dark. "Rebuild the old land...and rebuild it on this rebuilt world...how many...human personalities...became cyborgs...artificial intelligence killing artificial intelligence...has nothing to do with human beings!" I laughed out loud got up, but managed to hold back his laughter, "Damn it, Johnny." "Almost certainly." I went to the window, not caring who might see me down the dark street, and groped for a pack of cigarettes.They got soaked during a noon chase in the snow stream, but I lit one anyway and it caught fire. "Johnny, earlier you said this simulation of the Old Lands was extremely complete, and I said, 'For God's sake, why the hell?' And then you seemed to say 'Maybe that's the truth.' It was a quip, Or does it mean something else?" "I mean, maybe it's for God's sake." "Explain explain." Johnny sighed in the dark. "I don't quite understand the exact purpose of Keats's plan, nor the purpose of other old land simulants, but I suspect that this is part of a plan at the core of technology. Speaking of this plan, it dates back to at least seven hundred standard centuries ago, That's a plan for ultimate intelligence." "Ultimate intelligence." I said, puffing out a puff of smoke, "Well. So, the core of the technology is going to...do it?...Create God?" "right." "why?" "Braun, there isn't an easy answer here. Like, why have humans searched for God in countless guises throughout all these eons. But to the core, their interest is more in the search for a greater Power, seek a more reliable way to control... various variables." "But the technical core can use itself, using two hundred Wanfang data networks in the world." "Even so, their prophecy ability still... has gaps." I threw the smoke out the window and watched the embers fall into the night.The breeze was suddenly cold; I folded my arms. "What does all this... the old land, the rebuilding plan, the Cybermen... have to do with the creation of ultimate intelligence?" "I don't know, Braun. Eight standard centuries ago, at the dawn of the first information age, a man named Norbert Wiener wrote: 'Will God play with what he created? A meaningful game? Would any creator, even an uninspired one, play a meaningful game with what he created?' Humans played with our early artificial intelligences in a way that didn't make sense. Kernel Then pursue it with full force through the reconstruction plan. Maybe the plan of the ultimate intelligence has been accomplished, and all these relics are just the ultimate creation or the creator's simulation. The motivation of this ultimate intelligence, this personality is far beyond the core, just like the human It's like not being able to understand the kernel." I started to walk around the dark room, trying to warm myself, but I accidentally knocked my knee on the low table, and I stopped, stood still. "None of this tells us who is trying to kill you," I said. "Yes, no." Johnny stood up, and he walked to the far wall.A match danced and he lit a candle.Our shadows flicker on the ceiling. Jonny moved closer to me and gently grabbed my arm.The soft lighting cast yellow highlights on his curls and eyelashes, and on his high cheekbones and strong chin. "How are you so strong?" he asked. I stare at him.He leaned his face closer and kissed me.His lips were soft and tender, and that kiss seemed to last forever.He's a machine, I think.There are people on the surface and machines behind it.I close my eyes.His gentle hands touched my face, my neck, the back of my head. "Listen to me..." I said softly the moment we separated. Johnny didn't let me finish.Instead, he hugged me in his arms and led me to another room.big bed.Soft mattresses, thick duvets.The candles in the other room flickered and danced, and we couldn't wait to help each other take off our clothes. That night, the two of us had cloud and rain three times, and each time was a slow and sweet need, touch, warmth, and closeness. When the feeling came, the intensity gradually increased.I remember looking down at him the second time; his eyes were closed, his black hair was loose on his forehead, the candlelight showed the blush on his white chest, his forced arms and hands. Instructs me to amaze and hold me into position.At that moment, he opened his eyes and looked at me, and at that moment, I saw the look of emotion and passion in his eyes. Sometime before dawn, we fell asleep; I turned my face away, crawled away slowly, and then I felt his cold hand touch me, this gesture was caring, casual, not possessed Feel.