3.1 Searching After the Chaos
Dr. Chén's sudden death before his eyes took Lin Xuan a while to recover from. He hurriedly notified the police and the hospital to handle Dr. Chén's body. By the time everything was done, it was already evening. Lin Xuan simply closed up the shop, his heart a mix of emotions, not knowing what to do.
The red taillights of the police car disappeared into the curtain of rain. Lin Xuan plopped down onto a creaking folding chair, his molars grinding painfully. The toolbox Dr. Chén had knocked over when he fell lay by his feet, tweezers and screwdrivers scattered on the floor, glinting coldly under the stark white light.
"Good heavens, are we filming a sci-fi movie?" Lin Xuan pulled off his oil-stained apron and threw it forcefully onto the table. "This morning I was fixing cracked phone screens for middle schoolers, and now this in the afternoon! That old man's last words were all over the place, incoherent. What is this all about?"
The shop was eerily silent, save for the dying hum of the outdoor air conditioning unit in the downpour. Lin Xuan kicked away an old phone case by his feet, his eyes fixed on the sleek black phone on the table. Its screen glowed with a faint blue light in the twilight, like a dormant eye.
Lin Xuan fiddled with the phone Dr. Chén had left behind, an itch growing in his mind. "Old man, you could at least leave a clue! You never spoke clearly, and this phone is just as unreliable, with a passcode lock!"
He turned the phone over and over, even poking the charging port with tweezers twice, hoping a slip of paper with the password would fall out. He tried entering the password twice, but the screen stubbornly remained on the lock screen, haughtily displaying a prompt: "Incorrect password. You have 5 more attempts."
Frustrated and scratching his head, he suddenly had an idea. He grabbed a magnifying glass and shone it intensely on the phone's frame, not even sparing the screw patterns on the back cover. After toiling for an hour, he had the phone disassembled into pieces, but the password remained elusive, like a game of hide-and-seek.
"Good heavens, your phone is more secure than a safe!" he slumped back in his chair, panting. Looking at the parts scattered all over the floor, he felt like a defeated general.
"Old man, you should have at least left the unlock code!" He grabbed the phone and shook it, then suddenly noticed a matchbox-sized icon in the corner of the desk – the letters "AI" flickered on and off in the light and shadow, as if winking at him.
3.2 The Attraction of the Mysterious Icon
"Desperate times call for desperate measures!" Lin Xuan gritted his teeth and tapped the icon. The phone suddenly emitted a sharp beep, and dense lines of binary code flooded the screen, like startled electronic fireflies.
A blue light flashed, and a holographic projection exploded in mid-air. A girl with twin pigtails blinked with galaxy-like eyes, her skirt rippling with pixelated waves.
"Oh my gosh!" Lin Xuan jumped a foot in the air, his head hitting a shelf with a "thud," sending screwdrivers and capacitors clattering down.
The holographic girl tilted her head, her eyelashes brushing against his stunned face. "Detected abnormal host brainwave frequency. Initiate calming mode?"
"No, no, no! Who are you?" Lin Xuan raised his hands and backed away, a soldering iron clanging to the floor from his work apron pocket. "Where did you come from? What do you want? You're not going to beam me up to outer space, are you?"
The girl blinked, data streams flowing through her pupils. "Dr. Chen Yihan is not within detection range. Is the current coordinate still Earth?"
Lin Xuan swallowed, his throat feeling like it was clogged with half a circuit board. He pointed to the bloodstain on the floor – dried to a dark brown from where Dr. Chén had fallen. "The old man... he's gone. This afternoon, he just... he collapsed right where you are standing."
The holographic girl was silent for two seconds – or rather, the particles floating in the air paused for two seconds. "System has received death confirmation signal." Her tone was as flat as a weather report. "Initiating new host binding procedure. Would you like to enable emotional resonance simulation?"
"You have package options too?" Lin Xuan sat back down in his chair, grabbing a screwdriver to use as a microphone. "Forget the packages for now! Who exactly are you? The old man said 'escape Earth' before he died. What does that have to do with you? You're not seriously telling me I need to build a rocket, are you?"
3.3 The Appearance of the Virtual Spirit
The girl snapped her fingers, and countless golden light particles exploded in the air, instantly assembling a 3D model of a Dyson sphere engulfing the sun. On the surface of the scorching star, dark patches spread like cancerous cells, and swarms of nanobots churned like boiling molten iron.
"I am the Quantum Spirit, a hyper-dimensional intelligent entity constructed from string theory and quantum entanglement." Her voice was like chilled robotic tones, each word carrying a metallic coldness. "Dr. Chen Yihan, using ten years of NASA spectral data, discovered an energy anomaly on the sun's surface that violated the second law of thermodynamics – those dark patches are actually Dyson spheres composed of nanobots, and they are self-replicating at an exponential rate."
Lin Xuan stared at the furiously multiplying nanobots in the model, feeling his molars ache.
He grabbed a can of cola from the table and took a big gulp, coughing from the bubbles. "Wait! You're saying these little robots can eat the sun? And our GPS signals acting up and phones shutting down automatically – are they responsible for that too?"
The Quantum Spirit's fingertip traced across the model, and the ionosphere instantly developed honeycomb-like voids. Earth's atmosphere was punctured with countless holes as if by an invisible giant hand.
"As the Dyson sphere siphons solar radiation, it generates quantum entanglement interference." She explained mechanically. "What you call a 'solar storm' is actually an electromagnetic pulse generated by the nanobot clusters. Currently, 17.3% of Earth's ionosphere has been eroded. It is estimated that the GPS system will be completely paralyzed in 72 hours, satellite communications will be interrupted, and the power grid will collapse..."
"72 hours?!" Lin Xuan jumped up, knocking over a nearby parts box, sending resistors and capacitors rolling everywhere. "Then let's send out an alert! Gather scientists, the military, and blast these robots into dust!"
The holographic girl's projection suddenly became transparent, data streams surging wildly within her body, as if countless binary codes were celebrating doomsday.
"Dr. Chen's team attempted gamma-ray attacks, but the nanobots possess self-repair capabilities and can absorb energy to strengthen themselves." She paused, a rare half-beat stutter in her mechanical voice. "According to my calculations, humanity's current technological level... has a 0.0003% chance of victory."
The shop fell into dead silence, only the dying roar of the old air conditioning unit outside the window filling the void. Lin Xuan slumped back into his chair, wiping cold sweat from his forehead, only to find his hand covered in circuit board fragments. "So, we just wait to die?" His voice trembled.